For the first time, women’s voices shone in Havana to carry the light of truth of emancipating women who demanded their rights, to mark a milestone in history and the early movement for the vindication of women in the country.
The calendar marked the year 1923 to welcome the First National Congress of Women, to unite for the first time women from the then six provinces of the country.
In the Auditorium of the Academy of Sciences of Cuba, the imprint of those precursors, not always understood in their time, remain fresh to evoke the moral and intellectual approach of all the women of the nation, whose interest was to work together in the defense of the homeland, the home and the family.
Seven days were enough to bring together women of different beliefs and ideological currents, demonstrating a broad, non-classist character and with an agenda of 36 chapters, exposed to fierce debates that showed how much prejudices and social conventions weighed on the mentalities of many women of the Island.
The First National Women’s Congress, which shook Havana and Latin America, broke with the traditional discourse to introduce controversial issues, rich in discussion.
The demands to create special schools to attend children with disabilities, to obtain laws protecting children, to fight for the equality of social, political and economic rights and duties in relation to the male sex, and to fight against drugs and prostitution, reflected tendencies towards social reform.
Criteria without limitations were defended by the delegate participants in the meeting, who tried to make visible the life in the women’s intelligence, by the eagerness to turn the everyday into political.
More than 100 years after the awareness of Cuban women and their right to have rights, women’s voices still stand to fan the flame of women’s empowerment in the present times.
