Clara Campoamor was the politician who on October 1, 1931 defended and managed to get women's suffrage approved in Congress in Spain. Her whole life reflects one achievement after another, an extraordinary self-improvement.
She was born in Madrid in the convulsive and depressed Spain of 1898. She had to work from the age of ten, due to the death of her father, while she educated herself as best she could. In 1909, when she turned 19, the first competitions for female telegraph assistants were held: the first telegraph operator entered what we now know as the Post Office in 1881. Clara thus obtained a position in the first state company that incorporated women into its workforce. In her destinations of Zaragoza and San Sebastián she studied high school and prepared oppositions to the Ministry of Public Instruction: she achieved first place.
She combined her work there with another in the newspaper La Tribuna, which gathered around her numerous intellectuals, including feminist and suffragist women, whom Clara frequented. The great debate of the time was equal rights, and especially universal suffrage, and with an already unstoppable interest in politics and law, Clara became one of the first Spanish lawyers in 1924, at the age of 36. Her goal was to defend women's rights, and she demonstrated this when she was elected deputy for Madrid in 1931 for the Radical Republican Party.
In front of her, with her opposite thesis, another woman with an exceptional career, Victoria Kent, the first to be admitted as a lawyer in Madrid. Clara had been the second. Interestingly, women could be elected to political positions, but they could not vote. Despite the fact that the support was very divided, Clara won the debate, and Spanish women were able to vote in the 1933 elections, although for a short time: the Civil War would deprive them of that right and forced her into exile for life.
She lived for some time in Buenos Aires; she later returned to Europe and worked as a lawyer in Switzerland. She died there in 1972; She is recognized today as an undoubted reference, she is still moved to hear the clarity and brilliance with which she defended her cause in that decisive debate of 1931.
Espido Freire
