Promise Kept

MEXICO Promise Kept

Just before his Dec. 1 inauguration, President Adolfo Ruiz Cortines had a visit in his office from a resolute feminist named Amalia de Castillo Ledon. The conversation was brief and businesslike:

"Senor Ruiz Cortines, will you carry out your promise soon?"

"Yes," answered Don Adolfo.

"Could it be immediately?"

"Yes," answered Don Adolfo.

Last week President Ruiz Cortines made good on his promise. As his first notable legislative gesture after naming the new cabinet, he sent to Congress a constitutional amendment designed to give Mexican women full citizenship rights, including the vote. Smiling down from the congressional gallery, as the proposal was read, was Amalia Ledon.

Now Mexico's No. 1 suffragist and a golden-haired grandmother besides, tireless Amalia Ledon, 50, began her career as a fighter for women's rights by taking a degree at the University of Mexico back in the days when Mexican girls didn't do that sort of thing. For years, as a teacher and playwright, she preached to her often unheeding countrywomen that political action is the best way for women to beat such problems as low wage rates, legal discrimination and the double standard of morality. Moving abroad as a founder of the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women, she is now president of the Organization of American States' Committee of Women in Washington. But throughout her career, she has been embarrassed that Mexico should be one of the few lands in the hemisphere which withheld the vote from women (the others: Colombia, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Paraguay).

In the past year, she flew frequently to Mexico to 1) ply Ruiz Cortines with facts on women's progress, 2) make an ally of the new President's wife, and 3) form a 2,000,000-member Alliance of Women. Mexicans now believe that the women's suffrage amendment is a sure bet to win a two-thirds vote in Congress, plus approval by a majority of the state legislatures, and thus become a part of the constitution.

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