![]() The State Council unanimously agreed and in 1924 Mathilde became the first Ecuadorian woman to vote. ![]() She argued that the constitution stated that to be an Ecuadorian citizen and to exercise the right to vote the only requirement was to be 21 years old and able to read and write. Her application to vote was queried and referred to the State Council. She now turned her attention to the political rights of women and signed the register of voters. Mathilde practised medicine, and added de Procel to her name when she married the lawyer Fernando Procel. She went on to study medicine at the University of Cuenca, and became the first woman in Ecuador to qualify as a doctor. There was a prescribed distance which she had to stand outside the church – nothing less than two paces outside the church door would do to prevent other girls form being contaminated by Mathilde’s education.ĭespite the opposition, she became the first girl in Ecuador to graduate from high school, in 1913. He did so, and she studied at the Colegio Bernaro Valdivieso, but the local community acted with outrage to the spectacle of a girl becoming educated – mothers stopped their daughters from associating with her and the priest made her stand outside the church at mass. She spoke to her older brother, Antonio, who asked the director of the local secular high school for permission for her to attend. Mathilde attended a convent school, and she was an academic child but her education was soon to stop as senior schools were reserved for boys in Ecuador. Her father died when she was young and her mother was obliged to work as a seamstress to keep the family. She was born Mathilde Hidalgo in Loja, Ecuador in 1889 in a family of six children. ![]() ![]() The pioneer who symbolised women’s striving for emancipation in a cruelly conservative society was Mathilde Hidalgo de Procel. Ecuador was the first Latin American state to enfranchise women, in 1929. ![]()
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