A letter titled "To My Nieces," written by María Elena González Azurín for the opinion column Las Tejedoras, tells two girls, Abigail and Luciana, that the rights women hold today were never a gift but a conquest.
González Azurín, identified in the column as an active citizen, wrote that she hoped her nieces would grow up believing that voting, studying, choosing their own path and having their voice heard were the most normal things in the world. She said women before them defied prejudice and unjust laws that once told them their place was the home, and that women now occupy the world instead.
Warning over silence
She said she worried about silences, pointing to a message to the Nation in which women simply did not exist. Rights, she wrote, do not vanish overnight but erode when people stop defending them or assume they are already guaranteed.
She said she was not writing so her nieces would live in fear, but so they would live with memory. She urged them to ask their mother, their grandmothers and the other women in their family what obstacles they faced and what doors they had to open.
A message for later
She wrote that someday people would tell her nieces these struggles were already over, but that as long as a single woman's rights could be rolled back, there would still be something to protect. When it was their turn to lead, she wrote, nothing achieved would hold on its own unless women remembered where their rights came from and others chose to keep defending them.
She closed by asking them to honor the struggle and the memory of the women who came before, and to leave the path a little wider for the women who come after, signing off with love as their aunt.
The column appears under editor Alejandro Céspedes García, a political scientist and journalist specializing in comparative politics and solutions journalism who sits on the Central Journalistic Committee of La República.
