Voting Patterns In The Women's Movement

Interestingly, analysis of voting patterns in the years following the extension of female suffrage indicates that women did not vote in demonstratively different ways from their male counterparts. Instead, female voting patterns were more significantly influenced by other factors, primarily socioeconomic standing. Even though Evita made a concerted effort to grow the female wing of the Perón party, evidence of voting patterns “refutes the common notion that the regime greatly benefitted from women’s suffrage.” Women did become part of Juan’s multi-class base and a majority of them did indeed vote for the Perónist ticket, but they voted much more along class lines, again indicated that Evita’s role in the women’s movement was to channel …show more content…
Preceding feminists groups, often within the Socialist or Communist parties, had unsuccessfully championed women’s suffrage in Argentina before Perón, but it was Evita who led the ultimately successful campaign. The Perónist women’s movement succeeded where the previous movements failed by incorporating gender issues within a larger ideology and while promising that traditional gender roles would not be altered too greatly. By embedding women’s issues into labor rhetoric, the message became less about females and more about all Argentines and their everyday struggles. Female political participation, in addition to making women “more attractive and feminine” as Evita assured men, gave women tangible benefits in their daily lives that they could not get with the Socialists or the Radicals while at the same time Evita let women know that their fight for equality was integral to national liberation from the imperialist oligarch …show more content…
While many Argentines would have been frightened or disconcerted by a sudden alteration of women’s roles in the home or in society, the increase in female political and economic participation struck a delicate balance between providing tangible advancements for women while not upsetting the status quo too much. Given the lack of success of previous women’s movements, it seems unlikely that the women’s movement led by Evita would have been nearly as successful if it wasn’t embedded within the Perónist structure and continuously intertwined with the Perónist labor