Exclusion and inclusion of women in the concept of political citizenship in latin american constitutions: a diachronic analysis

Abstract

This article analyzes changes in the meaning of political citizenship as applied to women in Hispanic American constitutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Even while women were denied the right to vote, very few constitutions explicitly prohibited them from doing so. Rather, in most countries, their exclusion was taken for granted because of the socio-cultural belief that they were, by nature, incapable of participating in political life. The non-explicit exclusion of women generated, in many countries of the region, interpretative controversies among judges and legislators who argued variously in favor an exclusive ("marked") or inclusive "("unmarked") meaning in the constitutional statements on citizenship. These controversies were not solved until citizenship statements expressly excluded or included women. This article challenges certain theoretical approaches in both linguistics and the law in which literality is seen as an irrelevant and static entity, a semantic skeleton to which interpreters appeal merely to preserve the spirit of the law or the stability of the juridical order. I demonstrate, on the contrary, that in the case at hand, literality is a meaningful and dynamic entity. It played a pivotal role in the historical configuration of political citizenship. In addition, far from being used to preserve the established judicial order, literality became a hermeneutic instrument in the hands of judges and legislators seeking to justify a juridical reform (i.e., the granting of the female vote) that contradicted the spirit of the law and threatened the political order.