Elvia Carrillo Puerto

1912–1922

Elvia Carrillo Puerto is credited with starting numerous feminist leagues in Mexico, the most prominent being the Rita Cetina Gutiérrez League, named after one of Yucatán's most prominent educators. The feminist leagues focused on many tasks to promote women's rights, beginning in Mérida, where the first were founded in 1912, and eventually spreading through Southeastern Mexico, into Central Mexico in later years. The organization led a campaign against prostitution, the use of drugs, alcoholism, superstition and fanaticism. In attempts to uplift women, the Liga Rita Cetina Gutierrez, founded in 1919, often gave talks on child care, economics and on hygiene for poor women. The league inspected schools and hospitals, and helped to establish a state orphanage. Through the feminist leagues which Carillo founded, family planning programs were instituted with legalized birth control, the first in the Western Hemisphere. Elvia believed large families were a barrier to a better life for the poor and distributed literature by Margaret Sanger, who would later go on to found the American Birth Control League, later known as Planned Parenthood, material Sanger could not distribute in the United States for legal reasons. The leagues also set up prenatal and postnatal care for women.

1923–1925

Carillo is noted as having devoted herself full-time to touring Southeastern Mexico with the goal of organizing Mayan women into leagues and preparing them for civic responsibility. The leagues would identify women of special aptitude and train them to fill elective posts in the city and state government. Carillo, after her brother and governor Felipe permitted women the right to vote and hold office, was elected in 1923 to the Yucatán legislature, Mexico's first female member of state legislature. Carillo won the election by an overwhelming 5,115 votes. While a member of government, Carillo promoted the issue of land reform, proposing plans that would provide campesinos with farms capable of sustaining their families. In doing so Carillo organized local chapters of women into Gualbertista Central Agrarian Communities for Females, named after her brother Gualberto, a senator and land reform activist.

In 1924 as women's rights were advancing, Felipe was assassinated. Felipe's death signaled a change in the local government, as well as in women's rights. While permitting women's rights in Yucatán, he had not been able to have those rights reflected in the constitution of Mexico; after his death those rights were revoked by the incoming leadership of Juan Ricardez Broca. With a new government in power, women were removed from positions in municipal and state government offices, women's suffrage was revoked, and social programs through women's leagues were no longer supported. Carillo moved to San Luis Potosí, the new center of the women's rights movement, following Felipe's death. In 1925, Carillo was elected to the national Chamber of Deputies as a representative of San Luis Potosí; she was however denied the seat due to suffrage and office-holding being restricted to males. While local governments had permitted such roles, they were still not recognized nationally.