When Lidia Falcón decided to found the Feminist Party of Spain in 1979, she brought with her an experience that could hardly be separated from the way she understood power. She had been a political prisoner under Franco, persecuted and tortured for her ideas, and had seen firsthand the ways in which a political structure can turn women’s lives into a secondary concern. Years later, she would explain that she had been arrested, monitored, silenced, and insulted, as well as having defended women who were victims of violence at a time when that reality barely had a place in public debate.
Her conclusion was political: if women wanted to transform power relations, they needed to contest power in an organized way. She argued that traditional parties tended to defend the interests of specific social groups and that women needed an organization capable of defending their own interests from their own perspective. The party was established in Barcelona in 1979 and legalized in 1981, in the midst of Spain’s transition to democracy. Four decades later, the organization continues to define itself as a feminist political party, although its electoral trajectory has been limited.
But Spain has not been an exception.
In the United Kingdom, Catherine Mayer and Sandi Toksvig launched the Women’s Equality Party in 2015 after publicly discussing the absence of women and their concerns from politics. The initiative was born in London and went on to contest local, European, and national elections, putting issues such as representation, equal pay, care, and violence against women on the agenda. In 2024, its members decided to dissolve the party after nearly a decade, citing financial difficulties and an increasingly polarized political context. Nevertheless, they demonstrated that a small political formation could persuade much larger parties to incorporate issues they had previously ignored.
Sweden has had its own Feminist Initiative, founded in 2005 by Gudrun Schyman and other activists from traditional politics, precisely out of dissatisfaction with the existing parties’ response to equality. The organization went on to win representation in the European Parliament and continues to present itself as a feminist party and movement.
Latin America, too, has a history of its own that is worth remembering. In Panama, long before women gained the right to vote, Clara González and other women organized the National Feminist Party in 1923. Its goals included winning the right to vote, but also expanding women’s civil, political, social, and economic rights and securing their presence in the spaces where decisions were made. That party disappeared decades ago, but its existence demonstrates that the idea of politically organizing women is neither a recent import nor a contemporary eccentricity, but rather part of our own democratic history.
Mexico also offers precedents that inform this conversation. In 1929, the Revolutionary Feminist Party emerged, while decades later organizations such as the Diversa Feminist Political Group appeared, recognized in 1999 as a National Political Group. In 2021, a group of female legislators from different political forces, gathered under the name Rebels with a Cause, once again raised the possibility of creating a women’s party, considering the representation achieved within existing structures insufficient.
Transform from within or build an independent feminist political force?
This is a debate that is once again gaining relevance in the face of democratic backsliding and the resistance women still encounter when they seek to contest positions of power.
The issue deserves to be revisited precisely because we have made significant progress and, at the same time, continue to encounter structural limitations. Women hold more public office than they did several decades ago, gender parity laws exist in several countries, and virtually all major parties have incorporated some reference to equality. Yet decisions concerning the economy, security, care, employment, technology, taxation, health, and infrastructure continue to be made within structures where women’s experiences do not always carry the same political weight.
The discussion becomes even more urgent amid the autocratizing wave sweeping across the Americas, where the weakening of institutions, the concentration of power, and the advance of openly hostile discourses toward women’s rights are altering the rules of the democratic game. In this context, building feminist parties could become a form of active defense of democracy, understood as organizations capable of contesting power electorally, defending institutional autonomy, incorporating women’s perspectives into economic and social decisions, and confronting attempts to turn our rights into political bargaining chips.
When democracy becomes more fragile, the political representation of those who have historically held less power takes on strategic value. A feminist party would also have the opportunity to articulate a democratic agenda linking equality, freedom, human rights, and institutional quality, placing women’s lives at the center of public policy and the defense of the rule of law.
The debate over feminist parties in Latin America does not start from scratch
International experience shows that creating a feminist party does not, in itself, guarantee electoral success. Some have disappeared, others have achieved limited representation, and still others have had a greater influence on the public agenda than on the number of seats they hold.
But that may be precisely where part of their value lies. Politics does not change only when a party wins an election; it also changes when a party succeeds in altering what other parties consider important. What remains to be decided is whether the time has come to turn this dispersed experience into an electoral alternative of its own.
Latin America has millions of women with professional, community, business, academic, trade-union, social, and political experience. It also has a long tradition of feminist organizing. Perhaps the challenge of the next stage is not to ensure that women find a place within existing parties, but to dare to build political spaces capable of changing the rules by which those parties operate.
The history of Clara González, Lidia Falcón, Gudrun Schyman, and so many other women shows that feminist politics has known how to imagine institutions before they seemed possible.
Autor
Psicóloga. Master en Políticas Públicas con enfoque de género. Especialista en Transformación Cultural y Coaching Ontológico. Directora de FeminismoINC. Autora de "Incomodar para Transformar" y "Atrevidas: Manual de trabajo personal por el activismo feminista".
