I was born in 1971. I got married for the first time in 1991, when I was still 19 years old. That same year, I went to the Escuela Libre de Derecho in Mexico City to do my admission interview. While in line to enter the famous interrogation, a girl who was also trained for the same purpose, saw my wedding ring and, surprised, asked me: -Are you married?!, And whispering she said -They will not admit you, Take off your ring and don’t say you’re married because, even if they accept you, the teachers are going to tell you in class that you’d better cook for your husband and they’re going to fail you. I was puzzled, but since I didn’t have many options because I couldn’t afford tuition at a private university, so I took off my ring and went to study at ELD. Those who have been through this school know well what I am talking about.
I must say that it is a great academic institution for those who manage to adapt to its system, and I am very grateful for what I learned there, but indeed, I was able to verify, a few weeks after starting classes, that it was terribly macho and misogynistic, as well I kept the ring and the five years of study I hid that I was married. In that period, by the way, I only had one female teacher.
In my first job as a litigator, a few months after starting my career, my boss, a lawyer from UNAM who found out that I was married because he knew my family from a distance, called me at his office about four months later. from working there and he said to me: —Look, Irene, I know you’re married, so the truth I must tell you is that the best thing is that you stop studying because I don’t see that you have enough wood to be a lawyer and even less so from La Libre; I suggest you change your career and do something simpler or better dedicate yourself to your house and your husband. And he ran me.
I finished my degree in 1996 and graduated in 1997. During the years of study I worked in various places and met wonderful lawyers who supported me and taught me a lot. But yes, it was — is — a man’s world in which women rowed against the current. In my working life I lived, like thousands of women, a work environment in which your boss can ask you shamelessly what size of bra you wear or tell you what good legs you have, and you are the one who gets uncomfortable and you keep quiet for fear of reprisals. A world in which men have the right to handle other men simply because they are men or because the day before they went to a table dance to share their “manhood” along with various tequilas; a world in which they speak an exclusive language and make jokes of women next to women making them feel like an object while they consecrate themselves as alpha males.
To be a woman is to be born marked, conditioned by roles and stereotypes created by men, but also by women; marked by small and large stories of abuse and discrimination that we almost always hide for fear of revictimization. To be a woman is to row against the current, go uphill and defy the gravity of a society full of customs and complicities that hurt and terrorize us, that draw us back, that minimize us.
I have also met wonderful men who are outraged with us, so I think we should not generalize, but not allow the normalization of all this. Never shut up. This column is not at all a complaint against the Escuela Libre de Derecho, it is simply to turn on a light so that we do not forget that all women have a story or two or three in which being a woman has marked us. Today I decided to tell one of mine in the hope that no woman will ever have to remove her ring again.
* President of Observatel and commentator of Radio Educación.
Twitter:@soyirenelevy
– .
