Matilde Rodríguez Cabo

Matilde Rodríguez Cabo Guzmán (Las Palmas, San Luis Potosí, July 17, 1902 – Mexico City, September 8, 1967,) was Mexico's first female psychiatrist.^[1] Also a surgeon, writer, feminist, and suffragist, Rodríguez was an activist for the right of Mexican women, and affiliated with the Mexican Communist Party. She was married to General Francisco J. Múgica; they had a son, Janitzio Múgica Rodríguez Cabo.^[2]

She graduated in 1929 from the faculty of medicine at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and specialized in psychiatry at the Humboldt University of Berlin between 1929 and 1930. With Esther Chapa and María Lavalle Urbina, Rodríguez pioneered the Mexican feminist movement of the 1940s. In this context, the movement was spearheaded by the group of women and intellectuals associated with various organizations in the country, including the Frente Único Pro Derechos de la Mujer (FUPDN), whose membership included Chapa, Refugio Garcia, Esperanza Balmaceda, and Consuelo Uranga. In 1933, she founded the first school for people with learning disabilities. In 1936, along with Ofelia Domínguez Navarro, Rodríguez proposed reforms to decriminalize abortion in Mexico through the presentation La Mujer y la Revolución in the Frente Socialista de Abogados. The proposal was at the forefront of the international debate on women's self-determination. She was also a notable researcher, as well as an advocate of eugenics and the right to abortion.

Selected works

• Estudios sobre delincuencia e infancia abandonada (1931)

References