Born: 11 September 1898, Panama
Died: 11 February 1990
Country most active: Panama
Also known as: Clara González de Behringer
Panamanian feminist, lawyer, judge, and activist Clara González became the first Panamanian woman to earn her Bachelor of Law Degree in 1922, the same year she established the Partido Nacional Feminista (PNF, National Feminist Party) to campaign for women’s rights and suffrage. With the Inter-American Commission on Women, she collaborated with other activists from Latin America and the United States to research conditions for women across North and South America and make recommendations to improve them. In addition to her decades of activism, she ran for political office once women in Panama gained voting rights in 1945, and later became the first woman to serve as a juvenile court judge in Panama, helping to draft the country’s juvenile code.
Although born in Panama to a Spanish immigrant father and a mother of indigenous descent, the family lived in exile in Costa Rica when she was young. González was raped by a family friend when she was just 6 years old, which would later influence her activism. As a young woman, she earned a teaching degree and worked as a teacher while completing her degree at the Escuela Nacional de Derecho (National School of Law). Her graduate thesis was on La Mujer ante el Derecho Panameño (Woman in Panamanian Law). In 1927, she won a scholarship that enabled her to attend New York University, where she earned her doctorate in law in 1929.
Although González finished her Bachelor of Law in 1922, she was legally prohibited from practicing as a lawyer until the law was changed in 1925. In the interim, she co-founded the Partido Nacional Feminista (National Women’s Party) in 1923 with Sara Sotillo, Elida Campodónico de Crespo and Rosa Navas to promote causes like women’s political participation and education for women and girls. González and others connected gender inequality to other social ills, leading her to support causes like civil rights, anti-imperialism – including opposition to the Panama Canal Treaty – and socialism. (Ironically, she would marry Charles A. Behringer, an American civil engineer working in the Panama Canal Zone in 1943.)
From 1928, when the Inter-American Commission of Women (IACW) was formed, until 1930, González served as head of research for the organization, but eventually left due to commission chair Doris Stevens’s controlling leadership style and dismissal of Latin American women’s issues. González was overseeing the creation of reports that informed international conferences, yet Stevens denied her and other Latin American activists funding to attend those same conferences in addition to denying them leadership positions. Stevens, an American, avoided issues surrounding the effect of U.S. imperialism on the women in countries like Panama.
Separating from the IACW, González returned to Panama in 1930, teaching economics, political science and sociology at the National Institute until 1937. She would later teach criminology, family law, and juvenile justice at the University of Panama.
Perhaps influenced by her experience with the IACW, González gravitated toward groups that focused on intersectional approaches – not just gender, but class, ethnicity and other marginalizations. Her political activism in socialism and anti-facism with groups like the PNF led the federal government to accuse her of being a communist. Although she was not a member of the Communist Party, she did work with communist activists. She also worked with UNESCO on child welfare issues, and served as an official for the International Federation of Women Lawyers (Federación Internacional de Abogadas).
In 1944, González established the Unión Nacional de Mujeres (National Women’s Party) and ran as a candidate for the Constitutional Assembly in 1945, the year Panamanian women gained suffrage. Although she was unsuccessful in both that campaign, and her later run for vice-president of Panama, she was named a juvenile court judge in 1951, the first woman in the country to achieve this. She served in this role until retiring in 1964.