“Aunt, please tell me what life is like in Santiago,” read a letter written by a great-niece to Catalina Meléndez del Villar, a Chilean lawyer, who turned 104 a few weeks ago. The letter is from more than 40 years ago, the sender, Carmen Gloria Núñez, is 49 today, and at that time and to this day lives in Viña del Mar. She sent letters to Catalina to find out what the existence of that letter was like. woman who moved around the Chilean capital and was so independent. Those questions and admiration for her great-aunt, now a centenarian, endure. Today the great-niece’s questions sound like this: “Auntie, how did her father object to studying law?” Or like this: “Auntie, and you were traveling alone?” Also like this: “And they never said anything to him because he didn’t want to get married?”
On a morning under a blue sky in the city of Viña del Mar, sitting side by side, great aunt and great niece spin Catalina’s story. “When you grow up as a woman you have to create your feminine references and, when I was a girl, they were still very classic: the woman who gets married and has children. And the aunt was like a different reference, she was seeing that there are other ways of being a woman,” says Carmen Gloria and adds that she, a psychologist by profession, followed a path similar to that of Catalina: “I didn’t get married either, nor did I have children. I lived a very independent life.”
Catalina Meléndez was born in northern Chile on March 13, 1920 in the Sargento Aldea nitrate office, of which his father was administrator. She was the youngest of 10 siblings and the only one to go to college. Her family wanted her to train, but in something related to accounting. “My dad wanted me to study, but to his liking. At least I followed my tastes.” Her tastes, letters and laws. She emphasizes throughout her conversation her passion for Law: “I had taken my profession as a joke because I loved it.” She is something of a living witness to the Confucian verse “choose a job you like and you will never have to work a day in your life.” Hidden away, with those guts typical of youth, and with an accomplice – an aunt known to the family – she took free exams to be able to enroll in a law degree at the University of Chile.
“There were very few of us, it was full of men,” says Catalina, remembering the university classrooms, where she asserts that she spent the most beautiful times of her life. “Aunt, the other thing you told me is that in the exams they were very hard on you, they asked you far-fetched things,” Carmen Gloria tells her. The centenarian nods: “Yes, in general we women took the exams very hard,” she says. Her niece remembers that, not so many years ago, her great-aunt would wake up at night having nightmares about those interrogations.
Catalina graduated in 1948, the year in which only 14 women out of a total of 86 students from the Faculty of Law of the University of Chile did so. Her thesis is called On the transfer of social rights in public limited companies and the collection of shares in the hands of a single shareholder, which can still be read and played in the university library. It will soon be digitized in order to create a repository of the theses of the women who studied at that university. In a letter sent for her 104th birthday, the current dean of Law at the University of Chile, Pablo Ruiz-Tagle, told Catalina: “Studying Law in the 1940s was undoubtedly an enormous challenge that you took on with determination. that today, 60 years later, is an example for our students and for our university community.” For her birthday, representatives of the Chilean Bar Association also recognized her career and visited her personally.
Always carrying a handkerchief that she caresses with both hands, Catalina remembers: “At that time they didn’t look at us women much. Of course there were some that stood out, but very few.” She emphasizes the reason for this discrimination: “Simply for the fact of being women, for not being like them, the men.”
Because he was not like them, the exercise of his profession was not easy. As a notary in Santa Cruz, a town in the central Chilean valley, she faced the machismo of the landowners. They refused to go see her in person and always sent her employees to talk to Catalina. “These huasos with silver [dinero] “They do what they want,” says another niece who remembers the lawyer’s complaints. But other men also opened the door to places forbidden to women at that time. In Taltal he joined the gatherings held by the poets Mario Bahamonde and Andrés Sabella and was one of the attendees who stayed until dawn.
At a time when, according to ECLAC, the average number of children per woman in Chile was five, Catalina refused to have a ring placed on her left hand. “I was never thinking about a husband, I had many suitors, but I didn’t want to get married,” she says. She later explains: “I wanted to be alone and act alone. “I didn’t want a man to be demanding from me what he liked and I knew that no one was going to receive me in those conditions.” She remembers that she had several classmates who the only thing they thought about was getting married, and Carmen Gloria adds: “Hey aunt, you told me that there was a professor who told women that, if they had entered Law to find a husband, they were wrong because There they were going to find pure poor men.” They both laugh. Regarding the current role of women, the lawyer says: “I lived in a time when women did not act much. But now she is totally different, a woman does and undoes what she wants.”
His love for his work was complemented by a fascination for traveling: Argentina, Peru, Bolivia, the Galapagos Islands, France, Spain, Russia, China. But Paris is the place that still makes him sigh: “There were so many places to spend the night, with lots of music and beauty,” he says. His favorite trips were by boat: “I really loved sailing, I don’t know why the sea attracts me so much.” His great-niece appears with an answer: “Maybe because there was no sea in the nitrate mines.”
He is still excited about travel plans, he imagines walking the European streets again. At 104 years old, he is not afraid of the end of his life: “I don’t think about that, I think about what I’m going through, about whether I have something I like to do. But to start thinking about when I have to die or that I have little time left, I put that aside.”
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