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ASUNCIÓN – Today marks the 139th anniversary of the birth of Serafina Dávalos, the lawyer who challenged mandatory motherhood and debated with intellectuals of her time such as Manuel Domínguez, Arsenio López Decoud, Juan E. O'Leary, and Fulgencio Moreno. She paved the way for women in Paraguay to study, teach, earn doctorates, direct educational centers, represent the country abroad, and be ahead of her time in the fight for gender equality. Who was this lesbian who, at the beginning of the 20th century, argued that marriage is the enslavement of women? 

Those were times when wealthy women participated in social gatherings, in their world of long dresses, petticoats, elaborate hairstyles, fans, stockings, hair combs, and high heels. Poor women worked as domestic servants for other families and had virtually no rights. 

Serafina Dávalos deviated from that path and forged another. She was the first Paraguayan lawyer, at a time when intellectual work was not a common pursuit for most women. It wasn't until 1870 that Adela and Celsa Speratti, Paraguayan sisters and educators, established the first normal school in Asunción, a crucial step for the development of the country's education system. Women's participation in political decision-making came much later, with women gaining the right to vote in 1961. 

The daughter of Gaspar Dávalos and Teresa Alfonso, and sister of Nicasio, Serafina was born on September 9, 1883, in the town of Ajos, ​​Coronel Oviedo. She moved alone to Asunción to attend secondary school. She studied at the Normal School of Asunción, where she obtained her teaching diploma in 1898. She was the first woman to graduate from the Faculty of Law of the National University of Asunción in 1907. 

“I don’t think it’s a myth in my family, but we used to sit on the sidewalks. And when she walked proudly through the city, standing tall before society, because she was very clear about what she wanted to do, women would run inside with their daughters so that Serafina wouldn’t walk past them as if she had leprosy, the plague. Social rejection. But she, very proud, bought a car, she drove,” says Rosemary Dávalos, Serafina’s great-niece, in an interview with television host Pelusa Rubín.

The Paraguayan elite and middle class were very European in their mannerisms. They frequented theaters and salons where plays were performed, songs were sung, and piano music was played. The Paraguayan Institute—a cultural center founded in 1895—offered classes in drawing, piano, and fencing. The Italian Mutual Aid Society and the Union Club were the most elegant salons of the time. 

These spaces were frequented by the elite and the middle class. The working class gathered on the outskirts. One of the weekend pastimes was going to the Belvedere, located at the corner of España and Brasil streets. What is now the Hotel del Paraguay was the "society grounds," where people met for horse races, outings, and refreshments. Those who couldn't afford to enter these places would go on picnics in Tacumbú.

At that time, most Paraguayans read and spoke Guaraní. Spanish was the second language, but only the upper class, who could afford an education, had access to it. All government decisions, books, records, and school materials were in Spanish. Asunción's history was told from a male perspective. The pages of official history books banished women from the narrative, including Serafina Dávalos. Dozens of women worked to rescue this silenced memory.

In the book "Alchemists: Another History of Paraguay," Line Bareiro, Clyde Soto, and Mary Monte recovered the hidden history of women, their movement, and feminism in Paraguay. The audiovisual production "Alchemists: History of Women in Paraguay," produced in 1995 by the Center for Documentation and Studies (CDE) and Decidamos, became a historical landmark and a key documentary for tracing the history of feminism in Paraguay.

Against patriarchy, humanism

Dávalos founded and was active in several organizations, including the Feminist Movement of Asunción, the Paraguayan Feminist Center, the Paraguayan Women's Union, and the Paraguayan League for Women's Rights. In her thesis, " Humanism," she questioned the subjugation of women to a patriarchal society and considered legal equality as crucial for changing women's social status. 

“There is no doubt that women can rise in the realm of intelligence to the same heights as men. To that end, they should be given the same educational treatment as men in the essentials; no reservations about profound and elevated ideas because they are believed to be incapable; what has been called the feminine does not falsify the nature of women's reason,” Serafina wrote in 1907 (Humanism, p. 13).

That work caused great controversy among the intellectual class of her time. In years when women were prohibited from voting, she was already questioning gender inequality and demanding equal opportunities. She did not live to see Paraguay become the last Latin American country to grant women the right to vote, in 1961 with the law "On the Political Rights of Women." 

Rescuing Serafina

Historian Ana Barreto Valinotti included Serafina Dávalos's biography in her book, Women Who Made History in Paraguay, published in 2011. There she wrote: “Serafina died in 1957, in poverty, having practiced law until the end of her days. Her remains were denied a Christian burial.” Several experts agree that Serafina died after a long illness, forgotten and destitute, under the stigma of having been denied a Christian burial.

Rosemary Dávalos, along with her husband, Gustavo Ilutovich, and other cultural figures, formed the group Rescuing Serafina. Their mission is to find her grave and highlight her legacy. According to some historians, she was not allowed to enter the church because she was a lesbian and because of her social activism. The same was done to Freemasons and other institutions that had some kind of dispute with the Catholic Church. When she was buried, they didn't even put a headstone on it so that it wouldn't be found. 

Compulsory heterosexuality

As Rosa Posa, an activist with Aireana, a lesbian rights group, explains in her podcast "Why is Serafina thought to be heterosexual?", lesbians are routinely scrutinized by society, both today and in "official history." "To say that Serafina wasn't a lesbian is a sign of extremely heterocentric thinking. People are considered heterosexual until proven otherwise. That's not how the world works, no matter how much they insist on seeing it that way. It's as if by saying Serafina Dávalos was a lesbian, we're diminishing her achievements," she says.

This year, agreements were signed to begin the restoration of Serafina Dávalos's house through the Paraguayan Institute of Handicrafts. But for some time now, the Serafina Dávalos collective—comprised mostly of law students—had been lobbying to continue building the national historical memory of women. 

Between Estados Unidos and Tacuary streets stands Serafina's house, where she lived with her partner, Honoria Barilán. Rosemary confirmed this: “We are in the 21st century, and although people are still shocked by homosexuality, these two women stood up to Paraguayan society and always lived together. Everyone knew they were a couple.”

In 2017, lawyer Nicasio Dávalos, the son of one of Serafina's brothers, filed a criminal complaint against Honoria Balirán in the Criminal Court of First Instance of Asunción, presided over by Judge Ernesto Giménez, accusing her of being responsible for "the slow and horrific death of the Doctor of Law." This complaint was dismissed for lack of evidence. 

Following an article published that year by Última Hora, Aireana posted a statement on social media calling on the journalist to reflect on how he constructed the story, based on his own prejudices. 

“We have thousands of ‘Nicasios’ in the lives of lesbians, men who accuse their sisters’ partners of theft for buying things together, men who make up stories that their daughters were corrupted by another woman they lived with for many years, fathers who, after abusing their daughters, blame their partners for being reported. In short, ‘evil is always outside,’” they point out.

“When you have to prove that it harms you, makes you sick, and causes you to die, then yes, she’s a lesbian. But when she shines, the only woman in the intellectual circles of the time, she isn’t. It’s as if we have to prove it time and time again. But it’s as if proving it were a grave matter. This isn’t a statement we make lightly, but because we’ve been involved in activism for a long time and because we’ve studied it extensively,” says Rosa Posa. Much of the collective feminist memory in Paraguay is built around the figure of Dávalos, who not only left a theoretical legacy but also questions that remain relevant today.