On 20th January 1886, La Voz de México (The Voice of Mexico) published the following article about an unprecedented event:

“At 5pm on Monday, young Margarita Chorné, daughter of widely-respected dental surgeon Agustín Chorné, passed her viva exam to qualify as a dentist. Panel members unanimously agreed that the young lady had demonstrated ample knowledge of her subject.

Ms Chorné’s brilliant performance opens the way to reflexions on the progress of young women in such a notable area as surgery. Margarita Chorné is the first woman (in Latin America) to take an exam of this nature, and we are sure her many years of dedicated study, under the skillful guidance of her father, will be richly rewarded with a numerous select clientele.

The Chorné dental practice at Mesones no.24, enjoys an excellent reputation, and with good reason. After today, the added attraction for patients will be that they will have the option of placing themselves in the hands of a skillful intelligent young woman, thereby avoiding operation at the hands of a man, who, no matter how skilled he may be, can never have the finer, more delicate touch of a woman’s hands.”

La Voz de México, 20th January 1886

Margarita Chorné’s graduation as a professional dentist was an event of great importance to society in the days of Porfirio Díaz. Indeed, without realizing, this young woman had become the first woman in Latin America to graduate in an independent profession.

The image of a lady standing in a dentist’s surgery, forceps in hand, ready to treat the mouth of a patient, was unimaginable at the time.

After this first ground-breaking occasion, others events followed which were to be just as relevant to the future of Mexican women. Of special note: the publication of the first women’s magazine, Violetas del Anáhuac, founded and directed by Mexican writer Laureana Wright de Kleinhans. One of the magazine’s objectives was to demand equal opportunities for both sexes, and women’s suffrage.

Months later, in 1887, Matilda Montoya became the first woman to graduate at the National School of Medicine in Mexico. This event was so unusual that it was celebrated with a bull-fight. By the same token, the announcement in 1898 that a female law student would defend a convict before a jury caused a great sensation. The social tabloids noted that the lawyer “dressed very correctly in a brown outfit, and that, after delivering her defense, received loud applause from the large group of curious onlookers who had succeeded in entering the courtroom.

Such notable cases opened the breach, and Mexican women began to emerge from centuries of acquiescence. These pioneers were to pave the way for all the Mexican women who began, in the first few decades of the 20th Century, to enter activities that had previously been the exclusive preserve of men.

A brief biographical sketch of the first Mexican pioneer, Margarita Chorné y Salazar, would not come amiss. Margarita was born on 22nd Februrary 1864 at Puente Quebrado no.6. The name of the street was later changed to San Felipe Neri, and is today La República de El Salvador. Eager and inquisitive from a young age, Margarita attended preschool with her brothers, where she learned her first letters and acquired some notions about music. Then, along with most of the well-off middle class girls in the Capital, Margarita she went to a school run by nuns, where she was taught the Catechism, arithmetic, geography, French, how to crochet and do cross-stitch. Doña Paz, Margarita’s mother, tried to teach her daughter how to cook and attend to all the household duties that any “well-bred señorita” ought to be able to do. Unlike her sisters, however, Margarita hated going into the kitchen. She also loathed spending the afternoon making bobbin lace or sheets of drawn-thread work, and going to boring girls’ parties to eat chocolate cake and gossip about the previous Saturday’s weddings. She found it much more fun to read books from her father’s library, or go out her brother Rafa.

It was never in the Chorné family’s plans for the girls to study beyond primary school. A home-economics course perhaps, or Christian doctrine, poetry, embroidery or baking, subjects appropriate for those who were destined to run a household. However, none of these was of any interest to Margarita. Besides listening to and playing music, she loved reading. She pestered her parents until they finally allowed her to go to La Paz secondary school, commonly known as Las Vizcaínas. There, Margarita took subjects that fascinated her: natural history, hygiene, the basics of the physical sciences, mathematics, book-keeping, English and chemistry. Her inherent interest, as well as her close relationship with Don Agustín and her brother Rafael, led to her spending her afternoons after school in the consulting rooms with her father and brother, and gradually they began allowing her to help. At first she would open the door to patients as they arrived, and take down their names. She was also responsible for cleaning and storing the instruments. Her interest in learning the secrets of this profession led her to a furtive reading of the French medical texts her father stored in his American oak writing-desk, and the magazines, such as Dental Cosmos, to which her brother subscribed.

It was three years before Dr. Chorné would allow Margarita actually to attend to a patient, even though she had demonstrated her great skill in dentistry long before that. Margarita soon became convinced that this was what she wanted to do for the rest of her life. As she derived pleasure from restoring a patient’s capacity to smile or chew, she was happy to spend her days crafting porcelain dentures to measure. However, if Margarita was going to continue in the profession, she needed a degree in dental surgery. Her biggest obstacle was persuading her individual family members to allow her to apply formally to take her degree. After surmounting this problem, she devoted all her time to preparing for her exam in all the subjects related to the professional practice of dentistry. She knew she would have a hard job convincing the examining panel that a woman could be just as good as a man. Eventually, and with great effort, Margarita succeeded in becoming the first professionally qualified lady dentist in Latin America. Years later, in 1908, she was awarded a diploma and medal by the Toulouse Midy Institute in France, in recognition of her achievement.

Following in Margarita’s footsteps, several more women ventured into dentistry: Clotilde Leonila Castañeda graduated in 1890, Mónica Correa took her exam in 1896, and María Dolores qualified in June 1899. When the National School for Dental Medicine, the first of its kind in Mexico, opened at the beginning of the 20th Century, Clara Rosas was admitted in the second generation and graduated in September 1908. Luisa Rojo and Angélica Avilés graduated the following year. Little by little, more Mexican women entered the dental profession, and the proportion of women admitted to dental schools has continued increasing to the present day when there are more female than male dental students.

Margarita worked in the profession she loved for more than 40 years; first in her father’s dental practice, and then later starting her own practice in a small consulting room she adapted in her own home, allowed her to remain close to her only son, Baltasar. After she retired, Margarita devoted her time to reading, spending time with her two grand-daughters, playing the piano and looking after pets: several canaries who brightened up a corridor in her house.

*In 1999, Dr. Martha Díaz de Kuri was awarded the DEMAC prize in the biography category, for the book from which this summary is taken. She is a WIW Network donor.

“In today’s world we are closer to each other than ever before, but there cannot be democracy without equality, and there cannot be co-existence without respect. Because of this, we need to begin helping ourselves by helping others. From these seeds grow the crops of co-existence and democracy.”

Lourdes Arizpe
Social Anthropologist and Feminist
WIW Network Donor