G. Sofía Villa de Buentello

G. Sofía Villa de Buentello (fl. 1917–1927) was a Mexican feminist who worked in the first wave of the suffrage movement in Mexico and was one of the first women to analyze the legal equality of men and women before the law. She founded the Women of the [Hispanic] race and led the faction of more moderate feminists in the 1920s in Mexico.

G. Sofía Villa de Buentello was a Mexican feminist. She was probably a teacher, as most of the attendees at the 1916 First Feminist Congress of Yucatán were teachers and it was a requirement of attendance that women be educated. Her publications list her as a "professor" and other sources state she was a lawyer, though she indicated in a 1925 interview with The New York Times that she had only a secondary education. Though married and a mother — her books are dedicated to her husband, Edmundo E. Buentello, and her children Miguel Edmundo and Sofía — Villa de Buentello was not a submissive wife. She publicly called for a change in women’s marital dependency and the domestic limits placed by society upon women.

Soon after the Congresses, in 1917 President Carranza’s “Law on Family Affairs (Domestic Relations)” was passed. In her analysis of the legislation, Villa pointed out that prior to its passage, the Civil Code was discriminatory. In the event that a child was born out of wedlock, if a woman who gave up her child to prevent stigma and shaming, she alone could be identified. The previous law had allowed maternity investigations so that orphans could find their birth mothers, but forbade paternity investigations.

In 1921 she published a book, La Mujer y la Ley (The Woman and the Law), which asked whether men and women were equal before the law in Mexico. Though the analysis was moderate in tone, Villa de Buentello stated that regardless of social or economic status, everyone must be viewed equally before the law. Considering that women did not have suffrage, it was considered revolutionary. She may have been influenced by Genero Garza, a male lawyer who had made a similar statement 30 years earlier, according to Carmen Ramos Escondan.

While Villa de Buentello was known for her less radical ideas, she was not truly a moderate. She and Elena Arizmendi Mejia established a cooperative union "Mujeres de la raza" (Women of the [Hispanic] Race) in 1923 with aims of uniting Latina women in the struggle for rights. At the time, Latin America was seen as the next "staging ground" as suffrage had been gained in Europe and the United States, but it was clear to Arizmendi after her attendance at the 1922 Pan-American Conference of Women that there was a lack of understanding from the Anglo-oriented perspective on Hispanic women's cultural influences. Villa and Arizmendi both saw matrimony and motherhood, an integral part of Latina identity, as making the experience of women "complete".

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