Google Doodle celebrates Elena Caffarena, a Chilean lawyer and public figure’s 119th birthday

Google Doodle celebrates the 119th birthday of Chilean lawyer, jurist, and politician Elena Caffarena Morice, the most important 20th-century feminist and public figure in Chile of the 20th century, on March 23, 2022.

Who was Elena Caffarena?

Elena Mafalda Zunilda Caffarena Morice was born on March 23, 1903 in Iquique, Chile to Ana Morice and Blas Caffarena, an Italian worker. Elena Caffarena is the main women’s activist of the Chilean twentieth century, because of her various writings and activities with which she looked for equal rights for women. Contemporary historians and humanists consider her to be one of the most important 20th-century public figures in Chile.

Whenever Elena Caffarena was youthful the family moved to Santiago from Iquique. Caffarena went to the University of Chile, and her time there was extremely powerful in her career. She entered the University of Chile at the Law School in the mid-1920s, rapidly entering the voluntary workshops for the education of workers.

When at college in her sophomore year she worked at Defensa Jurídica Gratuita. During this work, she met her husband, Jorge Jiles. Caffarena herself was a major advocate for women to be financially independent of their husbands. Caffarena was exceptionally inquisitive about what the possible reason could be to keep women out of politics.

Elena Caffarena received her law degree in 1926, being one of the first 15 Chilean women jurists. Her memory was named El enrichment without cause to the expense of another, in the Chilean Civil Code.

With a degree in hand, Elena Caffarena went to Europe intending to do a postgraduate degree, however seeing herself seduced by the huge number of museums to visit, she liked to focus on it. During this trip, she met Gabriela Mistral, who became an extraordinary companion with whom she kept an extreme correspondence. She got back to Chile in 1929.

In 1935, Elena Caffarena co-founded the Movement for the Emancipation of Chilean Women, the first national group to advocate for equal salaries and opportunities for women. On account of a bill that Caffarena co-wrote, the Chilean feminists acquired universal suffrage in 1949.

During the Pinochet Dictatorship (1973-1990), Elena Caffarena ran a series of associations to leave her own home, which was within a Seminary. Two of the associations she established and ran Comité de Defensa de los Derechos del Pueblo (CODEPU) (English: Committee in Defense of the Rights of the People), and Fundación para la Protección de la Infancia Dañada por los Estados de Emergencia (PIDEE) (English: Foundation for the Protection of Children Damaged by States of Emergency). Both of these associations’ goals were to help the repressed under Augusto Pinochet.

Elena Caffarena dedicated herself primarily to promoting the legal rights of women, from that point forward the laws – and until very recently – viewed as Chilean women as minors, attached to the desire of their father or husband.

Caffarena worked for the defense of human rights that were as a rule systematically violated. During the 1980s, she became one of the founders of the Committee for the Defense of the Rights of the People (CODEPU), which at present functions as a corporation accountable for the legal, social and medical defense of the victims of the dictatorship and your families.

Elena Caffarena dedicated a lot of her life to the battle for women’s emancipation. Her granddaughter is the journalist Pamela Jiles. Caffarena died on July 19, 2003, at 100 years old in Santiago, Chile.

On March 23, 2022, Google featured a Doodle on its homepage for celebrating Elena Caffarena’s 119th Birthday. The present Google Doodle celebrates her birthday and thinks about all she achieved for the Chilean working class and women!