Julieta Lanteri

Julieta Lanteri (born Giulia Maddalena Angela Lanteri, 22 March 1873 — 25 February 1932) was an Argentine physician, leading freethinker, and activist for women's rights in Argentina as well as for social reform generally.

Early life and education Julie Madeleine Lanteri was born in rural Briga Marittima, in the Province of Cuneo, Italy (today La Brigue, France). Her parents, Mattea Guido and Pierre-Antoine Lanteri, emigrated to Argentina with their two daughters in 1879, and she was raised in Buenos Aires and La Plata.

She became, in 1891, the first woman to enroll at the Colegio Nacional de La Plata, a public college preparatory school. Earning a degree in pharmacology at the University of Buenos Aires in 1898, Lanteri became, in 1907, only the fifth woman in Argentina to earn a medical degree, and the first Italian Argentine woman to do so. She campaigned actively for greater access to medical care for the poor early on, and founded a periodical, Semana Médica, for the purpose.

She founded the National League of Women Freethinkers and its journal, La Nueva Mujer. She helped organize the first International Congress of Women in 1910, and later helped organize the first National Child Welfare Congress.

Armed with detailed knowledge of Law 5.098, which specified numerous requisites for the right to vote while remaining moot on a woman's right to do so, Lanteri persuaded the precinct chair to accept her vote in the 16 July 1911, elections for the Deliberative Council, thus becoming the first woman to vote in South America; Electoral Law was amended that year to require military service (something required of all male Argentine citizens) in order to vote, again eliminating women. Lanteri instead joined her lawyer, Angelica Barreda, in forming a political party, the National Feminist Union, in 1918, and she ran for a seat in the Argentine Chamber of Deputies in every election thereafter until the 1930 military coup. In 2019, a new station in Line H of the Buenos Aires Underground was named after Lanteri.