Marta Lamas

Marta Lamas Encabo (born 1947) is a Mexican anthropologist and political science professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), and lecturer at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM). She is one of Mexico's leading feminists and has written many books aimed at reducing discrimination by opening public discourse on feminism, gender, prostitution and abortion. Since 1990, Lamas has edited one of Latin America's most important feminist journals, Debate Feminista (Feminist Debate). In 2005, she was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. Marta Lamas was born in 1947 in Mexico City to Argentine parents. She studied ethnology at the Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia (National School of Anthropology and History) and then completed a master's degree in anthropology at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. In 1976, she founded a feminist magazine, Fem, and in 1987, she co-founded the first feminist newspaper supplement in Mexico for the newspaper La Jornada: Doble Jornada (Double Day). In 1990, she founded Debate Feminista (Feminist Debate) a publication aimed at connecting academic feminist theory with the practices of activists in the women’s movement. The publication is a springboard for discussing ideas within the movement to evaluate how they can be brought to the public. Debate has become one of the most important journals in Latin America, because it also prints men's articles. She was a founding member of La Jornada and is a contributing columnist to the magazine Proceso and the Spanish newspaper El País and serves as an editorialist for the newspapers El Processo and Diario Monitor. Lamas has written numerous books and is a prolific feminist writer. In 1990, she founded the Sociedad Mexicana Pro Derechos de la Mujer (Semillas), (The Mexican Society in Favor of the Rights of Women), which is an organization in which more privileged women can invest in women who have less opportunities. The group sponsors cooperatives and micro-enterprises and offers support centers and work groups which address problems women face, including human rights issues.