A country’s traditional dress and feminism - Panama
Traditional dresses or costumes were created and designed centuries ago when women had less rights, but the labor and materials invested in the creation of the female dress versus the male dress will tell you if the women of this culture we held in high esteem.
In the case of the Guna tribe traditional dress, in the islands in the Northeast of Panama, you can see the amount of gold used in their jewels, and under all the gold there are delicately embroidered shirts, called molas, which take hours to make, and are an internationally recognized intellectual property of this tribe. Gunas are a matriarchal community where grooms take the family name of their wife, and young women have ceremonies celebrating their passage into adulthood.
In the case of Hispanic Panamanian woman, in the central part of Panama, the traditional dress, called Pollera, is white, and it is darned, shaded or cross stitched in bright colors. Polleras have won international awards in contests around the world. A traditional dress, can cost up to $15,000, and in traditional high and upper middle class families, girls are given one for their fifteenth birthday. You can see the amount of gold, which is part of the costume of the women, in contrast with the simple male dress.
Both traditional dress examples, that include abundant gold jewelry speak of the financial independence of the women of old in this country, because gold was the woman’s asset that provided security and independence.
Today not every woman in Panama can have such massive amount of jewelry. But the traditional appreciation of women persists. Women in Panama could get loans and credit cards before their counterparts in other countries in the hemisphere. Panama has already had a woman President, Mireya Moscoso, and has a higher number of graduates of STEM careers. The engineer in charge of the expansion of the Panama Canal was a woman engineer.
Although Panama’s laws favor women over men in many aspects, Panama still has a long road to go in practice, with issues stemming from poverty and lack of education, however, women’s equality is not a foreign concept, but rather a goal that Panamanians aspire to achieve.