Magdalena León (, León Gómez; pen name, Magdalena León de Leal; Barichara, Santander, June 30, 1939) is a Colombian feminist sociologist specializing in social research and women's studies. Trained with the founders of Colombian sociology, Orlando Fals Borda and Camilo Torres Restrepo, she transferred the rhetorical and discursive framework to the analysis of empirical reality using the survey, systematization, and data analysis to learn the reality on the ground, not only of Colombia but also from Latin America.
She has worked in the formulation of policies aimed at the advancement of women. She is the author of La mujer y el desarrollo en Colombia (English: Women and development in Colombia) (1977) recognized as the work that inaugurated the issue of women and development in Colombia from a national perspective both for its incidence in the academic field and for its impact on public policy formulation. Also noteworthy is her research establishing a gender approach on redistribution policies that allowed the recognition of women's work in the rural and agrarian world, claiming land ownership for women as a key to development and the fight against poverty.
Early life and education
Magdalena León Gómez was born in Barichara, Santander, Colombia, June 30, 1939. She was the fifth of nine siblings, seven girls and two boys. Her father was Juan Francisco León, a liberal merchant who owned a fabric store. She had the affection and care of two mother-figures, her mother, Lola Gómez de León and her aunt, Tata, Magdalena explains, recalling her early life. She also remembers the violence in her home town and, as a consequence of threats, the transfer of her family to Bucaramanga when she was seven years old.
She began the third year of elementary school at the Franciscan nuns' school and graduated from high school there. There, in her fifth year of high school, she met Monserrat Ordóñez, a future writer, with whom she struck up a friendship. Educated in Barcelona and with a large library, Ordóñez made it easy for León to connect with books and libraries, awakening her passion for knowledge. In the company of her older brother who had studied medicine, she moved to Bogotá to enroll in the National University of Colombia. She initially decided on studying economics until she was recruited by Orlando Fals Borda and Camilo Torres Restrepo, a pioneer of Liberation theology and co-founder of the first sociology faculty in Latin America. León entered with the first sociology class, a newly-founded department at the National University (1959-1962).
The group of students included of four women and twelve or thirteen men and were led by Fals, Torres, and Andrew Pierce; Virginia Gutiérrez de Pineda joined later. León studied various subjects with them: rural sociology taught by Fals, which included field trips to discover and transform reality; methodology with Torres with whom she visited the poor neighborhoods of Bogotá; and family anthropology, with Gutiérrez de Pineda, who, at that time, was conducting pioneering research on the family in Colombia. León graduated in 1963 and was awarded a Rockefeller Foundation scholarship to study at the University of Washington, where she received a masters degree.
In 1967, she married Francisco Leal, a sociology student. After her first daughter, Claudia Maria, was born, León returned to the U.S., to the University of Wisconsin. Later, she gave birth to her second daughter, Marta Biviana.
Career and research
León is recognized as a leading researcher who brought gender studies to rural parts of the world.
In Colombia, León became a teacher at the National University of Colombia, teaching the course on Class Structure and Social Stratification.
In the late 1960s, León met a Spanish feminist with whom she shared reflections on the experiences of being a woman. Key books and their authors were beginning to circulate in bookstores, such as Betty Friedan and her The Feminine Mystique although, as León later explained, at that time, she had no direct contact with liberal feminism or the radical feminism that emerged later in the U.S. It was upon her return to Colombia again and looking for work, when León was confronted with the desire to understand what was happening to the women of her country.