RICARDO SANDOVAL
 Herald World Staff

 MEXICO CITY -- Women head Mexico's two biggest political parties. They hold 17
 percent of the seats in Congress. And as 56 percent of the nation's eligible voters,
 women will have a big say July 2 in who becomes their next president.

 But despite their growing political clout, Mexico is a land where machismo still
 rules. In a recent nonscientific survey, 92 percent of 128,000 Mexican men polled
 said a woman's main role should be that of housekeeper and mother. About 4
 percent of men even disagreed that ``women have the right to live free of violence.''

 But the day of Mexican women may finally be dawning, if they learn how to flex
 their political might. They have had only two generations of experience since
 winning the right to vote in 1955.

 ``There's a lot of work ahead of us,'' said Patricia Mercado, president of Diversa,
 Mexico's most influential women's political group. ``Men still don't help out in the
 home, and the government still looks at us with laws of the early 1900s.''

 Mexican women are routinely asked to submit photos with job applications. And
 many newspaper ads for office workers specify ``attractive women between 18
 and 25.''

 Nor have women done well in attempts to change laws to their liking. Penalties for
 spousal abuse remain light. Legislators have largely ignored issues like child care
 and women's rights in family law. Women can be fired for being pregnant. As
 recently as 1974, Mexican men could legally object to their wives working outside
 the home.

 But middle- and upper-class Mexican women are better educated than they used
 to be. At the National Autonomous University of Mexico, 55 percent of the
 students are female, almost double the share in 1970. Women are more likely to
 vote than men and they lead more grass-roots political committees. ``It's a fact
 men must live with,'' said Dulce Maria Sauri, a former governor of Yucatan state
 and former congresswoman. ``All but one Mexican state are dominated by women
 voters.''

 Sauri recently became chairwoman of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party
 (PRI) and must guide it through a tough presidential election.

 The Mexico in which presidential candidates are competing for women's votes has
 a changed economy. Single women head four million households. Pushed by the
 country's repeated economic disasters, one in three women works outside the
 home, compared with one in five in 1970.

 In village after village in the countryside, women now run the communities. The
 men spend much of their time working on farms or in factories in the United
 States.

 The government acknowledged this trend three years ago when it started directing
 anti-poverty program checks to the woman in a household.

 The campaigns of the men who want to be president of Mexico are playing out
 against that background.

 Opinion polls show each of the front-runners, Francisco Labastida of the PRI and
 Vicente Fox of the conservative National Action Party (PAN), with about 40
 percent of the voters' support.

 Of the three major candidates, only leftist Cuauhtemoc Cardenas of the Party of
 the Democratic Revolution (PRD) scores high among feminists, partly because
 his party has tried to meet quotas set by activists for the share of women on
 political and government staffs.

 Labastida says his social platform is based on workplace equality and expanded
 programs for the poor. Fox has met with female journalists as he promised more
 economic development programs aimed at women, such as the small-business
 grants he created as governor of Guanajuato state.

 Feminists, however, blast Fox's conservatism as too Roman Catholic to allow
 greater freedom for women. They accuse Labastida of coming from a party that
 has kept millions of women in poverty and out of schools.

 ``It's logical that women are becoming a political force,'' said Amalia Garcia,
 national chairwoman of the PRD. ``Women have been the ones tending to the
 families and the farms and the small businesses, while the sons and husbands
 work in the United States. . . . Now they're moving up through political ranks.''

 A tireless politician, Garcia formed alliances of disparate opposition groups in
 several Mexican states that wrested governorships from the ruling party. Now she
 is improving the PRD's reputation among women. She is credited with reshaping
 Cardenas' image and boosting his flagging showing in opinion polls.

                     Copyright 2000 Miami Herald