This work covers the most significant stages of the assessment of Uruguayan women in the long period that runs between the first official institutionality of the Spanish Colony (Cabildo original, 1730) and the claims not yet achieved at the present time. With careful selection of documentary contributions - some very little known - this work shows how, while the emancipation of the colonial regime in the political order had a certain historical date, instead in the cultural facets (and especially as regards women), the painful attachment to the uses, practices, norms, values ​​and even institutions belonging to the former European metropolis continued for years; subordination and dependence from which he could detach very laboriously. By way of example, although enlightened minds early proclaimed the equality of political and civil rights between men and women, they were able to vote only in 1938, as well as acquire parental rights over their children and dispose of their property in equality with your spouse, years later, in 1946. As a whole, this work exhibits the stages of a process of emancipation of women, in the family, in society and as a human being, and at the same time the struggle - sometimes it is trident, sometimes deaf - between the rationality of ideas and the powerful gravitation of customs.