Anniversary Essay: The Long March of Feminism
Franco, Jean
When I lived in Mexico during the 1950s, I used to visit Alaide Foppa de Sol6rzano, who many years later would die, cruelly tortured, at the hands of the Guatemalan military. An incredibly...
...T hese "new social movements" seemed to offer women access to citizenship outside traditional party structures and were welcomed as evidence of the development of participatory democracy...
...We, too, often fall into the common practice of generalizing male experience to cover all people instead of acknowledging that certain conditions affect women differently...
...In Tupamaras, Aradjo says that although a third of militants in the MLN were women, they were not proportionately represented in the leadership, and that more often than not they acted as couriers or as guardians of safe houses...
...In Chile, Josefina Bilbao, the head of the National Women's Service (SERNAM), was given ministerial rank...
...8 This was a period of dramatic rethinking for the left in Latin America...
...More significantly, the essay, and the entire NACLA report, assume that arm.d struggle is the purest form of militancy and the gun the instrument of liberation...
...The extremely powerful Catholic Church has played a consistent historic role in reinforcing the strength of this ideology by teaching that women's God-given role is to be the mainstay of the family-an ever-nurturing mother and an obedient wife...
...These encuentros have been amply documented elsewhere, so I will only mention an issue that has continually surfaced and was succinctly expressed by feminist scholar Sonia Alvarez when she asked, "How can we promote and advance a more ideological, theoretical and cultural critique of dependent capitalist patriarchy while maintaining vital links either with poor and working class women organizing around survival struggles, or with revolutionary women organized around national liberation struggles...
...Indeed, who benefits from much of this attention remains an open question...
...146-170...
...State violence in many Latin American countries led many on the left to reevaluate the importance of democratic freedoms that they might have once dismissed as "liberal" or "bourgeois...
...One of the major contributions to Latin NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 12ANNIVERSARY E55AYI FEMINISM American feminist thought, Julieta Kirkwood's Ser polItica en Chile (Being a Political Woman in Chile) was a piercing indictment both of the failure of progressive parties to encourage the political participation of women and an explanation of the success of the right in mobilizing women against the Allende regime.7 By the late 1970s, many Latin American women on the left had reached the conclusion that femi- nism was not another bourgeois deviation but had something powerful to contribute to revolutionary thinking...
...This accounts-and of course there is nothing wrong with this--for the strong emphasis on bringing women into the work force and on men sharing familial responsibilities...
...5 (September/October 1980), pp...
...While underground, it encouraged women to actively join the struggle, counteri ng the threat of harsh repression from the National Guard and frequent disapproval from h usbands, fathers and even mothers who still saw women's place as in the home...
...In the end, the seductive image of the woman revolutionary foreclosed rather than encouraged further analysis...
...Along with illustrations of women in the workplace, the issue carries several illustrations of women carrying weapons, and the cover bears a police mug shot of Jessie Macchi, a leader of the Tupamaros, the Uruguayan guerrilla movement...
...Rather, they focus on certain feminist issues which are inflected rather differently in the south-issues of mili10 NACL4 REPORT ON THE AMERICAS Jean Franco is the author of Plotting Women: Gender and Representation in Mexico (Columbia University Press, 1990) and a member of NACLA's editorial board...
...An incredibly cultivated woman, she was then in exile, her talents on hold, and patiently attending meetings where men discussed politics and the women sat aside as nonparticipants...
...14, No...
...In fact, Cuban policy towards women emerged not from a careful analysis and revision of Marxism but from pragmatism...
...2. Coco Fusco, "Hustling for Dollars," MS Magazine (September/October 1996), pp...
...Sonia Alvarez discusses the encuentros in Sonia Alvarez and Arturo Escobar, eds., The Making of Social Movements in Latin America: Identity, Strategy and Democracy (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992...
...The Zapatista movement in Chiapas, which has incorporated women's rights into its program, has since shown that it is possible to learn from history...
...Largufa and Dumoulin say, for instance, that "the mass of women must be prepared for participation in defense, and must be admitted to the armed forces...
...The issue that divides many feminist and women's organizations especially in the so-called Third World is one that implicates us all, for it raises the question of where resistance and opposition lies given the depoliticization of the state, which now exists largely as the vehicle for the implementation of transnational neoliberal policies...
...The idea that revolutionary change was on the horizon for the entire continent was not an unreasonable assumption in the For many armed movements, the gun was the signifier of equality, but it was a poor substitute for democratic theory and practice...
...special issue entitled "Women in Struggle...
...10, December 197...
...Vol...
...And this, in turn, puts a spotlight on "citizenship," which is by no means as straightforward as it first appears, especially in light of the neoliberal reorganization of the state...
...3 Yet AMNLAE's support of reproductive rights did not result in legislation because the Sandinista government was unwilling to alienate the Catholic Church by legalizing abortion...
...For many on the left, feminism is still viewed as if the "woman question" were somehow separate from the big macho topics of globalization, the financialization of the world, pauperization and the environment, when in fact it is crucially involved in these issues...
...Many women did indeed participate valiantly in armed struggles in the 1970s...
...Such diversity cannot possibly be registered in a single article, and these reflections do not claim to be exhaustive...
...Nor could the Association do anything to alleviate the food shortages caused by the U.S...
...s The Latin American presence was significant-representatives from 250 feminist organizations came from Mexico, while over 300 Brazilian women attended the Huairou forum...
...Such commissions have been founded in Brazil (the National Council on Women's Rights), Venezuela (the National Council of Women) and Ecuador (the National Office of Women...
...14, No...
...15 (April 1997), pp...
...But external factors cannot account for the surface response of revolutionary and socialist governments to "women's problems...
...Funding for women's organizations is now available from many sources, especially from European and North American governments and foundations...
...Largufa and Dumoulin did not analyze why the subordination of women has been so persistent throughout history, for example, or why women's entry into the workplace did not change their subordinate situation...
...Government councils and commissions in many Latin American countries have been established to identify and design policies for women...
...3. Patricia Flynn, "Women Challenge the Myth," NACLA Report on the Americas, Vol...
...Rather, it signals the strategic position of women in globalization and the unresolved contradiction between traditional family values embraced by conservatives and religious organizations, on the one hand, and the crucial role of women in the labor force on the other...
...This development accounts for the acrimony that surfaced in the most recent encuentro in Cartagena, Chile in 1996, during which "autonomous" feminists, who want to guard against the absorption of feminism into other social struggles, sharply criticized these new NGOs...
...blockade and civil war, that hindered revolutionary change in Cuba, Chile and Nicaragua...
...The Cuban government's pragmatism in relation to sexual politics has been most blatant in its recent policy shifts on prostitution...
...1. Isabel Largula and John Dumoulin, "Toward a Science of Women's Liberation," NACLA's Latin America & Empire Report, Vol...
...In retrospect, the 1980s was an extraordinary decade for Latin American women...
...The arena where differences and similarities between feminists and women from grassroots organiza- tions were worked out were the The Association of Women Confronting National Problems (AMPRONAC), for med in 1977 with the support of the FSLN, played an important role in the battle to oust Somoza...
...Increasingly, women on the left began questioning the belief that women's liberation was a necessary outcome of social revolution...
...The letter contained little more than a vague promise that things would get better, and did nothing to stop women from rushing to the polling stations, some of The September 1980 cover of NACLA Report on the Americas, featuring a Sandinista fighter and a Nicaraguan mother and daughter in a health clinic...
...I suppose it is the early 1970s, as Wilma Espin, director of the Cuban Women's Federation, said in an interview that appeared in the NACLA report...
...But despite some enlightened policies in revolutionary Cuba and Nicaragua and in Chile under Allende, many real problems were never confronted...
...Des Femmes de l'Uruguay (Paris: Des Femmes, 1980...
...Sonia Alvarez, "Articulaci6n y transnacionalizaci6n de los feminismos latinoamericanos," debate feminista, Vol...
...When I was asked to write this thirtieth anniversary reflection on feminism, Alaide was the first person who came to mind, not only because of fem but also because her feminism was profoundly related to a feeling of exclusion from the orthodox left and an urgent need to find new forms of political activism...
...Women's transformation of the political arena and of the concept of citizenship became evident during the military regime in Argentina, for example, where the Thursday demonstrations of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo drew interna- tional attention to the disappearances of thousands of people in that country's "dirty war" in the 1970s and early 1980s...
...Research and outreach institutions such as the Fundagao Carlos Chaga in Sdo Paulo, the Centro Flora TristAn in Lima, and Casa de la Mujer La Morada in Santiago became internationally known...
...them at dawn, to be first in the line to vote for Violeta Chamorro...
...20-32...
...And, because many on the left identified democracy exclusively as "bourgeois democracy," they overlooked the importance of women in the grassroots activism that was taking place outside traditional political organizations...
...Yet feminists like Julieta Kirkwood took this a step further, arguing that "there is no democracy without feminism...
...6. Ana Vdsquez, "Preface," Les Chiliennes (Paris: Des Femmes, 1982...
...Las feministas y los partidos (Santiago: FLACSO, 1986...
...Giulia Tamayo, "La maquinaria estatal: LPuede suscitar cambios a favor de las mujeres...
...How then are we to understand the very real tensions that arose between grassroots women's movements and feminist groups, especially over the issue of reproductive rights-a grave problem in a continent where the Catholic Church has succeeded in keeping issues like abortion off the agenda in many countries...
...Yet pragmatism also dominated policy making regarding women's issues in Nicaragua...
...The Sandinista leadership failed to understand that many of the "undecided" voters registered by public opinion polls were women who were not really undecided at all...
...In its 1972 issue, NACLA noted the dearth of s research on "the concrete con- e ditions which exist in Latin t America and the effects of h imperialism on women there...
...International 4NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 14ANNIVERSARY ESSAY/ FEMINISM funding which formerly went to research institutions and grassroots organizations increasingly funds NGOs, as well as local, regional and global networks of women's organizations...
...On the eve of the elections, then President Daniel Ortega sent a hastily mimeographed letter to housewives...
...A woman annot have any political, economic or ocial rights in a capitalist society vheree he uffers from class oppresion and discrimination because of sex nd race...
...If the left is to be proactive rather than reactive, it will have to recognize that women no longer occupy a separate place on the agenda but are central to the global market as producers and consumers, and as the targets of often insidious population policies...
...10 The positive effort of feminists in the encuentros to form an umbrella for many kinds of organizations and tendencies was thwarted by real divergences not only of class, sexual preference and political agendas, but also by the very growth in the number of women's organizations, which has inevitably led to fragmentation...
...2, March/April 1980 Since the days of Spanish colonization, Latin American society has vener ated women as spiritually strong, self-denying and long-suffering-the repositories of morality...
...Even so, the point, as I see it, is to look beyond the good news in order to arrive at a "critical" feminism that is not only conscious of the differently inflected struggles in the south, but that is also able to build on these struggles in order to forge a deeper understanding of the changing significance of women in globalized economies...
...The emphasis on the "empowerment" of women through internationally funded self-esteem and leadership seminars, for example, tends to further the individualism of the neoliberal agenda, while the professionalization of NGOs channels political energies into controllable spaces...
...In her reflections from exile, the Chilean militant Ana Vdsquez acknowledged that contact with European feminism had influenced many exiled women, convincing them that "the relation of cause and effect between social revolution and women's liberation" was no longer a given...
...8, No...
...I could not have been more The mistaken...
...3-20...
...6 The record of the orthodox left and progressive political parties was no more enlightened than that of those engaged in armed struggle...
...9. Julieta Kirkwood, Ser politica en Chile...
...t The theoretical backbone of this a report was an essay reprinted b from the Cuban journal, Casa c de las Americas, entitled "To- s wards a Science of Women's Liberation" and co-authored by Isabel Largufa and John a Dumoulin.' Drawing on canonical texts by Engels, Lenin and Castro, the authors listed a whole set of "universal" factors in women's oppression-the sexual division of labor, consumerism (the authors called it "female economism") and ideology-but they sidestepped some intractable problems...
...But neither the persistence of these problems nor the fragmentation of the movement licenses us to dispense with feminism's real contribution to social change...
...The initial enthusiasm for the new social movements as a proving ground for participatory democracy gave way, moreover, to sober questioning, especially when many of these movements developed into internationally funded NGOs, often with a paid professional staff...
...10 (December 1972), pp...
...14, No...
...A 1980 NACLA report entitled "Latin American Women: One Myth-Many Realities" reflected this change...
...Despite impressive gains, the problems of discrimination, reproductive rights, marginalization and the exploitation of female labor are still acute...
...Women," she says, "live the republican values of Equality, Democracy and Fraternity as inequality, oppres- sion and discrimination...
...The Sandinista women's organization, the Association of Nicaraguan Women (AMNLAE), named after Luisa Amanda Espinosa, the first woman combatant to fall in the struggle against Somoza, worked hard to mobilize women...
...As we know, the "class suicide" of the Soviet housewife left most women washing the dirty dishes and standing in line for potaassumption that women's liberation in Latin America would be achieved as a result of armed struggle that is the most glaring difference between then and now...
...5 (September/October 1980...
...2 Women's participation was central to the 1979 Sandinista revolution, with women in leadership positions like Dora Maria Tellez, one of the comandantes who led the assault on the national palace...
...It was just that she & Jess had to invent her own brand of politics...
...In this period, Cuba was still considered to be the vanguard of revolutionary change...
...4 Aradjo reports that the women militants she interviewed acknowledged that while they disseminated party values, "they could do nothing to influence them...
...Vol...
...As far as the leadership was concerned, participation in a revolutionary organization replaced the specific struggle of women for their liberation...
...There can be no liberaion for a social group consisting of alf of humankind, as long as exploitaion of man by man continues, as long s the meansof production are owned y an exploiting minority...
...Notes Author's note: Although this work is a personal reflection, I am deeply indebted both to debate feminista, which has consistently discussed the issues I raise here, and to Sonia Alvarez's work on the encuentros and nongovernmental organizations...
...Indeed, former militants, like Ana Marfa Aradjo of the Uruguayan Movement of National Liberation (MLN), began challenging this romanticized image of the gun-toting woman...
...Elsewhere in Latin America, women were also learning how to organize for survival, showing that however much they had been programmed into rigid gender roles, the stereotypes could be transgressively exploited and turned into a positive force...
...This brings me to the third development-the globalization of feminism and the restructuring of priorities by neoliberal governments...
...toes on top of a hard day's work at the factory...
...Looking back over the past 30 years, I realize that the early expressions of the feminist movement in Latin America have become an immensely complex, heterogeneous and often contradictory manifold...
...The report dealt with issues like abortion, women's political participation and women in the work force...
...Many of these NGOs are increasingly engaged in planning public policy, often in concert with state agencies like those mentioned above...
...5, September/October 1980 Vol XXXI, No 4 JAN/FEB 1998 13ANNIVERSARY ESSAY/ FEMINISM feminist encuentros, or gatherings, which were initiated in Bogoti in 1981 and have taken place every two years since in different Latin American countries...
...9-18...
...Women's publishing houses have emerged in many countries in the region, and Latin American women writers are increasingly found on best-sellers lists...
...Can women further structural change at the national level by participating in elections and introducing social policies, or should they become involved in global organizations, such as the people's forum against the Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), which are challenging the policies of corporations and international organizations...
...As an observer during the 1989 elections, I was struck by the vehemence of women's opposition to the Sandinistas-a factor which undoubtedly contributed to their defeat...
...8. "Latin American Women: One Myth-Many Realities," NACLA Report on the Americas, Vol...
...10 NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICASANNIVERSARY ESSAY/ FEMINISM tancy, citizenship and transnationalization...
...This division raises the question of how citizenship is to be practiced-whether women's organizations should be acting as pressure groups within the parameters set by governments or whether they should act independently...
...The issue was already latent in Chile, given the divergent goals of the Concertaci6n of Women for Democracy (an organization that includes many women in the political parties that form the ruling Concertaci6n) and the Coordinator of Women's Social Organizations (groups independent of political parties that seek to preserve the autonomy of women's movements...
...14, No...
...Moreover," she wrote, "as a revolutionary organization, the MLN has never referred to the oppression of women...
...It criticized the fact that women had not been considered participants in history, noting that "until recently, the subject of women has not been considered sufficiently interesting to warrant categorical reference in Latin American history books...
...Although the Mothers' demonstrations were often interpreted in essentialist terms as the archaic resistance of injured motherhood, in fact, they transgressed the public/private distinction by making the private public and using silence as a political weapon that packed more power than empty rhetoric...
...9 Her words would prove to be prophetic for, in the late 1980s, the key words were no longer "revolution" and "armed struggle" but "citizenship" and "human rights," especially in those countries that were emerging from civil war and dictatorship...
...Much thinking on the left still relied on traditional definitions of public and private spheres, blinding it to the fact that the so-called private sphere was also a political space...
...In the late 1970s, when two of her children were fighting with the Guatemalan guerrillas, she December 1972 cover of NACLA's Latin Amel Empire Report, featuring a police photograph sie Macchi, a leader of the Uruguayan Tupamar volunteered her services as a courier...
...5. Guiomar Rovira, Mujeres de maiz (Mexico City: Era, 1997...
...4. Ana Maria Araeijo, Tupamaras...
...Yet time would demonstrate that the gun was not in fact the ideal instrument to achieve women's liberation...
...For many armed movements, the gun was the signifier of equality, but it was a poor substitute for democratic theory and practice...
...6, No...
...In 1974 Fidel Castro himself acknowledged that only 6% of cadres and party functionaries were women...
...But other policies, such as the persecution of homosexuals especially in the 1960s and early 1970s, reinforced the very machismo that the family law was supposed to combat...
...In the 1960s, she started a series of radio programs on women for Radio Universidad in Mexico City and later founded the feminist journalfem...
...7. Julieta Kirkwood, Ser politica en Chile...
...Whereas in the 1960s prostitution was regarded as a pernicious effect of capitalism and efforts were made to reeducate prostitutes and incorporate them into the work force, today the sex trade is tolerated if not encouraged in the interests of the tourist industry...
...Compounding the problem was that government policies were based on assumptions Vol XXXI, No 4 JAN/FEB 1998 11 Vol XXXI, No 4 JAN/FEB 1998 11ANNIVERSARY ESSAY/ FEMINISM cies were based on assumptions about women's problems rather than gender issues...
...In what now seems a rather vain attempt to model women's oppression on that of the proletariat, the authors made the rather odd suggestion that "the class suicide of the housewife and her NACLIA' LATIN AMERICA & EMPIRE REPORT rhe liberation movement cannot be eparated from the liberation of socity in general...
...The participation of women in the public sphere today is a leap forward of such proportions that it could scarcely have been imagined in 1972 when NACLA first highlighted women's oppression in a transformation into the proletariat requires the elimination of the social traits acquired under capitalism...
...Though Cuba introduced a progressive family law, its record in other areas related to gender was less impressive...
...This is one aspect of what Sonia Alvarez has called the "transnationalization of feminist organizations, agendas and strategies in Latin America," which raises questions over how women's roles are being defined in the global economy and them...
...5 But the Zapatistas, however praiseworthy their efforts, remain an exceptional case and not necessarily a model...
...At that time, I thought her somewhat apolitical...
...Feminist journals such as fem and debate feminista in Mexico, Estudos Feministas in Brazil and Feminaria in Argentina drew attention to research on women's issues and the growing importance of women's contribution to the arts...
...There were admittedly external factors, such as the U.S...
...62-67...
...Nowhere was this heterogeneity more evident than at the Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing and the parallel meeting of nongovermental organizations (NGOs) at Huairou in 1996, attended by 20,000 government representa- rica tives and 30,000 women from of NGOs throughout the world...
...blockade or the discontent over the conscription of young men to fight the U.S.-sponsored contra war-both major issues for women...
...12 who is defining The July/August 1993 cover of NACLA Report on the Americas...
...In the 1990s, both governments and international organizations have focused on women's issues as never before...
...Yet once the private is accepted as a political arena, "once domestic violence, prostitution and the prohibition of family planning are recognized as violations of human rights," says Kirkwood, "then an area which women 'know' and through which they are empowered becomes a political space...
...Yet, "prior NACLA work has done little to correct this tendency," reads the report's editorial, acknowledging NACLA's own sins of omission...
...Vol...
...All this attention to women does not, of course, signify a conversion of governments and funding organizations to feminism...
...6, No...
...79 (September 1997), pp...
...Socialismo y Participaci6n, No...
Vol. 31 • January 1998 • No. 4
