Date: Sat, 9 May 98 01:29:52 CDT
From: rich-AT-pencil.math.missouri.edu (Rich Winkel)
Subject: NACLA: Feminism's Long March
To: undisclosed-recipients:;-AT-Indy1.newmedium.com-AT-gw1.mail.psi.net


/** nacla.report: 394.0 **/
** Topic: Feminism's Long March by Jean Franco **
** Written 12:09 PM  Apr 30, 1998 by nacla in cdp:nacla.report **
Reprinted from the November/December 1997 issue of NACLA Report 
on the Americas.  For subscription information, email NACLA at 
nacla-AT-nacla.org

by Jean Franco

When I lived in Mexico during the 1950s I used to visit Alaide Foppa de 
Solorzano, who many years later would die, cruelly tortured, at the 
hands of the Guatemalan military. 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 non-
participants. At that time I thought her somewhat apolitical. I could not 
have been more mistaken. It was just that she had to invent her own 
brand of politics. In the 1960s she started a series of radio programs on 
women for Radio Universidad in Mexico City, and later founded the 
feminist journal fem. In the late 1970s, when two of her children were 
fighting with the Guatemalan guerrillas, she volunteered her services as 
a courier. 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. 

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. 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 l996, which was 
attended by 20,000 government representatives and 30,000 women 
from NGOs throughout the world. The Latin American presence was 
significant-representatives from 250 feminist organizations came from 
Mexico, while over 300 Brazilian women attended the Huairou forum. 
Such diversity cannot possibly be registered in a single article, and these 
reflections do not claim to be exhaustive. Rather, they focus on certain 
feminist issues which are inflected rather differently in the south-issues 
of militancy, citizenship and transnationalization. 

The participation of women in the public sphere today is a leap forward 
of such proportions that it could scarcely have been imagined in l972 
when NACLA first highlighted women's oppression in a special issue 
entitled "Women in Struggle." In this period, Cuba was still considered 
to be in the vanguard of revolutionary change. In the 1972 issue on 
women, the editors noted the dearth of research on "the concrete 
conditions which exist in Latin America and the effects of imperialism 
on women there." The theoretical backbone of this report was an essay 
reprinted from the journal, Casa de las Americas, entitled "Towards a 
Science of Women's Liberation" and co-authored by Isabel Larguia and 
John Dumoulin.1 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-while sidestepping some 
intractable problems. They 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. 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 
transformation into the proletariat requires the elimination of the social 
traits acquired under capitalism." As we know, the "class suicide" of the 
Soviet housewife left women washing the dirty dishes and standing in 
line for potatoes on top of a hard day's work at the factory. More 
significantly, the essay, and the entire NACLA report, assume that 
armed struggle is the purest form of militancy and the gun is the 
instrument of liberation. Larguia 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." Along with illustrations of 
women in the workplace, the issue carries several illustrations of women 
carrying weapons, including a cover photograph of Jessie Macchi, a 
leader of the Tupamaros, the Uruguayan guerrilla movement. I suppose 
it is the assumption 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. The idea that revolutionary change was on the 
horizon for the entire continent was not an unreasonable assumption in 
the early 1970s, as Wilma Espin, director of the Cuban Women's 
Federation, said in an interview in the NACLA report. Yet time would 
demonstrate that the gun was not in fact the ideal instrument to achieve 
women's liberation. 

Many women did indeed participate valiantly in armed struggles in the 
1970s. But despite some enlightened policies in revolutionary Cuba and 
Nicaragua and in Chile under Allende, many real problems were never 
confronted. Though Cuba introduced a progressive family law, its 
record in other areas related to gender was less impressive. In l974 Fidel 
Castro himself acknowledged that only 6% of cadres and party 
functionaries were women. In fact, Cuban policy towards women 
emerged not from a careful analysis and revision of canonical Marxism 
but from pragmatism. 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. 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. Compounding the problem was that government 
policies were based on assumptions about women's problems rather than 
gender issues. The Cuban government's pragmatism in relation to sexual 
politics has been most blatant in its recent policy shifts on prostitution. 
Whereas in the 1960s prostitution was regarded as a pernicious effect of 
capitalism and efforts were made to re-educate prostitutes and 
incorporate them into the work force, today the sex trade is tolerated if 
not encouraged in the interests of the tourist industry.2

Women's participation was central to the 1979 Sandinista revolution, 
and women held leadership positions, as was the case of Dora Maria 
Tellez, one of the comandantes who led the assault on the national 
palace. Yet pragmatism also dominated policy making regarding 
women's issues in Nicaragua. 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.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. Nor could the Association do anything to alleviate 
the food shortages caused by the U.S. blockade or the discontent over 
the conscription of young men to fight the U.S.-sponsored contra war-
both major issues for women. 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 the Sandinista 
defeat. 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. On the eve of the elections, then 
President Daniel Ortega sent a hastily mimeographed letter to 
housewives. 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 them at dawn, to be first in the line to vote 
for Violeta Chamorro. 

There were admittedly external factors, such as the U.S. blockade and 
civil war, that hindered revolutionary change in Cuba, Chile and 
Nicaragua. But external factors cannot account for the surface response 
of revolutionary and socialist governments to "women's problems." In 
the end, the seductive image of the woman revolutionary foreclosed 
rather than encouraged further analysis. Indeed, former militants, like 
Ana Maria Araujo of the Uruguayan Movement of National Liberation 
(MLN), began challenging this romanticized image of the gun-toting 
woman. In Tupamaras, an assessment of women in armed struggle, 
Araujo 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.4 Araujo reports that the women militants she interviewed 
acknowledged that while they disseminated party values, "they could do 
nothing to influence them." "Moreover," she wrote, "as a revolutionary 
organization, the MLN has never referred to the oppression of women. 
As far as the leadership was concerned, participation in a revolutionary 
organization replaced the specific struggle of women for their 
liberation." 

For many armed movements, the gun was the signifier of equality, yet 
the gun was a poor substitute for democratic theory and practice. 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.5 But the Zapatistas, however praiseworthy their efforts, remain 
an exceptional case and not necessarily a model. Increasingly, women 
on the left began questioning the belief that women's liberation was a 
necessary outcome of social revolution. In her reflections from exile, the 
Chilean militant Ana Vasquez acknowledges that contact with European 
feminism had opened the eyes of many exiled women so that "the 
relation of cause and effect between social revolution and women's 
liberation" was no longer a given.6 

The record of the orthodox left and progressive political parties was no 
more enlightened than that of those engaged in armed struggle. 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. And, because many on the left identified 
democracy exclusively as "bourgeois democracy," they overlooked the 
importance of women in the grassroots participation that was taking 
place outside traditional political organizations. One of the major 
contributions to Latin American feminist thought, Julieta Kirkwood's 
Ser politica en Chile (Being a Political Woman in Chile) was an 
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 feminism was not another bourgeois deviation but 
had something powerful to contribute to revolutionary thinking. A 
NACLA report of 1980, entitled "Latin American Women. One Myth-
Many Realities," reflected this change. The report had by this time seen 
the need to deal with abortion, women's political participation and 
women in the work force. The report 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." Yet, 
"prior NACLA work has done little to correct this tendency," reads the 
report's editorial, acknowledging NACLA's own sins of omission. "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."8 

This was a period of dramatic rethinking for the left in Latin America. 
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" democracy. Yet feminists like 
Julieta Kirkwood took this a step further, arguing that "there is no 
democracy without feminism." Women," she says, "live the republican 
values of Equality, Democracy and Fraternity as inequality, oppression 
and discrimination." 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."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. 

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 international attention to the disappearances of 
thousands of people in that country's "dirty war." 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. 
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.

These "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. How then are 
we to understand the very real tensions that arose between grassroots 
women's movements and the feminist groups, especially over the issue 
of reproductive rights-a grave problem in a continent where the Catholic 
Church has succeeded in so many countries in keeping issues like 
abortion off the agenda. In an attempt to raise the issue, several well-
known women in Argentina and Brazil have publicly acknowledged the 
fact that they had had abortions in order to publicize the dangers of 
keeping abortion illegal.

 For example, while middle-class women were more interested in sexual 
liberation and reproductive rights, grassroots women emphasized 
survival issues. And while women's social movements opened up a 
space for women's political activity at the grassroots, they often rejected 
feminist agendas, particularly the calls for reproductive rights-At the 
same time, however, feminists have struggled to overcome their middle-
class image, and the determination to cross class divides is one of 
characteristics of Latin American feminism. 

The arena where differences and similarities between feminists and 
women from grassroots organizations were worked out were the 
feminist Encuentros, or Gatherings, which were initiated in Bogota in 
1981 and have taken place every two years since then in different Latin 
American countries. As these encuentros have been amply documented, 
I will only mention here the issue that 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?"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 number of women's organizations, which 
has inevitably led to fragmentation. And initial enthusiasm for the new 
social movements as a proving ground for participatory democracy gave 
way to sober questioning, especially when these movements developed 
into internationally funded NGOs, often with a paid professional staff. 
This development accounts for the acrimony that surfaced in the most 
recent encuentro in Cartagena, Chile, and the criticism of NGOs made 
by "autonomous" feminists-those who want to guard against the 
absorption of feminism into more general social issues. The issue was 
already latent in Chile, given the divergent goals of the Concertacion of 
Women for Democracy (an organization that includes many women in 
the political parties that form the ruling Concertacion) and the 
Coordinator of Women's Social Organizations (groups independent of 
political parties and concerned to preserve the autonomy of women's 
movements). 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 the government or whether they 
should act independently. 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 current reorganization of the neoliberal state.

In retrospect, the 1980s was an extraordinary decade for Latin 
American women. Research and outreach institutions such as the 
Fundacao Carlos Chaga in Sao Paulo, the Centro Flora Tristan in Lima, 
and Casa de la Mujer La Morada in Santiago became internationally 
known. Feminist journalists 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. Women's publishing houses have emerged in 
many countries in the region, and Latin American women writers are 
increasingly found on the best-sellers' list.

This brings me to the third development-the globalization of feminism 
and the restructuring of priorities by neoliberal governments. In the 
1990s, both governments and international organizations have focused 
on women's issues as never before. Government councils and 
commissions in many Latin American countries have been established to 
identify and design policies for women. 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).11 In Chile, Josefina Bilbao, the head of the National Women's 
Service (SERNAM), was given ministerial rank. Funding for women's 
organizations is now available from many sources, especially from 
European and North American governments and foundations. 
International funding which formerly went to research institutions, and 
then to grassroots organizations, increasingly funds NGOs so that these 
now have salaried professional staff, as well as local, regional and global 
networks of women's organizations. Many of these NGOs are 
increasingly engaged in planning public policy, often in concert with 
state agencies like those mentioned above. 

All this attention to women does not, of course, signify a conversion of 
governments and funding organizations to feminism. 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. Indeed, who 
benefits from much of this attention remains an open question. 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 energies into controllable spaces. 
This is one aspect what Sonia Alvarez has called the 
"transnationalization of feminist organizations, agendas and strategies in 
Latin America," which raises the question of how women's roles are 
being defined in the global economy and who is defining those roles.11 

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. 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. 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 depolitization of the state, which now exists 
largely as the vehicle for the implementation of transnational neoliberal 
policies. 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?

Despite impressive gains, the problems of discrimination, reproductive 
rights, marginalization and the exploitation of female labor are still 
acute. 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. 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 can build on these struggles in order to forge a deeper 
understanding of the resignification of women in globalization.



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