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[Katha Pollitt <kpollitt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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There's some interesting information and analysis in here,I thought.

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Date: Sat, 9 May 98 01:29:52 CDT
From: rich@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Rich Winkel)
Organization: PACH
Subject: NACLA: Feminism's Long March
Article: 34358
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/** 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@xxxxxxxxx

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.



** End of text from cdp:nacla.report **

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