New Readings on Women's Movements and Women's Rights in Latin America

Abstract

pp.; hardcover $55, paperback $18.95. Isbester, Katherine. Still Fighting: The Nicaraguan Women's Movement, 1977-2000. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001. Bibliography, index, 272 pp.; hardcover $45, paperback $19.95. n Latin America, as elsewhere, women activists have worked toward 159 160 LATIN AMERICAN POLITICS AND SOCIETY 45: 2demands in different periods, depending on the national interests of the moment. Women's activism must be understood in relation to pressures from above to expand or curtail particular citizenship rights. That is, the political and economic context is central in determining the types of successes and limitations women's movements are likely to encounter. Several of the authors whose work is reviewed here link the context in which a given movement or organization operates to the relative autonomy of women's movements from other social actors, such as the state, political parties, unions, funding agencies, and the church. The second issue is "difference." As Molyneux (2000) points out, Latin American women's movements have principally fought for the expansion of women's rights on the basis of their inherent difference from men, reflected in their presumed superior morality and maternal and cooperative values. They have maintained that women's rights should be defended and that women should be granted equality on the basis of the contributions they make to society as wives and mothers. This brand of "difference feminism" has not precluded the existence of differences among women, however. Such differences complicate the very concept of "women's interests."The differences among women fall into two general categories. The first includes differences asserted by women who struggle for the expansion of rights, but whose priorities are linked to class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and so on, leading them to feel that their interests are not represented in women's movements dominated by whiter, middleclass, heterosexual, nonindigenous women. Such differences have been more or less salient over time, depending on the particular historical moment. The second category involves ideological differences that have led some women-particularly those on the political right-to struggle not for the expansion of women's rights but the preservation of women's traditional roles. Understanding both of these categories of difference is essential to advancing the study of women's activism and its influence in the region.