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The History of Gender in the Historiography of Latin America

2001; Duke University Press; Volume: 81; Issue: 3-4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-81-3-4-449

1527-1900

Sueann Caulfield,

Historical Gender and Feminism Studies

Writing in 1972, Ann Pescatello bemoaned the underdevelopment of Latin American women's studies, a field so much in its infancy that it was difficult to identify major trends and authors, much less conduct research.1 Seven years later, Asunción Lavrin observed that historians still lagged behind social scientists in filling in the gaps and pointed out directions that Latin American women's history might take.2 Scholars have since followed the paths Lavrin indicated, provoking a steady flow in work that focuses on women, and since the mid-1980s, and a great surge of studies that use gender as a category of analysis. Twenty-odd years after Lavrin's prophetic essay, the field that she and a small group of Latin American and Latin Americanist colleagues pioneered is again exceedingly difficult to review. The problem now, however, is the large quantity of significant work, the variety of topics, theoretical approaches and methodologies, and the multiple ways in which this scholarship has influenced how we understand Latin American history.This essay will not attempt to cover all of these topics, approaches and methods, much less all of the significant works in the field. It will leave to a future historian, for instance, the task of evaluating whether gender analysis has moved "from margin to center" in the ways historians have integrated it, or at least mentioned it, in studies that do not specifically focus on gender or women.3 Although this trend is as significant as the outpouring of publications with "gender" in the title (or, more commonly, in the subtitle), this essay will be largely limited to what I consider exemplary and representative studies that use gender as a primary, or at least major, tool of analysis.Emphasis on books in which gender is a primary analytical category brings with it a second limitation: a focus on scholarship published in the United States, where over the past six years there has been a torrent of monographs that deal primarily with gender. Gender analysis has not been as central a concern in the different national historiographies in Latin America. This is despite the existence of an extraordinarily rich and broad-ranging Latin American scholarship on the kinds of topics that are especially attractive to gender historians, such as the family, sexuality, and racial or ethnic mixture, as well as a wealth of literature on women's roles in labor, politics, and everyday life. The analytical methods that Latin American scholars bring to these topics are diverse, emerging as they do from national and local historiographies with their own trajectories and different relationships to North American and European scholarship. This is not to say that Latin American work is more provincial than that produced outside the region. On the contrary, Latin American scholars, especially those who work in the larger nations (Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Mexico) with well-developed research centers, including centers dedicated to research on women or gender, are vigorous participants in international scholarly dialogues. Recent multivolume collections on the history of private life in Brazil or the history of mentalities in Mexico, with obvious reference to French literature in these areas, are good illustrations of the different placement of topics and issues that would certainly undergo more explicit gender analysis—and the works might well include "gender" in the titles—if published in the United States.4The best of the scholarship produced in the United States both builds on the respective national historiography and participates in an international dialogue. Yet, as Mary Kay Vaughan has noted in her recent essay on the "new" cultural history in Mexico, there is a lamentable lack of dialogue between U.S. and Latin American scholars.5 North American scholars rely upon Latin American empirical research, which is frequently "incorporated" into U.S. theoretical and scholarly agendas, not vice versa. Latin Americans, for their part, do not generally view "Latin America" as a coherent regional field, and, especially in the case of Brazil, are more likely to read French, British, or U.S. scholarship than that of other Latin American nations. Of course, the explanation for the difference in North American and Latin American conceptions of the hemisphere, and the relatively slow circulation of research among Latin American nations, are complex. For our purposes, it is simply worth noting that scholarship produced in the U.S. has brought a specific set of concerns to gender history. While it is possible to perceive certain common theoretical concerns and narrative strategies among recent works on gender in Latin America produced in the United States—including the near universal adoption of the term "gender"—this is more difficult to do with the more varied recent Latin American scholarship.I will argue, however, that it is possible to trace in very broad strokes the development of certain scholarly trends in the international literature on women and gender in Latin America over the past three decades, in which Latin American production plays a leading role. In synthesizing both political processes and scholarship on the region as a whole, I will inevitably overlook or even distort debates and contributions that are crucial to distinct national cases. The periodization also shifts when one focuses on individual nations. This is evident in comparing my synthesis of the literature of the region to Thomas Klubock's discussion of gender history in Chile. While our narratives are similar in some ways, Klubock's discussion of the political context, peri-odization, and particular contributions is much more specific and detailed than mine.Finally, I will not discuss the development of the history of homosexuality. This area of gender historiography has emerged in different ways in the scholarship of both Latin Americans and U.S.-based Latin Americanists, as Martin Nesvig shows in his comprehensive review in this issue. It is one of the most promising new directions in Latin American gender history, but Nesvig's review would make a discussion here redundant.With these limitations in mind, this essay will examine the history of political and scholarly trends that have influenced gender analysis in the historiography of Latin America (excluding the French- and English-speaking Caribbean). I see this history as falling into three overlapping periods. The first covers the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, when initial efforts were made to carve out a space for historical perspectives within the burgeoning field of Latin American women's studies, then dominated by the social sciences. While the interdisciplinarity of the early women's studies literature left an evident mark on subsequent scholarship on gender, the terms of the most fervent political and theoretical debates that surrounded Latin American women's studies now seem indelibly dated to the 1970s. Yet the debates—over the role of U.S.-based feminists in defining a scholarly agenda; the links between Latin American feminist militancy, working-class women's movements, and scholarly production; the relevance of Latin America's (dependant) position in the world economy to women's status; and the relationship of scholarship on women to U.S. imperialism and Latin American political struggles—shaped the trajectory of scholarship long after the political moment had shifted.6Political shifts, of course, also influenced scholarly trajectories. As the self-assured combativeness of the late 1970s feminism and partisan politics gave way to more fragmented political identifications by the end of the 1980s, in the Americas and elsewhere, new debates and topics emerged in the scholarship on Latin American women. At the same time, institutional resources in Latin America for historical research and research on women improved dramatically in nations recovering from years of dictatorship, which resulted in a sharp rise in archival-based research produced in the region, especially in Brazil and, later, in Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile. Partly in response to these political and institutional changes and partly because of the shifts in national and international scholarly trends, an interest in women spread to different historical subfields.A renewed interest in colonial history, focused now on sexuality, moral order, and everyday life, is one trend that highlighted women as subjects of history after the mid-1980s, particularly in Mexico and Brazil.7 Another is the overlap of three subfields that are especially dynamic in Latin America: family history; a social history influenced by European micro-history and the "new social history" in the United States;8 and a strain of cultural history that is heavily influenced by Foucault, the French history of mentalities, and other theories of discourse and representation that have been grouped together under the label post-structuralist or (usually by social historians critical of it) postmodern. As these three subfields came together, the patriarchal family, long recognized as a central political and economic institution in Latin American history, was reexamined by social historians, demographers and historical anthropologists interested in women, everyday life and nonelite historical actors. Even more prevalent, as Klubock shows for recent scholarship in Chile, was the combination of social histories of everyday life with cultural analysis that emphasized the power of symbolic representation and discourses of liberal professionals. A good deal of research clustered around topics such as prostitution, criminality, or public health and hygiene campaigns in urban centers at the turn of the last century. The shift to small units of analysis in these studies represented a departure from "grand theories" of the 1960s and 1970s, which seemed ill-suited to the political and intellectual climate of the 1980s and 1990s.Finally, the 1980s saw a shift to analysis of "gender" rather than "women," especially among U.S.-based scholars, with frequent citation of the work of Joan Scott. Using gender as a category has helped deflect the frequent criticism that studies of women were too narrow, for gender is a relational concept that implies a focus on men as well. More importantly, gender is a broader analytical category that includes consideration of how female and male subjects are socially constructed and positioned and how representations of femininity and masculinity structure institutional power. This analytical shift has characterized histories written by both U.S. and Latin American scholars, although Latin American historians have been less enthusiastic about theorizing or adopting the term "gender."9Methodological innovations in the historical scholarship on women and gender over the course of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s resulted in the collection of vast amounts of data, the accumulation of a rich array of closely analyzed case studies of family and community life, and compelling new ways to understand social identities and power structures in Latin American history. A recent group of monographs has built upon this scholarship, using similar methods and sources while attempting to resolve some of its theoretical tensions and interpretive limits. It is significant that these books were written by scholars based in the United States, for they display a common immersion in recent debates in U.S. historiography, particularly regarding the relationship between feminist theory, social history, and post-structuralism. In some works, innovative theoretical approaches lie subtly behind the narrative. In others, "grand theory" has charged back in, setting ambitious goals for multilevel analyses of politics and power.10These authors have taken some new directions, including giving attention to both masculinity and femininity. They have also relinquished dichotomous concepts of power and resistance, and with them, stable notions of identity. Although historians continue to read documents "against the grain," they are increasingly attuned to contemporary terminology, especially in colonial studies. One result is that an emphasis on honor runs through new scholarship on both colonial and modern topics. Another is that there is a specificity lacking in earlier works on gendered discourses of power, which in the end could make one site look very similar to the next. Historians are asking quite a bit of gender: How did religious orders reproduce colonial social and economic structures? How did liberal ideals and vocabulary spread? How was republican citizenship constructed? How did socialist or capitalist states achieve hegemony? Why did local communities respond to the call to war? The final section of this essay will look briefly at some of the ways in which these questions are being answered.As someone who finished graduate school in the mid-1990s, I feel fortunate to have arrived on the scene after the groundwork of women's history in Latin America had been laid. Unlike the generation before me, I could consult bibliographies and reviews of the field; learn from theoretical debates and methodologies of published work; and receive support and advice from established scholars in the field.11 Moreover, in the United States, gender analysis was recognized as cutting edge in the 1990s. In contrast to the professional barriers previous generations encountered, those of us working on gender over the past decade found university doors and employment options wide open.Still, one cannot help but feel somewhat envious of the sense of exhilarating political possibility that marked the early Latin American women's studies literature and professional gatherings. Dramatic political transformations throughout the region either promised to open up or threatened to shut down opportunities to end women's oppression; either way, a heightened sense of urgency surrounded scholarly work. Reading through reviews and introductory essays to collections and bibliographies on women in Latin American that appeared in the 1970s and early 1980s, one gets a strong sense of what John French and Daniel James call the "passionate partisanship" that inspired early works, most of which sought to theorize the relationship between capitalism and patriarchy, identified as the roots of women's oppression.12 Anthropologist Florence Babb remembers, with some nostalgia, that scholars argued "with the certainty and conviction of the time" for historical materialist approaches that would light the path toward structural change and even socialist feminist revolution.13 Whether they embarked on projects with immediate practical relevance or worked to construct far-reaching theoretical models, feminist social scientists saw the potential of scholarship to reshape the social-sexual order. Moreover, interdisciplinary approaches and collaborative research on women seemed poised to transform the academic disciplines, since traditional theories and methods could not account for women's experiences.No less important than individual research projects was the creation of a vibrant scholarly community committed to the collective endeavor of uncovering women's conditions and experiences. With the proliferation of conferences and symposia, along with published collections, debates, reviews, bibliographies and, later, research centers and institutes dedicated to promoting women's studies in Latin America, political and disciplinary fissures appeared, sometimes along class lines; often separating north and south. Latin American researchers sometimes bristled at what they saw as a North American commitment to a bourgeois and imperialist feminist agenda, while some North Americans interpreted the Latin American commitments to partisan political agendas or structural dependency theory as misguided or backward.14Of course, disagreement about the primacy of sex or class (with racial or ethnic discrimination added as a form of class oppression) also emerged among scholars of the same nationality.15 Yet the strong marxist position in Latin American social sciences, adopted by prominent U.S.-based Latin Americanists, prevailed in much of the significant research. The prevalence of dependency analysis, emphasis on class oppression, and early criticism of North American feminists meant that from the start, "women" were generally studied in the context of their class and region. Class and sex were frequently seen as independent variables that might be weighted differently in different settings: class inequalities were more important in the "Third World," while sexual inequalities could take precedence in industrialized nations.16 Although there were notable exceptions, particularly in the North American political science literature on women's political participation, class analysis influenced interpretations of data as well as the topics favored. These included the effects of development on women, women's roles in social and political change, and women in the urban and rural labor force, including the informal sector.17Notwithstanding the historical materialist approach of some of the early women's studies research, little of it was actually conducted by historians before the early 1980s. Instead, political scientists, anthropologists, and sociologists employed a variety of methods for collection of data, mostly on contemporary societies, to test broad theoretical concepts or models. With the hindsight of two decades of vigorous historical research on gender, concepts such as "capitalist patriarchy" for understanding the exploitation of women's labor, both domestic and extradomestic, or "marianismo" for explaining women's political power as an extension of her venerated position in the traditional Iberian home, seem overly rigid and ahistorical.18 Although some historians have retained modified versions of these concepts in specific contexts, most recent scholarship has developed more complex and flexible theoretical frameworks for analyzing how gender has intersected with class and ethnicity to structure politics or the social relations of production.19As easy as it is to criticize theories developed before much empirical historical research was amassed, however, it is difficult to deny the lasting impact that the early social science research on Latin American women has had on the historiography on gender, especially but not exclusively in Latin America. Studies collected in June Nash and Helen Safa's 1976 volume, Sex and Class in Latin America, showed that women's political action varied by class, ethnicity, and region and that the public and private realms were intertwined—themes historians continue to develop. That volume, and the body of work on women and work that it represents, is also relevant to new research in labor history. In the introduction to a 1997 collection of some of the most innovative labor history of Latin America published in English in the past decade, coeditors John French and Daniel James identify Nash and Safa as precursors.20 Nash's 1979 ethnographic study of a Bolivian mining community, according to the editors, even anticipated the objectives of "today's cohort of gender-conscious Latin American labor historians."21Historian Heidi Tinsman, whose research on gender and agrarian reform in Chile is featured in this special issue of the HAHR as well as in the French and James collection, also recognizes the importance for subsequent gender historians of the early social science scholarship on women's labor, especially the international literature on women in development and women in revolutionary societies.22 Much of this literature dealt with Latin America, including significant contributions by U.S.-based scholars (for example, Nash, Safa, and Maria Patrícia Fernandez-Kelly) and scholars of rural households, production, and labor (for example, Eleanor Leacock, Carmen Diana Deere, and Magdalena León).23 In addition to their own field research, these scholars published extensively in Spanish and English, including edited volumes that brought together research produced in the United States and Latin America.24 By the mid-1980s, this kind of collaboration had done much to lessen the divide between North and Latin American research.25Some researchers demonstrated the need to reform public policies in order to benefit women equally; others—most commonly Latin American scholars— rejected altogether the concept of "development," which they believed was informed by a uniform notion of progress imposed by the wealthy nations on a homogenized "Third World."26 Although, as Marysa Navarro demonstrated in a 1979 review, it was the international development literature and conferences of the 1970s that first led Latin American social scientists to study women, Latin Americans were generally more concerned with national policy and issues than with comparative or international research.27 This, together with obvious international inequalities in resources for publishing and distribution, often contributed to making their work less visible among the international scholarship as a whole. Yet, the bulk of data on women's labor, poverty, household composition, family roles, and education were produced locally, often with sponsorship of new research centers and in some cases international funding.28Working within or against "development," scholars amassed a wealth of data on the sexual division of labor and inequities in salary, education, and access to state benefits, as well as analyses of the complex relationships between local cultural norms, national and international political goals and ideologies, and the interests of local and international employers. The data showed conclusively the differential impact on women and men of economic and technological change brought by development projects, industrialization, and shifting strategies of multinational corporations.29 They also demonstrated that these changes affected sex roles and family relations in complex ways and provoked a variety of individual and collective responses. As Tinsman notes, the answer to the question of whether development, as conceived by national and international capitalist policymakers, improved women's status was generally "no." Women's wages might have increased with new factory work, but their status relative to men fell. Development policies in socialist Cuba or Chile were generally more favorable to women than those of capitalist countries, but even there, limits to women's full participation in decision-making tempered the gains.30One social science research project that started out in this general vein— a study of rural family structure after the Cuban Revolution—merits special mention because of its later importance to historians. Anthropologist Verena Martínez-Alier's Marriage, Class and Colour in Nineteenth-Century Cuba (1974) is based on church and state regulations regarding marriage, interracial couples' petitions for permission to marry, and judicial cases of seduction and elopement, discovered by the author while awaiting authorization in Havana to return to the countryside.31 The resulting book was a pathbreaking historical study of the intersection of race, gender, and class in the maintenance of social hierarchy, and of the importance of sexuality and marriage to religious and secular authorities.In 1978, Asunción Lavrin cited similar documents—legal records of divorce, adultery, concubinage, bigamy, incest, parent-child conflicts over marriage choice, and dispensation of consanguinity—to show how everyday practices diverged from legal and religious prescriptions in colonial New Spain.32 Yet her article was exploratory and suggestive, written as a guide to further research, not as an in-depth analysis. It would be another decade before historians began to work more closely and systematically with these kinds of documents to uncover everyday practices and moral values and to examine the intersection of social categories of race, ethnicity, class, and gender.Lavrin recognized the relevance to historians of the women's studies literature produced by social scientists, and even suggested that historical research might "give support—or disproof—to some of their theories."33 Yet, there were factors that distinguished women's history from the more general women's studies literature. First, the bulk of the early (pre-1980s) women's history research was done by U.S.-based scholars. Like the early women's history in the U.S., and unlike previous Latin American women's studies literature, the historical research up until the mid-1980s included a number of studies of elite women, religious women and convents, women's legal rights, dowry and other property, and prescriptive literature on gender roles and morals.34 Historians also considered the effects on women of major events such as the conquest or independence and of women's participation in these and other political events and movements.35 Although several important works on the history of feminism were written by politically engaged Latin American social scientists looking for antecedents, for the most part, the history of national feminist movements was of greater interest to U.S.-based researchers than to locals.36Women's history continued to lag behind the social sciences in research on working-class lives until the late 1980s.37Women also began to appear as agents of family and social history in the 1970s in ways analogous to their appearance in the social science development literature, that is, in works that were not specifically about women and that were not necessarily feminist. This was true of studies produced both in and outside of Latin America. As Elizabeth Kuznesof and Robert Oppenheimer point out, the significance of the family, especially the elite extended family, to political and economic structures has always been a major theme in Latin American historiography.38 Scholarly studies of the family, beginning with Gilberto Freyre's portrait of family life on the colonial Brazilian sugar plantation in 1933, depicted it as the dominant force in patronage systems; the circulation of capital and political power; the development (or nondevelopment) of modern social classes; and the configuration of ethnic or racial relations. Up until the 1960s, Brazilian historians saw families of all races and classes as integrated into this patriarchal, elite family.39 François Chevalier's influential 1954 study of the self-contained Mexican hacienda depicted a similar dynamic, although the structure and labor system of the Mexican hacienda and its relationship to outlaying peasant communities was very different.40 Later studies of landed elites as well as urban and rural merchants, bureaucrats, and politicians found that family and kinship networks, which hinged on careful planning of marriages, were the crucial means of accumulating wealth and power in colonial society.41 Strategies changed in different ways with new political and economic conditions in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the independence wars displaced the traditional families in some regions, but kinship remained a fundamental way of extending and maintaining power. Population studies and ethnographies since the 1950s have focused on lower-class family and kinship systems as well, particularly those of indigenous groups, as primary social institutions and centers of reproduction.42The family might seem an obvious place to look for female historical agents, but most historians did not find them there until the 1970s. They were blinded by the figure of the omnipotent colonial patriarch and his nineteenth-century parallel, the caudillo (coronel in Brazil). Elite white women appeared as instruments in male negotiations to extend the clan through marriage alliances, which required protecting their virtue by cloistering them in the home; nonelite women appeared as victims of white male sexual prerogatives, which resulted in the creation of subordinate mixed-race populations. The nonelite population that was not a part of the grand estates or closed communities were assumed to form a disorganized, promiscuous mass in which stable family ties were an exception.With the adoption of new methods of quantitative demography and qualitative social and cultural history, this picture began to change. Demographic studies of communities and households began to challenge the notion that large, extended families characteristic of the "feudal" colonial period predominated throughout the region. On the contrary, researchers consistently found that the average household size in rural and urban areas was small (between four and six free members), and that it grew in the nineteenth century to accommodate production for new capitalist markets. Second, these studies overturned the idea that households and production were invariably patriarchal, for they found between 25 to 45 percent of households headed by women.43 In the early 1980s, Elizabeth Kuznesof and others concluded that the numbers of female-headed households rose with the beginnings of urbanization and industrialization as a response to demands for domestic market production.44 Several historians have uncovered data on illegitimacy and consensual unions by ethnic or class group in local studies, finding both prevalent principally among the non-white and non-elite populations. Some conclude from this that lower-class groups disregarded the moral values disseminated by the church, a finding rejected by more recent cultural historians.45 Even from a purely demographical standpoint, generalizations about the region remain tentative. Beyond the finding that female-headed households and illegitimacy have been unusually high in much of the region from the colonial period to the present, historians continue to find tremendous variation in degree and patterns by region and over time.46Particularl