Historia de las mujeres en España y América Latina
2008; Duke University Press; Volume: 88; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1215/00182168-2007-086
ISSN1527-1900
Autores Tópico(s)Political Dynamics in Latin America
ResumoThis volume examines an extensive array of women’s experiences in both Spain and Latin America from the twentieth century to the present, establishing an important dialogue of women’s voices across the Atlantic. The great variety of topics, including suffrage, Catholic feminism, literature and film, dictatorships, labor movements, exile, reproductive rights, and modernity, effectively creates an encyclopedic effect of sophisticated historiography. The collection offers fertile ground for study not only of the historians’ craft but also of women’s movements and the many individuals who made history.In fact, one of the most important contributions of the volume is the collection’s examination of the transnational nature of women’s struggles. In the twentieth century, feminists advanced their political agenda wherever they found themselves, transcending various national barriers. For instance, María Abella de Ramírez (Uruguayan), Julietta Lanteri (Italian), Alicia Moreau (English), and Belén de Sárrage (Spanish) were all influential in Argentina’s women’s movement (pp. 513 – 14). Like these women, feminist slogans, such as “the personal is political,” traveled back and forth across the Atlantic and found advocates everywhere. Often, politics violated the security of the personal sphere, forcing women to leave their traditional homes. As a consequence of the Spanish Civil War and Spain’s eventual military dictatorship, many women artists took refuge in Latin American cities, forming new intellectual communities in their host countries. For example, Maruja Mallo wrote of her fascination with South American popular culture (pp. 197 – 98), and Mexico warmly welcomed Remedios Varo’s paintings (pp. 212 – 13). Likewise, Latin American women fleeing the terror of military dictatorships at home and denouncing human rights abuses found solace and solidarity with women’s movements in Europe and the United States. The Madres de Plaza de Mayo, like many organizations in South and Central America, has survived and grown with international support. Recently, as one of the consequences of globalization, Spanish and Latin American women are being brought together in domestic spaces. In Spain, the elderly population is mostly female and relies for daily care on young immigrant women (p. 468).The collection also offers a theoretical and historical approach to understanding feminism lying outside the internationally influential British and U.S. canons. The discussion centers instead on Spanish and Latin American women’s choices, ideas, and historical circumstances and examines the various reasons feminists chose to support dictators, adhered to or challenged conservative discourses of womanhood, joined anarchist and communist movements, and struggled for political rights. In short, the volume proposes that feminism is a culturally specific phenomenon that must be understood in its unique historical context. In the first half of the twentieth century, Spanish women for the most part advocated social feminism, that is, the struggle for civil and social rights. They organized around concrete goals like the right to divorce, equal education, and extra domestic jobs rather than promoting political equality with men (p. 57). The social feminism experienced in Spain also found counterparts in Latin America. However, what is astonishing about the Latin American experience is precisely its diversity. For instance, international feminism had a varied impact throughout Latin America. U.S. feminism played the role of catalyst in promoting women’s political and social rights in Panama (p. 571), provided a model in Brazil (pp. 863 – 70), and served as a point of departure that was imitated less over time in Argentina and Uruguay (pp. 881 – 83). Latin American and Spanish women focused on social rights much more than did their British and U.S. counterparts because their societies denied them basic rights. Even though divorce was legal as early as 1837 in Guatemala and 1888 in Colombia, Spain and the rest of Latin America denied women this right until recently — Spain in 1981 and Chile in 2004 (pp. 557 – 58).The influence of conservative feminists in Spain and Latin America also accounted for the region’s emphasis on social rights. Catholic feminists, for example, looked with dismay on any political pretense of gender equality and elevated conservative governments, often repressive military dictatorships, as moral protectors of traditional gender roles. Generals Francisco Franco Bahamonde, Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, Anastasio Somoza García, and a dozen other dictators legitimized their regimes with the aid of women in their traditional roles as mothers and dutiful daughters. Albeit an uninspiring topic for most of us, these examples make clear that women influenced politics even when they were trying to do the opposite.In these ways, the study of diverse feminisms in Spain and Latin America, which have often been labeled “exceptional” and “backward” in the history of women, raises theoretical and historical questions that should concern feminists worldwide and represents an important model in women’s studies in our age of globalization.For all its commendable work, the collection focuses mostly on white women, while in Latin America they are a minority. This criticism, however, does not undermine the multiple contributions of the collection. On the contrary, it stands as an invitation for a further volume that would address the issues of race and racism in the lives of women in Spain and Latin America. In short, the book is a must-read for scholars of the transatlantic world, Spain, Latin America, and women’s studies.
Referência(s)