Before the Revolution: Women's Rights and Right-Wing Politics in Nicaragua, 1821–1979

6. Sex and Somocismo

Before the advent of the Sandinista National Liberation Front in the 1960s, the nation-building project of the Somozas’ Nationalist Liberal Party was the most inclusive ever to be promoted in Nicaragua. But it was full of contradictions for women. It incorporated women into the nation’s economic system, but as low-paid workers, and into the nation’s political system, but as loyal voters organized in pro-government partisan groups. This Liberal legacy—radical in comparison to the Conservative one—resulted in the formation of a populist Somocista Liberalism that rested not on moralistic or maternalist ground but on the public display of exaggerated sexuality. During the Somozas’ years in power, certain misogynistic sexual practices common to all social classes of Nicaraguan society—husbands’ public extramarital a¤airs, male promiscuity, and the prostitution and rape of women—would be writ large on the national canvas . The Somozas personally exemplified promiscuity by openly engaging in countless extramarital a¤airs. Prostitution was institutionalized under their rule, as was state-sponsored sexual violence against female antiSomocista prisoners. Even as the Somozas fostered women’s leadership and solidarity among Somocista women through the Ala Femenina, they worked to reinforce the sexism already present in Nicaraguan culture, with negative S I X SEX AND SOMOCISMO results for women. In this regard, Roger Lancaster’s findings during the 1980s can also be applied to the Somoza period: Women often find their intimate emotional (and sometimes even much of their material) support and mutual aid in the company of other women more than in the company of men. . . . This female world is . . . a necessary prerequisite for the ongoing reproduction of the male world of machismo—for the package of assumptions it carries, the e¤orts and resources it allots, even the spheres of relative autonomy it grants for women, are part and parcel of a deeply gendered division of the world, where gender remains defined in terms of male dominion over women and children.1 Under the Somozas, women’s work and political participation outside the home was not meant to disturb traditional family arrangements or women’s relationship to their husbands or children; it was simply an added responsibility, recognized by the state. This way of thinking can be found in a Somocista grade school textbook, which stated: “Now the mother cannot stay in the house, in her home, only tending to her children , her husband, the domestic chores, etc.; now in addition to attending to her family, she has to go out to work in diverse occupations, to help in the economy of the home.”2 Women’s entry into politics through a female partisan organization and into the workforce in traditionally female fields did not radically alter gender relations in Nicaragua either for the better or for the worse. Yet, in the aftermath of the Somozas’ reign, Nicaraguan and foreign antiSomocistas remember the dictatorship as a period of extreme sexism and profound sexual exploitation of women. This understanding of the Somoza period is based on three factors: the power and visibility of Nicolasa Sevilla under the dictatorship, the state’s support of prostitution for the National Guard’s economic gain, and the rape of numerous antiSomocista women. Anti-Somocistas’ anxieties about the Somozas’ sexual legacy are also rooted in early and mid-twentieth-century preoccupations over the e¤ects of modernization and U.S. intervention on women. This chapter deals with sexual politics under the Somozas and with how the Somoza period is remembered in contemporary Nicaragua. The first section addresses early twentieth-century concerns over modernization and women’s sexuality; the second considers the experiences of women rightly and wrongly accused of prostitution; the third discusses the history of prostitution in Nicaragua; the fourth and fifth examine the rape of anti-Somocista women under the dictatorship; the sixth deals 1 3 6 B E F O R E T H E R E V O L U T I O N with the intersections between maternalism and clientelism; the seventh addresses the concepts of both sexual order and disorder used to characterize the regime and the ways in which Somocista women’s discourse may reveal elements of resistance; and the eighth section discusses contemporary memory, the masculinization of Nicaragua’s “new” Right in the 1990s, and the “Righting” of Nicaragua’s Left after 2007. “They Learned the Diabolic Art of Seducing Men”: Women, U.S. Intervention, and Modernization...