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[1] Myths of Progress: Citizenship, Modernization, and Women’s Rights Struggles in Ecuador Living in the nation today involves, also, living with the state. —rajeswari sunder rajan, The Scandal of the State: Women, Law, and Citizenship in Postcolonial India The historical relationship between women and the state in Ecuador is complex , multifaceted, and paradoxical. From the start, women’s rights struggles necessarily have taken place in multiple social spaces and have cut across a range of political, economic, and geographic sectors. The state has served as an important legitimizer of women’s rights struggles and has sought political accountability by granting specific rights and concessions to women, indigenous communities, the rural poor and other groups (for example, through voting and agrarian reforms). Eurocentric ideologies of womanhood, in conjunction with ideologies of progress, ‘‘whiteness,’’ and modernity, have been central to the historical formation and implementation of Ecuadorian state policies and laws and to the broader imagining of Ecuador as a nation (Whitten 2003b). They have also shaped in important ways the boundaries of and challenges brought forth by contemporary feminist politics. Many studies of Ecuadorian politics today focus on class- or ethnicity-based claims made by social movements to the state and pay special attention to indigenous , peasant, and labor struggles with little reference to their gender dimensions (e.g., Pachano 1996; Selverston-Scher 2001; Gerlach 2003; North and Cameron 2003; Sawyer 2004). These studies point out the important ways in which the state has developed historically and how it has promoted a self-image based on the exclusion of the (ethnic) majority of society. Studies of women’s political participation, including women’s grassroots organizing, participation in the Left, feminisms, and public policy making, have tended to focus on the 24 gendered paradoxes redemocratization period (late 1970s–present) and, to a lesser degree, on the earlier period of presuffrage organizing (1900–1929; see Prieto 1987; Rosero 1988; Menéndez-Carrión 1988; Rodrı́guez 1992; Rosero, Vega, and Reyes Ávila 2000). Few of these studies, however, bring together, on the one hand, the processes under way within the state, which played an important role in historically constructing the professional field and discursive terrain of social welfare and, on the other, the strategies developed and used by various types of women’s organizations to intervene in national decision-making and political discourse. ‘‘The family’’ has been at the center of struggles within both these realms of action. My examination of women’s rights struggles in the context of state modernization and global development underscores the important ways in which gender was and continues to be instrumental to Ecuadorian state modernization projects and national identity. In terms of legal abstraction, women have gained important legal rights since the early twentieth century, beginning with suffrage for literate women in 1929. In practice, the extent to which these reforms bene- fited women has depended largely on their social location by class, region, ethnicity , race, and sexuality. In this chapter I address the historical relationship between women and the state in Ecuador by focusing on three interrelated aspects: (1) the emergence and historical trajectory of women’s movements; (2) the historical role of the state in providing social welfare, a policy framework that relied on specific notions of motherhood, citizenship, and national identity; and (3) the transnational aspects of women’s movements and nation-state formation, including influences from the international development field (especially the wid field), processes and ideologies of globalization, and regional organizing efforts by women. I highlight the paradoxical consequences of this historical process for urban poor, rural peasant, and indigenous women, as they are compared to middle- and upper-class women, most of whom were mestiza, urban, and formally educated. Before I proceed with my discussion of women’s rights struggles and state modernization I would like to address some of the structural and ideological underpinnings of political movements and social reforms in the country. From the start, Ecuador was a very divided nation, geographically, politically, culturally , and economically. This had important repercussions for the historical construction of citizenship and for later citizen struggles. The coastal city of Guayaquil had already established itself as a port city and industrial center during the colonial period. The coastal region was conducive to agriculture, and by the beginning of the twentieth century it was (and it continues to be) the nation ’s leading export sector. Because of its connection to Europe, and later to [3.16.83.150] Project MUSE...

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