Unfinished Transitions: Women and the Gendered Development of Democracy in Venezuela, 1936-1996 (review)

Elizabeth Friedman, assistant professor of political science at Barnard College (Columbia University), implicitly proposes a feminist ideal of women who renounce other loyalties and personal ambitions in order to achieve political gains for all women. Not surprisingly, Venezuelan women's groups between the 1930s and 1996 failed to measure up to that ideal. Like Sonia Alvarez's work on Brazil (1990), Friedman found that women united more easily during authoritarian periods (1936-45, 1948-58) than during democratic ones. The post-1958 political parties employed a gendered discourse that kept women in a secondary political status, usually relegating them to the peripheral women's bureaus of the parties. Nonetheless, women displayed strong loyalty to their parties in spite of their modest influence within them. The guerrillas of the 1960s accepted women combatants, but accorded them no greater role in decision making. In general, Friedman focuses less on women's gains per se--which were appreciable--than on the structure of their organizations and on their ability to press women's issues within the political arena.

Friedman argues that the democratic parties, Acción Democrática and COPEI (Christian Democrats), appealed to labor, business, or agrarian sectors through a multiclass populism. Students, women, or Afro-Venezuelans fell outside the rhetoric and the organizing principles based on class. The reformed guerrillas who founded the Movimiento Al Socialismo (MAS) party in 1970 initially had a different and more inclusive structure. The pressure of competitive partisanship, however, nudged them gradually into the more typical, male-dominated hierarchical pattern.

For a brief period, between the 1975 and 1985 international women's conferences and shortly thereafter, Venezuelan women did successfully organize across party lines. A loosely structured and egalitarian network of women's groups achieved the passage of a reformed civil code in 1982 and a revised labor code in 1990. Lobbyists for the measures found that a non-gendered discourse of improving democracy succeeded better than classical feminist arguments about improving the lives of women. Friedman laments that self-centered elite women failed to include domestic workers in the reformed labor law, without acknowledging that the omission might have been a pragmatic move to achieve the passage of a controversial code. In general the author devotes little attention to debates between and among women on tactics and issues.

The movement's unity and effectiveness faltered in the 1990s, according to Friedman, because of economic and political crises, the individual ambitions of some women, and the distraction of the 1995 Beijing women's conference. Inexplicably, Friedman praises the 1975 and 1985 international conferences as catalysts for reform in Venezuela and elsewhere, but characterizes the Beijing conference as an unwarranted distraction from the real needs of Venezuelan women.

Friedman was in Venezuela in 1992 and again in 1994-95 as a participant observer in some women's groups. Her own experience gives authority to the study, but may also account for some inconsistencies. She criticizes women's leadership in the 1990s as too masculine, hierarchical, egotistical, and often elitist. She is particularly critical of AD/COPEI women. On the other hand, she praises and dedicates the book to MAS leader Argelia Laya and she lauds the leadership achievements of COPEI's Mercedes Pulido de Briceño, an elite woman who became the first head of the Ministry for the Participation of Women in Development.

In spite of minor inconsistencies, Friedman's work is a welcome addition to the literature on women's political activism in Latin America and on Venezuelan politics in particular. Her study helps to highlight some of the flaws in the Venezuelan democratic system that ultimately led to the collapse of the parties and the election of former golpista Hugo Chávez in 1998. Interestingly, Chávez apparently enjoys strong support among...