Hidden Histories of Gender and the State in Latin America (review)

This collection provides an excellent introduction for scholars and advanced students to an exciting new trend in Latin American historiography, bringing together two theoretically sophisticated literatures on the state and gender respectively. Although individual interpretations vary, all the authors explicitly engage with theories of state formation and strive to demonstrate its dynamic interaction with gender: "to analyze how . . . state politics affected gender relations and how gender conditioned state formation" (p. 3).

The editors begin with synthetic essays that propose particular trajectories for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries respectively. Although readers may find specific points of disagreement, such overviews are useful in presenting the state of the field and raising questions for future research. Elizabeth Dore, who defines the state primarily as an institution controlled by the ruling class, asserts that the nineteenth century was not one of linear progress for women, highlighting the ambivalent effects of three important trends: the privatization of land limited women's access to property through the family, the secularization of marriage weakened the Catholic emphasis upon a "sacred union of equals" (p. 22), and limits on paternal authority increased the independence of single women but reinforced the power of husbands over wives. The last trend, in particular, of a shift from generational to nuclear patriarchy, is taken up by several of the contributors. Although modern Latin American states claimed the authority to intervene in families, Donna Guy shows that in practice Argentine officials rarely revoked patriarchal authority when the children were still minors of age. Parental control over adult sons and daughters, however, did weaken. Ann Varley, for example, argues convincingly that the judicial definition of the marital home in twentieth-century Mexico shifted dramatically as judges accepted the arguments of wives and their lawyers that women should not have to live as subordinates in the homes of their parents-in-law.

In her introductory essay, Maxine Molyneux focuses on the various state forms that developed in twentieth-century Latin America: liberal-oligarchic, corporatist-populist, bureaucratic-authoritarian, socialist, and democratic-neoliberal. One could argue that the goals she attributes to populist governments continued trends from the nineteenth century and were shared to some degree by the other types of states: the refashioning of male productive and social practices, the effort to bring children under state tutelage, and the rationalization of the domestic sphere (p. 52). The methods of achieving such goals, however, certainly varied by the ideology of particular regimes.

Molyneux's contention that the success of activist women often hinged upon alliances made in the course of regime changes is certainly borne out in several of the essays. Her own contribution on the Federation of Cuban Women demonstrates that the organization's strong tie to the Cuban state accounts for both its striking achievements and failures in advancing women's rights. She ends by raising an intriguing question about whether the relative lack of change in gender relations within the home, despite the egalitarian Family Code, is the result of too little or too much state intervention (p. 314). The risks for women's movements of allying with particular political parties in democratic-neoliberal regimes is confirmed by Jo Fisher's analysis of a housewives' organization in Argentina; by supporting Peronists in the postmilitary period, housewives gained public recognition of the value of their work, but in exchange had to postpone their radical demand for wages and insurance benefits. Fiona Macaulay analyzes a more promising model for women's relationship to the state represented by a Brazilian lobbying organization. She attributes the group's success to its ability to mediate between civil society and the state, which she defines as "a spatially and politically diverse set of institutional and discursive arenas" (p. 365), highlighting specifically "the ability to combine intimate, acquired insider knowledge of...