Radical Women in Latin America: Left and Right (review)

Victoria González and Karen Kampwirth have undertaken a daunting but important task in editing this collection of studies, which covers twentieth-century Central and South America, and employ politics and women—from the Left to the Right of the political spectrum—as an analytical category. One of their achievements is to have compiled essays that go beyond the traditional approaches that are confined to leftist and antiauthoritarian movements. The result is an interesting, if unbalanced, collection of ten articles by scholars from different disciplines (anthropology, history, and political science), as well as an activist woman. Their stories of radical women challenge portrayals of men as violent and women as inherently peaceful. They also prove that there is not an automatic sisterhood among women, even those belonging to the same class and ethnicity.

The essays fall into two broad groups. The first deals with women's movements in Central America (Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala). Victoria González's article examines women's support for the Somozas; Karen Kampwirth's compares the Sandinista revolutionary guerrillas of the 1970s and the counterrevolutionary guerrillas of the 1980s; María Teresa Blandón's is a feminist activist's account of the Nicaraguan women's movement at the end of the 1990s; and Patricia Hipsher's explores the leftist origins of second wave feminism, and the ways in which this legacy affected the coalition between left- and right-wing women in El Salvador. Kelley Ready studies the ways in which postwar Salvadoran feminists reconstructed fatherhood and motherhood, and Ilja Luciak compares women's participation in revolutionary movements and the steps taken toward gender equality after the peace accords in Guatemala, on the one hand, to what happened in El Salvador and Nicaragua on the other.

The second part of the book is concerned with South America (Argentina, Brazil, and Chile). Sandra McGee Deutsch examines women's participation in extreme right-wing organizations in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile from 1900 to 1940; Liesl Haas analyzes the relationship between the women's movement and the Workers Party in Brazil; Liza Baldez studies nonpartisanship as a strategy used by women on both the Left and the Right in Chile during the 1970s and 1980s; and Margaret Power looks at Chilean women during the same period, but with an emphasis on the discourse used by the military government to mobilize right-wing women, and the latter's acceptance of that discourse.

One of the obvious obstacles to a truly comparative and interdisciplinary work lies in the difficulty of integrating disparate historical and theoretical frameworks. Unfortunately, this problem is not overcome by the editors' 26-page introduction and the chronological tables that preface each section. González and Kampwirth begin by satisfactorily defining "radical" women, "Right" and "Left." They then enter a long discussion of four themes, feminism, autonomy, coalition building across political lines, and maternalism. They argue that these are all interrelated in the book, but do not really offer a coherent definition of any of them. Their analysis of maternalism is strongest, because of the types of questions it suggests. These are taken mainly from Kampwirth's essay, which asks, for instance, if the language of maternalism may be more a means of making public participation acceptable than a political motivation of its own (p. 96). By contrast, the least successful analysis is that of feminism. González and Kampwirth attempt to give a chronological account of its development, but their description is too general to explain, for example, what they call the "first wave of feminism." They are equally unsuccessful in their attempt to define feminism and gender. There are two well-known studies that clearly and outstandingly define feminism and gender in Latin America, Lynn Stonner's book on the Cuban women's movement and...