Women as Political Actors: The Move from Maternalism to Citizenship Rights and Power

Gender and the Politics of Rights and Democracy in Latin America. Edited by Nikki Craske and Maxine Molyneux. (New York: Palgrave Publishers, 2002. Pp. 226. $62.00 cloth.)

Radical Women in Latin America: Left and Right. Edited by Victoria González and Karen Kampwirth. (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001. Pp. 341. $55.00 cloth, $18.95 paper.)

Unfinished Transitions: Women and the Gendered Development of Democracy in Venezuela, 1936-1996. By Elisabeth J. Friedman. (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000. Pp. 324. $55.00 cloth, $22.50 paper.)

Women and Politics in Latin America. By Nikki Craske. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1999. Pp. 242. $59.00 cloth, $20.00 paper.)

Women and Power: Fighting Patriarchies and Poverty. By Janet Gabriel Townsend, Emma Zapata, Joanna Rowlands, Pilar Alberti, and Marta Mercado. (London: Zed Books, 1999. Pp. 200. $59.95 cloth, $22.50 paper.)

Women's Movements in International Perspective: Latin America and Beyond. By Maxine Molyneux. (New York: Palgrave, 2001. Pp. 244. $65.00 cloth.)

Almost thirty years have passed since Elsa Chaney first wrote of Latin America's supermadres—the concept she coined to describe women elected to public office in Peru and Chile (Chaney 1973). Her book of the same title, published in 1979, was one of the first works on women and politics in the region. Based on 167 interviews with "first generation" women in the late 1960s, Chaney proposed the following thesis:

Many women at that time thought that voting was a civic duty . . . [but] their role in electoral politics, and even their presence in the bureaucracy, [was seen] as an extension of their motherhood role in the family to the larger family of the municipio or the nation . . . [They were] doing what women had always done: mothering, now in a larger arena. (Chaney 1998, 78-79)

Subsequent studies of women in politics and activism throughout the region seemed to reconfirm this political identity for women, though some researchers claimed that maternalism was thrust on women by men in politics and by society. Women were expected to "keep house" in parties and bureaucracies and to support men's leadership.

The link between "politics and motherhood" continues to be an important focus of the books reviewed here. But each argues that women's political activity is not reducible to mothering. Women of different classes, ethnic groups, and places engage in political activity for reasons that span the gap between the altruistic and the selfish. Women are as likely to be ambitious and competitive as they are caring and socially responsible. The issues around which women mobilize are equally diverse and not reducible to family or to gender, an important focus of the books. As a group, the books present a multi-textured history of transformations in how and why women engage in political activities throughout Latin America. This also is a history of the changing nature of politics in public and private arenas. The volumes demonstrate clearly how women have played a critical role in the reformulation of "the political" in practice, in ideology, and—albeit belatedly—in academic political theory. ¹

Politics is broadly conceptualized by the authors/editors to encompass not only formal political behavior (voting, holding elected office), but also diverse social movements and citizen activism, non-governmental organizations, territorial protests, feminism, armed struggle, legislative reform campaigns, and other forms of inducing or resisting change. While this approach to the subject matter is not unusual or new (see Dore 1997; Waylen 1996; Jaquette 1989, 1994), what is important is the way in which each volume theorizes connections and differences among diverse forms of women's political behavior, makes clear why and how they are "political," privileges the "voices" of women themselves, and explores the barriers to and potential for alliances among women. One book, that by Townsend et al., sheds...