Un siglo de luchas femeninas en America Latina (review)

This collection of 15 essays originated in a 1999 conference held at the University of Costa Rica to celebrate the 50th anniversary of women's suffrage in that country. Four chapters on the struggles of female academics to establish themselves, as well as the discipline of gender studies, in Costa Rica's universities form the second part of the book. The longer first part consists of six essays on feminist struggles in Costa Rica during the twentieth century and five on other topics. These include Asunción Lavrin's survey of suffragist arguments across Latin America, historical case studies of Cuba, Nicaragua, and Panama, and an essay on Chicana history. The theme of women's suffrage ties together most, but not all, of the essays—most of which rely on extensive primary documentation.

The section on gender and higher education in Costa Rica celebrates the gains made by female students and academics since the 1970s, but it also warns of ongoing sexism in academia at all levels. The greatest accomplishment of feminist academics in Costa Rica has been the creation, in 1993, of a master's program in women's studies, run jointly by the University of Costa Rica and the National University. Women have also made gains in nontraditional majors, in administration, and in research. Feminist historiography itself has progressed rapidly in Costa Rica in the past decade, not least with a previous volume also edited by Eugenia Rodríguez Sáenz, Entre silencios y voces: Género e historia en América Central, 1750-1990 (Centro Nacional Para el Desarrollo de la Mujer y la Familia, 1998).

This collection's essays on Costa Rican history contribute somewhat unevenly to that historiography: they tend to assume prior understanding of the forces and phases of the nation's political history from the 1910s, and they could more directly speak to each other. Rodríguez Sáenz's piece surveys the struggle for the vote, particularly from the founding of the Liga Feminista in 1923, while Virginia Mora Carvajal examines the enthusiastic participation of women in the prosuffrage Partido Reformista's 1923 campaign. Rosalila Herrera Zavaleta profiles the small but vocal group of Communist Party-affiliated female teachers in the 1930s who explicitly questioned the value of suffrage. The best known of these revolutionary women was Carmen Lyra, who published (along with Magda Portal and Gabriela Mistral) in El Repertorio Americano, a modernist magazine that is the focus of Ruth Cubillo Paniagua's essay. Also part of the feminist milieu of 1930s Costa Rica was Yolanda Oreamuno, the subject of Emilia Macaya Trejos's essay of literary criticism. Together, these essays confirm that feminism thrived in Latin America's smaller republics and that it was broadly similar to that of, say, Argentina and Mexico in terms of the influence of liberalism, modernism, leftist and labor movements, and access to higher education. Feminism and women's activism outside San José is a topic that is broached but not explored in depth.

Both Yolanda Marco's notable essay on the 1936 women's suffrage debate in Panama's Congress and Rodríguez Sáenz's discussion of similar debates in Costa Rica illustrate Lavrin's argument that the prosuffrage position in Latin America was framed more in terms of individual rights than in terms of building democratic systems. Marco also argues persuasively that it was the highly competitive nature of Panamanian politics in the late 1930s, and not traditional views, that defeated suffrage proposals. Certainly, the Panamanian feminist movement was remarkably strong. K. Lynn Stoner's piece on the causes and effects of early women's suffrage in Cuba also suggests the importance of traditional political calculus over principle in understanding women's suffrage in Latin America. Marco (echoing Mora Carvajal's study...