In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

[4] Women’s Community Organizing in Quito: The Paradoxes of Survival and Struggle [W]e vest great hopes in the ‘‘resistance’’ everywhere in evidence in women’s daily lives, household survival strategies, and collective struggles . Yet we too often ignore the less glorious, more contradictory, more paradoxical dimensions and sometimes ephemeral qualities of those struggles. —sonia alvarez, ‘‘Concluding Reflections: Redrawing the Parameters of Gender Struggle’’ Since the inception of the restructuring process in the early 1980s, Ecuadorian civil society has been increasingly called upon to provide essential services for poor families. In many ways, it was poor families themselves—particularly women—who became the new civil society actors, a phenomena exemplified in the Borja and Durán-Ballén administrations’ child development policies in 1988–96. Either explicitly or implicitly, it was expected that components of civil society, including community associations and for-profit and nonprofit organizations (such as ngos), would pick up where the state left off. In general, a new model for social service delivery was being proposed, one that relied on the traditional gendered division of labor and assumed that women and families would ‘‘absorb’’ the costs of restructuring and take on the new market-related responsibilities (Fisher and Kling 1993). The once-familiar public/private boundaries of the state, economy, and civil society were being redrawn (Brodie 1994), leading not only to shifts in the broader economy but also to the restructuring of everyday life (Benerı́a 1992b): the organization of paid-labor sectors, the intensification of domestic work (both paid and unpaid), changes in family structure (as in male migration to the United States and Spain, an associated rise in female-headed households, and an increase in household size) and social relations, an evolution in cultural notions of play or vacation (such as fewer days off, fewer holiday get-togethers), and alterations in community development 94 gendered paradoxes strategies or initiatives. As a result of this restructuring, Ecuadorian businesses, ngos, and newly formed public-private partnerships began to play important roles in defining the country’s social development agenda; this required, among other things, reenvisioning social policy and community development, two important areas of concern for poor neighborhoods. During this same period, somewhere between five hundred and eight hundred grassroots women’s groups were established during the 1980s, as a way for women to address the needs of their communities and families (Centro Marı́a Quilla/cepal 1990). While many scholars have acknowledged that business and ngo sectors have retooled to meet the demands of the Ecuadorian state’s neoliberal agenda (e.g., Segarra 1996; Conaghan 2000; Bretón Solo de Zaldı́var 2003), in many ways it was these grassroots women who ‘‘mothered’’ the crisis, both individually and collectively. Through the process, they have gained some political visibility and have helped strengthen feminist demands for women’s rights, although, I argue, often at a cost to their own survival. Constructions of femininity , particularly constructions of motherhood, have been central to their organizing strategies, just as they have been to the external actors and institutions that have helped mediate the women’s forms of survival and struggle. In this chapter I address the paradoxes that emerge through the process of women’s community organizing, including the paradox of gender identity formation in the politically mediated context of poverty alleviation and, more broadly, Ecuador’s modernization project. First I discuss Ecuadorian women’s responses to the foreign-debt crisis and neoliberal restructuring in relation to how feminists, ngo activists, and development professionals intervened in the sphere of women’s community organizing. Next I analyze how women’s gender identity formation, especially their urbanized roles and identities as mothers, has been shaped in the broader context of collective action and has influenced their forms of organizing and perceptions of poverty itself. I then address the political and economic paradoxes of women’s struggles for survival, including the successes and limits of this type of women’s community-based organizing in the neoliberal era. Organized women have gained some political power, visibility , and recognition as public actors. Yet in many ways their activism has been reduced to a new form of clientelism among their organizations and the developmentalist state, particularly in light of this neoliberal shift toward positioning poor women explicitly as clients (Schild 2002b). Organized women have been heralded as acquiring some economic ‘‘empowerment ’’ through their activism, yet overall it is clear that their livelihoods have eroded since the inception...

Share