Empowering Women: Land and Property Rights in Latin America (review)

Two well-known scholars have collaborated once again to provide us with a brilliant multidisciplinary analysis of gender and property in Latin America, and the ways in which rural women are actively engaged in the contests over land rights. It documents the disjuncture between men's and women's formal equality before the law and the achievement of real gender equality in terms of their ownership and control over land and other agricultural resources. The book's central purpose is to examine why gender inequality exists in land ownership in 12 countries. Focusing on the nature of the Latin American family, community, state, and market, it attributes this disjuncture to "male preference in inheritance, male privilege in marriage, male bias in state programs of land distribution, and gender inequality in the land market" (p. 2). Deere and León break women's legal, political, and economic struggle to gain ownership over rural property into three historical periods. A comparative analysis of civil code reforms during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reveals that married women's control over property rights failed to improve significantly. Despite the parallel development of the first wave of the women's movement, legal equality for unmarried nonwhite women did not advance very far. Policymakers during the second period, which encompassed the agrarian reforms from the 1960s through the 1980s, assumed that giving land to families would make agrarian reform programs gender neutral. In reality these programs largely excluded peasant women as direct beneficiaries because the land was assigned to the male heads of households. They attribute this gender bias to the persistence of patriarchal ideologies, which linked definitions of "agriculturalist" and "household head" to masculinity. For example, women made up a very low proportion of the beneficiaries until quite recently in the pioneering agrarian reform programs of Mexico, Bolivia, and Cuba.

Over the course of the last two decades, rural women have gained greater access to land rights and ownership of land under the neoliberal agrarian reforms, aided by a loose coalition of local, national, and international women's organizations. This "triangle of empowerment," a concept developed by Virginia Vargas et al., is a three-pronged coordinated action by urban and rural movements, women in government, and women in formal politics, assisted by international organizations. One of the main contributions of feminist analysis, the authors contend, was to challenge the assumption that favoring the male household head benefited all members of the family as well. Their provocative argument, which asserts that women's advocacy groups played a critical role in pressuring the state to incorporate gender-progressive measures into "counter-reforms," merits serious consideration. In 7 of the 12 countries under investigation—Chile, Ecuador, El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Peru—agrarian reform was brought to a close. These countries embraced the neoliberal model, where individual rights took precedence over collective land rights. Counter-reforms took the form of privatization, individualization of land rights, and land titling programs, designed to enhance security of land tenure and of the farmers' welfare. In most cases, these reform efforts continued the practice built into earlier agrarian reform programs, which gave preference to male heads of household as the primary breadwinner. Chile's pioneering neoliberal counter-reform became the model for such male-biased programs, but the Mexican case is even more egregious. The major decisions regarding the privatization of the ejido are to be made by ejidomembers, of which women make up only 17.5 percent. Moreover, ejido members can, by majority vote, transform family patrimony into individual male property, excluding wives from the decision-making process in the disposition of this property. Nicaragua and El Salvador are special cases as a result of the peace accords, which did address the agrarian...