Women in Latin America

Women' grassroots activism in Latin America combines a commitment to basic survival for women and their children with a challenge to women' subordination to men. Women activists insist that issues such as rape, battering, and reproductive control cannot be divorced from women' concerns about housing, food, land, and medical care. This innovative, comparative study explores six cases of women' grassroots activism in Mexico, El Salvador, Brazil, and Chile. Lynn Stephen communicates the ideas, experiences, and perceptions of women who participate in collective action, while she explains the structural conditions and ideological discourses that set the context within which women act and interpret their experiences. She includes revealing interviews with activists, detailed histories of organizations and movements, and a theoretical discussion of gender, collective identity, and feminist anthropology and methods.

This volume studies the process of transition from high to low fertility as it has occurred and is occurring in Latin America. It provides a general comparative overview of transition in the region in which the link between socio-economic development and declining fertility is explored. There are sections on the process through which the transition occurs, social determinants of fertility change, and the consequences of fertility decline. The comparative analyses are complemented by five individual country studies.

This book examines whether the new consciousness of gender in development around the globe -- nurtured by the Cairo and Beijing conferences -- has placed more women in decision-making positions. Reflections from women and men in political organizations, international development agencies, and national groups reveal the gains women have made and the many challenges they face ahead.

Feminism has not been an alien concept for twentieth-century Latin American women. It has grown steadily, sometimes under adversity, and in this century's closing years it continues to be a matter of faith for some and a topic of debate or scorn for others.

Masiello's book "sheds light on a relatively little-known group of extremely interesting women in the formative period of a major literature. . . . [It] breaks new ground and will be a standard reference for the subject."-Margaret Sayers Peden.Evoking the famous watchwords of Argentine president Domingo Sarmiento (1868-74), Between Civilization and Barbarism explores the positioning of women within the Argentine nation and argues that women neither sought alliance with the "civilizing" agenda of leading statesmen nor found identity in the extreme poses of "barbarism," to which some intellectuals had condemned them. Instead, women used literary and political texts to surpass the tightly outlined roles assigned to them.Beginning with literary and journalistic texts written by and about women from the time of Sarmiento, Francine Masiello traces strategic shifts in the discourse on gender at moments of national crisis. She considers not only novels and guides to female behavior written by and for privileged women but also newspapers and political tracts produced by women of the working class. Extending her study into the urban expansion and modernization of the 1920s, Masiello explores the nature of gender relations posited in treatises on crime and public disorder and in the texts of avant-garde and social-realist writers. In addressing such representations of women, as well as the effects of ideology and history on writing, Masiello offers bold new insights into the development of Latin American women's literature and illuminates the role of women in forming the culture of present-day Argentina.Francine Masiello is an associate professor of Spanish and comparative literature at the University of California at Berkeley. She is the author of Lenguaje e ideología: las escuelas argentinas de vanguardia (1986) and coauthor of Women, Culture, and Politics in Latin America (1990).