Women and Social Movements in Latin America

In Women and Social Movements in Latin America: Power from Below, Lynn Stephen compares six cases of grassroots organizing in Mexico, El Salvador, Brazil, and Chile. The movements begin with urgent conditions—food, housing, land, medical care, wages, and the survival of children—but they do not remain confined to an allegedly apolitical domestic sphere. Participants connect those needs to rape, battering, reproductive control, unequal authority within households, and exclusion from unions, parties, or peasant organizations. Stephen’s attention to activists’ own interpretations shows how political consciousness is made through collective practice rather than imported fully formed from outside.

The book is particularly valuable for feminist movement history because it unsettles the distinction between “women’s interests” and broader struggles for class, land, Indigenous rights, or democracy. Motherhood and neighborhood responsibility can provide a legitimate language for entering public action while also reproducing expectations that women serve others. Alliances with male-led movements can create resources and protection but marginalize gender demands once a common enemy recedes. By tracing these negotiations, Stephen treats feminism as a contested process: women transform movements, movements transform their understanding of gender, and neither change is guaranteed.

Published in 1997, the study captures organizations and political conditions that have since changed, and its six cases cannot stand for the region’s immense racial, linguistic, sexual, and national diversity. Readers should place it beside later scholarship on Afro-Latin, Indigenous, queer, trans, migrant, and digital activism. Its comparative method nevertheless remains instructive. For FemRes, the book demonstrates that “power from below” is not simply participation by more women; it is the remaking of what counts as a political issue, whose knowledge guides strategy, and whether survival work can become a basis for redistributing authority rather than an endless obligation.