The Women's Movement in Latin America

The Women’s Movement in Latin America: Participation and Democracy, edited by Jane S. Jaquette, examines women’s organizing during and after struggles against authoritarian rule. The collection asks what happens when movements formed around human rights, survival, political repression, and feminist consciousness encounter democratic transition. Elections and formal rights create openings, but parties, legislatures, unions, and state agencies often expect women to return to private life or subordinate gender demands to national reconstruction. The book therefore treats democracy as a contested process rather than an institutional endpoint.

One of its enduring themes is the problem sometimes described as double militancy: activists may work simultaneously within feminist organizations and parties, labor movements, revolutionary groups, or human-rights coalitions whose leadership does not regard gender inequality as urgent. Autonomy can protect feminist agendas but limit access to political resources; alliance can broaden influence while diluting demands. The case studies show how motherhood, family responsibility, and moral authority can mobilize opposition to dictatorship yet also narrow the forms of citizenship available to women. Participation matters, but the terms on which participation occurs matter just as much.

The second edition appeared in 1994, so its account belongs to a particular wave of democratic transitions and precedes major developments in Indigenous, Afro-Latin, queer, trans, reproductive-rights, anti-violence, and digital feminist mobilization. Its institutional emphasis should also be balanced with scholarship on informal and community power. Read historically, however, the collection illuminates dilemmas that have not disappeared: movement autonomy versus state access, representation versus redistribution, and electoral democracy versus transformation of everyday authority. For FemRes, it provides a foundation for comparing later feminist waves without narrating the region as a simple march from dictatorship to equality.