Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The story of women's political participation in Latin America is a long one. Latin American women not only have been involved as pioneers and activists in various social movements, but also have been constructing, via national and international alliances, their own movement as women: Latin American feminism. It is a movement so wide-ranging and diverse that it converges in many others. Along with the indigenous and black movements, it is a fundamental bastion of the struggles and political practices taking place in Latin America at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Although it has historically been blocked or rendered invisible by the patriarchal narrative, women's political participation has occurred for more than a century almost everywhere in the region. Between 1870 and 1900, women's movements surfaced in Mexico, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Peru. These movements then reappeared with greater force in most Latin American countries during the first decades of the twentieth century. In this period, known as the first wave of Latin American feminism, women's movements mostly articulated their struggle around obtaining civil and social rights. Women's legal, economic, and social inequality was brought to light by the different movements, which made concrete and urgent demands for suffrage, for access to education and to land, and for wage equality, while also claiming ... log in or subscribe to read full text