Women in Latin America and the Caribbean - Cepal

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normative purposes (Sartori, 2003). Democracy is, and cannot be delinked from, what democracy should
be. Descriptive democracy refers to democracy as it actually exists, and prescriptive democracy to the
ideal pursued by a society. Throughout history, democracy has invariably been associated with a political
entity —a form of State and government— albeit within the framework of different, more or less liberal
or radical schools of thought. A review of the literature attests to the breadth of the feminist discussion of
the concepts of the individual, citizenship, politics and the State, as well as alignment with different
stances on democracy. What is known as “liberal” feminism makes a priority of judicial changes, while
more “radical” feminism maintains a debate on the deconstruction of the assumptions underlying the
notion of democracy. In many countries, women have been involved in social movements which ask for a
more participative democracy. This range shows that, although there is no single feminist definition of
democracy, women and women’s movements are contributing to a broad debate on democracy.
Feminist movements have criticized the limitations of the concepts of democracy. As early as
1791, the French activist Olympia de Gouges wrote the “Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the
Female Citizen” and presented it before the French National Assembly, for which she was rewarded with
the guillotine. In 1792, the British writer Mary Wollstonecraft published “A Vindication of the Rights of
Women”, one of the most radical feminist manifestos ever written. Its inspiration was the idea that
women do not exist solely for the pleasure of men, and it proposed that women should receive the same
treatment as men in terms of education, political rights and labour and should be judged by the same
moral standards.
Contemporary feminism has resumed the discussion and has criticized democracy for failing to
devote sufficient attention to laws and institutions (Betty Friedan). More radically, it has called into
question democracy’s omission of the private dimension. The slogan “the personal is political” has spread
under the influence of Latin American and Caribbean social movements that have campaigned to change
the status of women in legislation and within the State apparatus. Some theorists, including Carole
Pateman, have gone even further by asserting that, in reality, there is no such thing as democratic theory
because of the patriarchal biases of traditional doctrines; consequently, democratic practice does not exist,
insofar as women have never achieved anything resembling egalitarian power in the family, civil society
or the State. From this perspective, even countries considered to be democratic are seen as being in
transition. They have had to naturalize gender relations and remove the problem of inequality from the
sphere of politics (Valcárcel, 1997).
The democratic debate in Latin America and the Caribbean has been pursued in a number of
different settings in the last few decades. One such arena has been the summits held under the aegis of the
United Nations. At these summits, civil society organizations have contributed to the adoption of an
agenda in which the struggle for democracy is tied in with efforts to combat poverty, eliminate violence
and uphold reproductive rights. During the first world conferences on women, governments —in many
cases in the hands of dictators— did not have mechanisms for women’s advancement, and the demands of
civil society, sometimes made at great risk, were the main channel for the exercise of democracy.
A second, and enormously important, setting for the democratic debate is the struggle for human
rights. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, the women miners in Bolivia and innumerable
associations of family members of the detained and “disappeared” came to represent the moral reserve of
a society threatened by the loss of liberties. The third setting emerged with the return of democracy and
the establishment of machineries for women’s advancement, which have become strategic elements that
are often at the vanguard of efforts to secure constitutional reform or the adoption of quota laws, as well
as other changes inspired by the Beijing Platform for Action.