Women in Latin America and the Caribbean - Cepal

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position on the world stage at various times in history. Although women’s movements in the region have
been inspired by different feminist schools in Europe and the United States, their strategies and the
direction of their campaigning have given rise to considerations and thinking that reflect their own
perspective. The struggle has been marked all along by tensions and proposals that have arisen from the
debate between equality and freedom, between political rights and social rights. These proposals, in turn,
have combined women’s pursuit of emancipation with the objectives of democracy, respect for human
rights, social equality and the effort to combat poverty. Although later than elsewhere, the adoption of the
reproductive rights agenda and the extension of the concept of human rights to population policy form
part of this process. Unlike other regions of the world, Latin America and the Caribbean has a strong
tradition of women’s movements from working-class sectors that have been involved in the pro-humanrights
social struggles of trade unions and those against dictatorships and poverty. Alliances of workingand
middle-class women added up to a powerful movement which helped to give strength and legitimacy
to feminist movements. In such culturally diverse countries as those of the region it has been necessary to
recognize the coexistence of different orders of gender, corresponding to the different cultural traditions
and ethnic groups within a given society. The feminist movement has had to attend to the ways in which
the various systems of inequality are interconnected and hierarchically structured, and to the
contradictions between the desire for gender equity and for social equity, or ethnic and gender equity.
Cultural globalization has enabled the region’s feminist movement to be in contact with feminist groups
in other developing countries with different cultural traditions, including India, the Philippines and certain
Arab countries, among others, thereby broadening its frames of reference.
Although in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries only a small minority of women
figured in public affairs and even those who were involved were confined mainly to religious and
charitable organizations, there were a few groups already campaigning for equality at that time. In the
early twentieth century, a number of women entered revolutionary political parties and were involved in
democracy movements opposing dictatorships, as in the case of the Costa Rican feminist league against
the dictatorship of Federico Tinoco in 1920. The Adela Barrios feminist club, formed in the late
nineteenth century in El Salvador, campaigned for women’s suffrage and, in the 1920s, become involved
in reformist and revolutionary movements opposed to the regime of Meléndez-Quiñones.
In 1922, 6,000 women marched in black to symbolize mourning for the death of democracy and
support of the presidential candidate Tomás Molina. The membership of these organizations consisted
mainly of female teachers, who created organizations, clubs and journals as part of their political activity.
These women thus opened up separate political spaces from which to interpret their exclusion and
campaign for recognition as subjects of rights. These organizations were led by exceptional women who
shared a strong political will to combat the subordination of women in the family, the workplace and
education. One such leader was Prudencia Ayala, a Salvadoran of indigenous origin, who in the early
twentieth century wrote in local newspapers in support of Central American union and the cause of César
Sandino in Nicaragua and against the political regimes of the Central American countries. In 1930 she
lobbied the municipal council of San Salvador and the Supreme Court for women’s suffrage and
campaigned to be registered as a candidate for the presidential election. She also set up the Santa Tecla
women’s circle (Círculo Femenino Tecleño) and the journal Redención femenina.
The suffragist movement took on an international dimension from the outset. Through networks
connecting their organizations in different countries, women’s movements were able to share new ideas,
discourses and arguments in order to demand women’s suffrage simultaneously in different societies.
The suffragist movement emerged mainly in social contexts with favourable cultural and political
conditions, from where it spread to other areas. Feminist discourses started from within broader