Mothers Making Latin America

Gender, Households, and Politics Since 1825

Erin E. O'Connor

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781118271445, 9781118271438
• eBook ISBN: 9781118341124
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte

Mothers Making Latin America utilizes a combination of gender scholarship and source material to dispel the belief that women were separated from—or unimportant to—central developments in Latin American history since independence.

• Presents nuanced issues in gender historiography for Latin America in a readable narrative for undergraduate students
• Offers brief, primary-source document excerpts at the end of each chapter that instructors can use to stimulate class discussion
• Adheres to a focus on motherhood, which allows for a coherent narrative that touches upon important themes without falling into a "list of facts" textbook style

1

Introduction

Gender and Latin American History, or: Why Motherhood?

Two Tales of Women and Politics

Aída de Suárez did not begin her life as a political activist. She only became politicized when her son was “disappeared” – abducted by the military government without charges or due process. His disappearance turned her world upside down, particularly when she could not find out what happened to him. She described what it was like when she tried to find answers about what happened to her son:

I had a neighbour who was a doctor and after they took my son I went to him and he gave me an injection to calm me down. They come into your house and they take your child like that – you think you've gone mad. The injection didn't calm me at all. At seven in the morning I was in the police station. A guard at the entrance asked me what I wanted. I said my son had been taken away and I didn't know by who or why. I cried so much he let me in. They took my statement. As I was leaving a policeman at the door said to me, “Señora, there's no point in coming here. Go to the military regiments, they're the ones who are taking people. Don't waste your time here. We have orders so keep out of the zones of their operations.” I went straight to the regiment. They didn't want to see me. They said that they didn't know anything and that I should go to the Ministry of the Interior. Then one man told me to try the regiment at Ciudadela. I want there and they said I'd come to the wrong place and that I had to go to the First Army Corps in Palermo. That day I went to all those places but I didn't find out anything.¹

Aída de Suárez was like many middle-aged and older women whose adult children were disappeared when the Argentine state terrorized its own population from 1976 to 1979 in what eventually came to be known as the Dirty War. Although military violence against civilians began in the 1960s, the Dirty War started during Isabel Perón's presidency, from 1974 to1976, and it escalated rapidly after military forces overthrew her and established an authoritarian government. By the time that the military regime fell from power in the early 1980s, tens of thousands of Argentine men and women – most of them young – had disappeared and were presumed dead.

De Suárez was among 14 women, mostly housewives who had never been involved in politics before, who met each other in various government offices while trying to find out what had happened to their adult children who had disappeared. Their trips to police, military, and government offices yielded no results, just more frustration and fear. The mothers decided to march silently together around the Plaza de Mayo, Buenos Aires's central square, in order to bring attention to their plight and, hopefully, to find out where their children were. The movement grew rapidly to include thousands of mothers and grandmothers from many different walks of life, religions, and political perspectives. Thought they came from a variety of backgrounds, the women in the movement emphasized their identities as supposedly traditional mothers who were willing to sacrifice anything for their children, and who were more interested in family and morality than in any form of politics. In the end, the Mothers were one of the few groups able to bring international attention to state terrorism in Argentina; other protestors typically ended up among the ranks of the disappeared. The mothers' silent marching undercut the military government's claims to legitimacy, which in turn played a role in the regime's dissolution in the early 1980s.

Fast-forward to 2006, when Michelle Bachelet was elected as Chile's first woman president. In her victory speech, Bachelet stated:

Today we have witnessed the magic of democracy, amigos and amigas. Today we're all equal. The vote of the most humble person is worth the same as the vote of the most powerful. Democracy can help untangle the wishes and hopes of the people. …

Starting right now, your hopes are my hopes, your wishes mine. To all the people who welcomed me into their homes, all the men and women who gave me the gift of a hug and a kiss, above all so many women who gave me my victory today, on this night. To all the people from the provinces, I send my greetings and my assurance that I will fulfill the vow I took in the last days of my campaign, that we would remember them when we were here celebrating and surely they are all celebrating in each of their cities our great triumph tonight.

Amigos y amigas, starting March 11, Chile will have a woman president, but it will also be the start of a new phase where we will make sure that the successes we achieve in this great country make their way into the homes of all Chileans, because I want people to remember my government as a government of all, for all. Ours is a dynamic country, with the desire to be successful, that is becoming more and more integrated into the world, a country of entrepreneurs who create prosperity with their ingenuity and creativity. But for Chilean men and women to dare to be entrepreneurial and to innovate, they must also know that the society they live in protects them.²

Later, in her first annual address, Bachelet claimed that her political victory represented the “defeat of exclusion” not just for women, but for Chileans more generally.³ Bachelet was the sixth Latin American woman to hold the office of president, but she was the first to become president who had not been married to a high profile male political leader.⁴ Neither did Bachelet highlight her role as a mother to grown children, as some other Latin American women leaders – most notably Violeta Chamorro in Nicaragua during the 1990s – had done. Bachelet had an ambitious sociopolitical agenda, promising to achieve gender equity in her cabinet and address women's issues in Chile as well as the needs of poor Chileans. Though she met only some of her goals, she maintained strong support throughout her presidency from 2006 to 2010, in no small part because she got Chileans through the hardships of the worldwide economic recession that hit during her term.

Since Bachelet's successful campaign in Chile, three other Latin American women have won the presidency in their respective countries. Cristina Fernández de Kirchner won the 2007 presidential election in Argentina, following in the footsteps of her husband, Néstor Kirchner, who was president from 2003 to 2007. Fernández de Kirchner proved herself politically capable in her own right when her husband died in 2007, leaving her to rule without his support, and she made her own mark on the history of women in politics when she became the first female president in Latin America to win reelection in 2011. Two other women – Laura Chinchilla in Costa Rica and Dilma Rousseff in Brazil – ascended to the presidency via elections in 2010. Rousseff, in particular, took power in a country with of one of the world's fastest expanding and important economies.

Women have often played significant roles politics in several Latin American countries since the 1970s. However, the nature of their participation and the roles that they have emphasized changed considerably over the course of about 25 years. These transformations in politics have coincided with other developments for women in Latin American societies. For example, fertility rates have fallen dramatically in many Latin American countries: overall, Latin American women have gone from having an average of 5.98 children in 1960 to 2.2 children in 2010.⁵ This drop in fertility rates, however, has not occurred evenly throughout the region. The most dramatic decline in fertility rates has been in Brazil, where women averaged 5.33 children in 1970 and only 2.46 children by 1995. In other countries, the decline was not as dramatic, such as in Guatemala, where in the same time period, women went from having an average of 6.53 children to 5.12 children.⁶ Women in many Latin American countries are also becoming more educated, particularly among the middling and upper classes.

The changes in women's lives raise important questions about Latin American history. The history of the Mothers' movement in Argentina makes one wonder: how could politically inexperienced housewives start a protest movement that helped to bring down a violent authoritarian regime? How and why did these women create a political movement by highlighting, rather than rejecting, their traditional roles as mothers and homemakers? What political, legal, social, and cultural trends in the Latin American past made it possible for such a movement to emerge? Why did these women – and later political figures, such as Violeta Chamorro in Nicaragua – emphasize motherhood in their political pursuits? What might have been the cost of this focus on motherhood in politics? Certainly, although one can find examples of women who used maternalist ideas to their benefit, motherhood also set limits on women's ability to gain an education, make a living, or enter political office. If maternity was a double-edged sword of both opportunity and limitation, why did so many Latin American women utilize this symbolism?

More recent developments identified here also raise questions. Does the recent rise of women presidents since 2000 indicate that Latin American women have broken the so-called glass ceiling in politics? How important is it that Bachelet and Rousseff, in particular, did not draw attention to their roles as mothers or wives, as many politically active women did before them? Does this shift, along with dropping fertility rates, indicate that motherhood no longer holds sway over Latin American societies and politics as it once did? What can the experiences of successful women politicians and rapidly falling fertility rates tell us about what it means to be a woman in Latin America – and what do these facts fail to reveal about women in Latin America? In what ways have contemporary Latin American women broken with the past, and in what ways are they building upon it?

Of course, none of the questions above has a simple or straightforward answer. Whether or not women are breaking free of motherhood and overcoming longstanding limitations placed on them depends on which women one discusses. In addition to regional or country-specific variations, one must also consider the impact of recent changes on women of different class and race backgrounds. This book seeks, then, not to “answer” but rather to explore the questions above by examining the history of Latin American women from independence through the 1990s via the lens of motherhood. It examines both continuity and change over time, and takes class, race, and regional differences into account. In addition to deepening readers' understanding of the history behind recent developments for women in Latin America, this book also addresses broader questions pertaining to history itself. What can an examination of women – and mothers in particular – teach one about Latin American history? How can the history of Latin America teach one more about motherhood, and in particular, how does it complicate and historicize the term “mother”?

Although Chapter 2 briefly addresses issues of gender in the colonial period, my focus in this book is on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, mainly after Latin American countries achieved their independence. During the colonial period, although motherhood shaped women's lives in a variety of ways, it remained more of a private or religious issue. It was only with independence that women's identities as mothers came to have particularly powerful significance in social and political movements. The trope of motherhood is tightly intertwined with the history of modern Latin America. When nineteenth- and early twentieth-century state officials denied women the vote, they often did so by asserting that women belonged in the domestic sphere as wives and mothers, rather than in the public sphere of politics (Chapter 2). Women from middling and upper social classes did not always reject the idea that motherhood was at the center of their identities, but they used this notion in a variety of ways that state officials had not anticipated, arguing for greater personal rights and for greater influence in public society (Chapter 4). Yet upper-class gender norms rarely reflected the lives of the majority of women, who were poor and often from non-European backgrounds. For these women, the public and private spheres were not neatly divided, and motherhood was not necessarily the only or even central aspect of their daily identities (Chapter 3). By the early to mid-twentieth century, the themes of motherhood and home life helped political and economic elites to address the dilemmas and fears regarding the dramatic changes that came with industrialization, urbanization, or revolution. Though societies experienced rapid changes, including changes to women's roles in public, official gender discourses highlighted women's ongoing roles as mothers who would uphold morality and maintain traditions (Chapter 5). Thus, motherhood has been a central theme throughout changes in Latin America since independence, though its particular meaning at any given time was subject to change – as are all historical forces. Looking at Latin America through the lens of motherhood allows one to problematize simplistic divisions between public and private spheres, continuity and change, and private lives and political events.

Although motherhood has been an important theme throughout the course of modern Latin American history, it did not have the same meaning in all time periods, let alone in all regions of Latin America or among Latin Americans of different race or class backgrounds. Political, economic, and intellectual elites had a great deal of power to define the parameters of how gender and motherhood discourses developed, but they did not always agree with each other. Even more important, women developed many of their own ideas about what motherhood meant and how it should intersect with politics and the economy. Wealthy or middle-class women were the most likely to take advantage of elite notions about motherhood, in part because it was these women whom politicians and intellectuals identified as “good mothers.” Poor women and those of indigenous or African descent utilized certain aspects of elite gender norms regarding motherhood, but they also developed their own ideas about what made one a good mother, and what influence that gave women (or should give women) in society. The particular ways in which women and men of different class, race, and political perspectives engaged the theme of motherhood was further influenced by broader contextual changes in Latin American governments and economies.

Writing a book to address an all-encompassing theme like motherhood in Latin America since independence is an ambitious undertaking, and there is no way to “do everything.” Indeed, it is a mistake to try to do so with such a broad topic. Therefore, while readers will find many themes and historiographical works discussed, I lay no claim to summarizing or including the entire field of historical gender studies for Latin America. Similarly, although I take examples from a variety of Latin American countries, I do not attempt to include all of them, nor do I address every revolution, women's movement, or class-specific issue. Some of these other topics are referenced in the bibliography, and all of those not included in this narrative offer a rich set of possibilities for educators' own lectures, or for students' research projects.

Gender as a Category for Historical Analysis

Though many people associate the term gender with women and presume it is based on biology, gender is instead a social construction that pertains to the ideas a particular society holds about what it means to be a man or a woman. More precisely, groups that exercise the greatest political, economic, and social control define the dominant gender norms in a given society. Gender lessons begin extremely early in a child's life, when parents buy clothes and toys that they deem “gender appropriate” for him or her, or when they react negatively if a child crosses over accepted gender boundaries in his or her behavior. Because one learns gender rules so early and consistently, and often subtly rather than directly, by adulthood, gender norms often seem “natural” rather than socially constructed. Motherhood, as a subcategory of gender, is no different. Although one often hears references to “mothers' instincts” and how motherly urges and agendas are natural, in fact, motherhood is as much socially constructed and learned as any other aspect of gender.

In the 1980s, historian Joan Scott developed the now-standard definition of gender when she described it as both “a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes,” and “a primary field within which or by means of which power is articulated.”⁷ The first part of Scott's definition indicates that gender is learned rather than natural, and that it influences all of one's social relationships. That means that the relationships between men and women, or any individual's place within the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Series Editor's Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Source Acknowledgments
• 1: Introduction: Gender and Latin American History, or: Why Motherhood?
• 2: Motherhood in Transition: From Colonies to Independent Nations
• 3: Poor Women: Mothering the Majority in the Nineteenth Century
• 4: Middle-Class and Elite Mothers: Feminism, Femininity, and the Nation in the Nineteenth Century
• 5: Motherhood at the Crossroads of Tradition and Modernity, circa 1900–1950
• 6: Poor Mothers and the Contradictions of Modernity, circa 1900–1950
• 7: Mothers and Revolution, circa 1910–1990: Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua
• 8: Maternalizing Politics, Politicizing Motherhood: Women and Politics, circa 1950–1990s
• 9: Bodies, Policies, and Globalization: Contraception and Abortion in Latin America
• 10: Motherhood Transformed? History, Gender, and the Shift into the Twenty-First Century
• Bibliography
• Subject Index