Gender

1900-Present Document 1: Latin America

Keen and Hayes. Cuban Revolution. A History of Latin America.

Stearns, Peter. World Civilizations, 3 rd edition. 2000.

SOCIETIES IN SEARCH OF CHANGE

Social relations changed slowly in Latin America. Inequalities based on ethnicity, gender, and class continued in
some places. To be called Indian is still an insult in many places in Latin America. Women had entered the labor
force in large numbers but began to gain the vote only after 1929. However their status was in many ways closer to
that of women in Western Europe than to those of Asia or Africa.
Slow Change in Women's Roles
The role of women has changed slowly. After World War I, women in Latin America continued to live under
inequalities in the workplace and in politics. Women were denied the right to vote anywhere in Latin America until
Ecuador enfranchised women in 1929 and Brazil and Cuba did the same in 1932. Throughout most of the region,
those examples were not followed until the 1940s and 1950s. In some nations, the traditional associations of women
with religion and the Catholic Church in Hispanic life made reformers and revolutionaries fear that women
would become a conservative force in national politics. This attitude, combined with traditional male attitudes that
women should be concerned only with home and family, led to a continued exclus ion of women from political life .
In response, women formed various associations and clubs and began to push for the vote and other issues of interest
to them.
Feminist organizations, suffrage movements, and international pressures eventually combined to bring about
change. In Argentina, 15 bills for female suffrage were introduced in the senate before the vote was won in 1945.
Sometimes the victory was a matter of political expediency for those in power: In the Dominican Republic and some
other countries, the enfranchise ment of women was a strategy used by conservative groups to add more
conservative voters to the electorate in an effort to hold off political change . In Argentina, recently enfranchised
women became a major pillar of the Peronist regime, although that regime suppressed female political opponents
such as Victoria Ocampo, editor of the important liberal literary magazine Sur.
Women eventually discovered that the ability to vote did not in itself guarantee political rights or the ability to
have their specific issues heard. After achieving the vote, women tended to join the national political parties, where
traditional prejudices against women in public life limited their ability to influence political programs . In
Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Chile, for example, the integration of women into national political programs has
been slow, and women have not participated in proportion to their numbers. In a few cases, however, such as in the
election of Peron in Argentina in 1946 and Eduardo Frei in Chile in 1964, or in the popular opposition to Salvador
Allende, in Chili in 1972, women have been instrumental.
Some of the earliest examples of mobilization of women and their integration into the national labor force of
various Latin American nations came in the period just before World War I and continued thereafter. The classic
roles of women as homemakers, mothers, and agricultural workers were expanded as women entered the industrial
labor force in growing numbers. By 1911 in Argentina, for example, women made up almost 80 percent of the textile
and clothing industry's workers. But women found that their salaries often were below those of comparable male
workers and that their jobs, regardless of the skill levels demanded, were considered unskilled and thus less well
paid. Under these conditions, women joined the anarchist, socialist, and other labor unions and organizations.
Labor organizations are only a small part of the story of women in the labor force. In countries such as Peru,
Bolivia, and Ecuador, women working in the markets control much small-scale commerce and have become
increasingly active politically. In the growing service sectors, women have also become an important part of the labor
force. Shifts in attitudes about women's roles have come more slowly than political and economic changes. Even in
revolutionary Cuba, where a Law of the Family guaranteed equal rights and responsibilities within the home,
enforcement has been difficult.

By the mid-1990s, women made up 9 percent of the legislators in Latin America, a percentage
higher than in any other region of the world. They also held 9 percent of the cabinet posts. In terms
of demographic patterns, health, education, and place in the work force, the comparative position of
women reinforced Latin America's intermediate position between the developed nations and the
Developing World.
Quietly and against the odds, women are stepping up the political ladder in Latin America,
moving ahead of the United States when it comes to political empowerment and closely matching
much of Western Europe. Fourteen countries in Latin America have quotas requiring a certain

number of women to be in the government. Argentina was something of a trailblazer, the first
country in the region to adopt quotas, in 1991.
Female leaders are no novelty in the region. But now, at the same time, Brazil , Costa Rica,
and Argentina have had women presidents; Trinidad and Tobago and Jamaica have had female prime
ministers. And in Mexico, Josefina Vzquez Mota, an economist, was the first woman to run for
president under a major-party banner.

Cuba

By 1923 Cuban nationalism revived. The United States blatant meddling in Cuban politics and the postwar
collapse of Cuban sugar revealed the disastrous consequences of foreign domination and monoculture. Searching for
solutions to these problems, Cuban university students, one -quarter of whom were women, entered the political
arena in the postwar period. Believing that to change society they must change the university, they directed their first
attacks against inept and corrupt professors and administrators. Students would henceforth play an important role
in Cuban politics until the fall of Batista In 1959.
Women also played increasingly influential roles in Cuba economy. Economic growth, especially in household
services, textiles, and the tobacco and sugar-refining industries, created greater employment for women outside the
home. But as they moved "from the house to the streets ," in the words of historian Lynn Stoner, women brought to
their public activities a communal consciousness forged in family life. Even the Women's Club, organized in 1917
and composed primarily of upper- and middle-class women, insisted that the state, the pater familias of Cuban
society, should regulate domestic-social relations consistent with the common welfare. It therefore supported woman
suffrage, equal pay for equal work, greater access to education, and civil equality.
Fidel Castro spent nineteen months in prison on the Isle of Pines. During this period, the leadership of the AntiBatista Movement fell largely to women compatriots like Haydee Santamaria, a founding member of the 1952
anti-Batista resistance, and Melba Hernandez, the intrepid lawyer who had defended Castro at trial. They forged
political alliances with other anti-Batista groups like the Association of United Cuban Women, led by Gloria Cuadras,
and the Women's Marti Civic Front, organized by Carmen Castro Porta, whose anti-dictatorial activities were rooted
in struggles against the Machado regime in the 1920s.
Together, they built a network of urban and rural women who served the revolution as lawyers, interpreters,
medical aides, grassroots organizers, educators, spies, messengers, and armed combatants , In addition to Cella
Sanchez, perhaps Cuba's best-known woman guerilla, the revolution also spawned a female combat unit known as
the "Mariana Grajales Brigade.
By 1955, these women had produced and dis tributed some ten thousand copies of Castro's History Will
Absolve Me, which enhanced his reputation.
By mid-1957, women revolutionaries, insulated from earlier repression by the regime's sexism, began to
experience wholesale arrests, torture, and imprisonment. But they maintained a sense of humor; when their
lawyer. Margo Aniceto Rodriguez, was also imprisoned for denouncing Batista's terrorism, other jailed rebels joked
that "Margo is such a good lawyer that, if she cannot free us, she at least comes to stay with us in prison."

Cuba after the Revolution

Keen and Hayes. Cuban Revolution. A History of Latin America.

Despite its mixed economic record, the revolution's achievements in the areas of employment, equitable
distribution of income, public health, and education were remarkable . Until the onset of the 1990 economic
crisis, which caused many factories to shut down due to lack of fuel, Cuba had the lowest rate of joblessness in Latin
America. But even workers who were laid off because of plant closings continued to receive 60 percent of their
wages. Inequalities In the standard of living were dramatically reduced from the days of Batista. The working classes
in particular benefited from government policies; rents were controlled, limited to no more than 10 percent of income,
as were rationed food prices (but the government tolerated an open market in farm products). Eighty percent of
Cubans owned their own homes. Agricultural workers on state farms and cooperatives got furnished houses with
televisions and community recreational centers. Cuban city streets had virtually no beggars and sidewalk vendors,
which set them apart from their Latin American counterparts. Education and health care were free and equally
accessible to all.
The revolution had always promised equality and social justice, but these were special goals of the Cuban Women's
Federation (FMC). The FMC played a crucial role early in the development of revolutionary social services: literacy
crusades reduced illiteracy from 24 to 4 percent; a national child-care system freed women, to pursue their own
careers; an innovative rural education program taught vocational skills and provided peasant women with modern

health-care information; and schools for maids and prostitutes discouraged exploitation of women and re trained them as professionals in socially productive activities. The population had an average of a ninth-grade
education, and illiteracy was wiped out.
Since then, the FMC, has continued to influence Cuban policy regarding health care, education, women's
employment, daycare, sexual discrimination, and family life. For example, it secured passage of the 1975 Family
Code, which recognized the equal right of both spouses to education and career, required them to share in
household duties and child care, and established divorce as a legal remedy for any spouse whose mate refused to
comply.
The extremely difficult economic situation produced by the collapse of the socialist economic community and the
tightened U.S. embargo temporarily reversed the trend of steadily improving social conditions and produced a decline
in living standards. During this "special period," most Cubans lived on a drab diet of white rice and red beans,
supplemented by some vegetables and fruit an occasional chicken, and what they could purchase on the open market.
The food rationing system, however, prevented the emergence of the massive hunger and malnutrition so common in
the rest of Latin America.
Children continued to be special objects of the government's solicitude. Children aged seven and under and pregnant
women received a daily distribution of milk. Cuba's infant mortality in 1993, 9.4 per 1,000 live births, was among
the lowest in the world and almost equal with that (9.1) of the United States. Cuba had the lowest doctor-to-patient
ratio in Latin America with 50% of doctors being women (U.S. has 30% women doctors).
This has allowed Cuba to "transformed itself into a world-class health-care provider, an extraordinary achievement," as demonstrated by the fact that Venezuelan President Hugo Chaves would seek medical attention in Cuba for
his cancer treatments.

Before 1959, women comprised only 5 percent of university graduates and only 12 percent of the
work force, often holding menial jobs. Today women make up 41 percent of the Communist Party,
half of the islands work force, the majority of students in high schools and universities, 60 percent
of university faculties and the majority of provosts and department heads (but not presidents). And
women hold top portfolios in ministries and in key provincial positions.