Latin American feminisms have roots stretching back to before the independence period and have, since arriving on the intellectual scene in the late 19th century, reflected diverse contexts and with distinct strategies and objectives. While the earliest uses of the term feminism emerged from debates over liberalism, with its universalist imaginaries, these early challenges to patriarchal authority promptly generated multiple feminisms alongside movements that engage feminist ideas but eschew the label. Over the past 150 years, these fractures along lines of class, race, culture, and location have both challenged and revitalized feminist campaigns for social, cultural, and political change. Throughout, Latin America has remained a particularly dynamic region for feminist activism, leading the way on the world stage to draw attention to issues such as human rights, maternalist politics, and decoloniality. While Latin American feminism, in the singular, continues to defy any tidy definition or description, Latin American feminisms, in their multiplicity, have consistently fostered creative and effective challenges to patriarchy, particularly in the areas of legal rights, reproductive justice, freedom from violence, and recognition of subsistence labors.
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Latin American Feminisms
Jocelyn Olcott
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Women’s History and Movements in 20th-Century Brazil
Maria Lygia Quartim de Moraes
In the early twentieth century, Brazil depended on coffee exports, its slave regime had just been abolished, and most of its inhabitants lived in the countryside. The Catholic Church exercised the moral direction of society, and White landowners virtually established the rules of sociability and controlled economic and political life. A woman’s social position was fundamentally determined according to their social class. Wealthy and White middle-class women had access to some form of education, and when they left the family home, it was to marry and raise a family, being completely dependent on their husbands, with no political rights, and only allowed to work upon marital authorization.
With rapid urbanization, wretched working conditions, as either a domestic servant or a textile worker (the two female labor niches), worsened the lives of poor women in the city. Access to education, the struggle for labor rights, and the right to vote were the pillars of the long women’s emancipation process that was in progress.
In 1964 a military coup plunged Brazil into a long dictatorship that only ended in 1985 with the return of democratic institutions and the election of a civil president. The conquest of democracy was made with the broad participation of the various women’s groups and movements, especially the feminist movements.
