For Our Total Emancipation: Revolutionary Feminism and the Association of Salvadoran Women, 1978-1987

• In Event: New Histories of the Latin American Left

Abstract

In the case of El Salvador, critics have argued that its revolutionary movements of the 1970s and 1980s failed women and served as obstacles to feminism. In turn, the rise of feminism is dated to the 1990s—the moment when many women abandoned leftist parties and formed self-identified feminist organizations. In contrast, I consider how leftist women in El Salvador expanded revolutionary ideologies to confront sexism during the late 1970s and 1980s. My framework links feminist critiques of the left with dialectical approaches to studying revolution. In the latter approach, scholars distinguish between “revolution from above” (that is, the ideas promoted by party and government leaders) and “revolution from below” (those advanced by rank-and-file organizers and grassroots organizations). This framework allows me to center rank-and-file women who intervened in debates about gender arrangements within the revolutionary left, thus filling an important gap in the literature, which has focused primarily on the political visions of the top leadership. I draw from feminist and dialectical models in order to recognize both the sexism of leftist organizations and the alternative visions of struggle that women created within leftist movements. The Association of Salvadoran Women (AMES), an organization composed of combatants, peasants, and militants in exile, redefined socialist revolution to mean both the overthrow of capitalism and patriarchy. Feminist consciousness arose from the practice of organizing peasant women and in conversation with leftist women throughout the Americas who critiqued the separation of women’s liberation from class struggle. The sites of feminist praxis included guerrilla territories, Costa Rican and Nicaraguan refugee camps, and solidarity networks in Mexico, Nicaragua, and the United States. Within the guerrilla territories, AMES members actively participated in community councils, an experiment in popular democracy, and generated a feminist praxis that linked the exigencies of wartime survival to the long-term liberation of women. At the international level, Salvadoran women created alliances with socialist-feminists in Latin America and the United States in order to push their organizations in more feminist directions.

Author

• Diana Carolina Sierra Becerra