Rocio Rosero

The history of women's political participation in Latin America indicates a range of motives for women's mobilization and organization: economic and social demands, the struggle for democracy, resistance to dictatorships. Most of the time women's demands have grown out of their immediate concerns, with their mobilization itself often a spontaneous response to worsening conditions. In some cases, initially women's organization and participation has been prompted by external agencies rather than by women themselves, such as churches, political parties, unions, cooperatives, and the like. In any event, the accumulated experience of women's organizing has not only established the legitimacy of women's issues, it has given birth to one of the boldest and most original visions of social change, a guidepost toward a common path to productive growth and social justice, within a framework of authentic democracy.

Women's participation in many forms of organization throughout the Latin American region is no recent development, any more than is the feminist movement itself. What is new is the specifically Latin American feminist process, which has linked the struggles against economic discrimination and male domination. The fight against capitalist exploitation has thus been joined to that against patriarchal oppression.

In each country of the region, women's organizing has had its own relationship to feminism. In most countries, women have come together around concerns that have no specifically feminist character, such as the general types of issues noted above; their consciousness of gender has developed from there. In other situations, by contrast, feminist issues have been the starting point for various types of organization. Again and again we see that as women we have a diversity of viewpoints which is expressed in a diversity of organizing approaches.

As our struggle unfolds, one of the principal contributions of Latin American feminism is the recognition that gender relations— which of course involve both men and women— include relationships of domination and submission that are maintained by a rigid sexual division of labor and are expressed in specific forms of oppression in both the private and public spheres. Like every group that suffers oppressive power relations, women are thus challenged to resist and transform their condition.

The emergent woman-oriented approach to social issues reaffirms the value of human emotions. As an outgrowth of this, women have contributed to the democratization and humanization of politics. Ours is a struggle for the development of a new form of social practice that can overcome alienation and develop our self-awareness as autonomous subjects, rather than simply victims or objects of our fate. This woman-oriented perspective has broadened the concept of the "historical subject," since it holds out to women the promise that we can question our situation and take action to transform it by illuminating the conflicts that reside in our daily lives.

The Feminist Perspective in Popular Education

The past fifteen years have seen a marked growth in the strength of Latin America's popular movement— the movement of the poor majority. This advance has entailed the incorporation of new social groups and the search for new approaches to organizing that adequately express the experiences and perspectives of broad sectors of the population that previously have been marginalized, in analyzing social reality as well as in shaping the project of political transformation.

As social, economic, and political conditions have worsened in our countries, especially through the crisis of recent years, many women have begun to participate more directly in social movements. Their participation has unfortunately not been free of numerous obstacles, which derive not only from contradictions in domestic life but also from the popular organizations and institutions themselves, which reproduce structures that subordinate women to men and in this way maintain traditional gender roles.

Women of the popular sectors— and likewise many of us who work in support of their struggles—have found neither the space nor the mechanisms to adequately address these contradictions and our growing awareness of them. The popular movements and the feminist movement alike have failed to provide the context we need. Within the popular movements, it is still widely held that organizing around women's issues sidetracks and undermines the fundamental struggle of the people. On the other hand, feminist groups that have undertaken work with poor women are often uncomfortable or unfamiliar with popular education as it has emerged within the popular movements. Popular education, for its part, has meanwhile failed to recognize gender contradictions, which by right it should address as both a theoretical and methodological issue.

Thus on the one hand, the popular education movement has created spaces for organization, for reflection, for reclaiming popular culture— all of which have enormous implications for the daily lives of women. On the other hand, the feminist movement, taking the central problem of female identity as its point of departure, has a great deal to say on the questions of collectivity, culture, critical reflection, and the global organization of society. Nonetheless, the convergence of these two movements is contradictory and far from automatic.

When popular education, for its part, does take up women's concerns, it rarely confronts the central issues. And feminism, while it has thoroughly developed its own premise, still finds it difficult to integrate into its perspective other social movements and the problems they address. The popular education movement in our continent has given rise to strategic approaches that in turn have contributed to the development of more specific movements in such areas as education for peace and human rights, literacy, and cooperative economics, as well as movements geared to specific constituencies such as youth, indigenous peoples, and women. Each of these movements, in fighting for social change on a macro level, is also seeking the satisfaction of its own particular demands. The contributions of each such sector or issue area are manifested in the political content of the educational work undertaken within it, as well as in how it is situated in the context of the popular struggle. Nonetheless, this contextualization is at bottom formal and not very functional, and thus is inadequate.

Popular education considers its most basic role to be the strengthening of those groups and sectors that are systematically seeking to redistribute resources and power in favor of the subordinated sectors of society. The point of departure of the educational process— as it is defined by popular education— is social reality or social practice; that is, social relations (the what) and the different forms they take in various social spheres such as the family, the community, or the organization (the how).

In spite of the diversity of their circumstances, Latin American women have as a common denominator their enormous domestic responsibilities and their major contributions to productive labor, academic activity, and technical and professional development. In short, although women play a critical role in every sphere of social life, yet their participation is not valued. Further, women are often used instrumentally, existing in conditions of manipulation and at times even degradation. This gives rise to innumerable conflicts and contradictions, often including violence, all of which permeate the fabric of social relations, interpersonal relationships, and daily life: in relationships between men and women, in couples, in relationships between adults and children, in sexuality, and in domestic violence.

The struggle to improve economic and social conditions for the majority demands that we seek our "own identity as women, which requires us to recognize other identities. What does it mean to be a woman? An Indian woman? A Chola [woman of mixed race]? A peasant woman? This is the signal contribution of women: in finding ourselves as women we are retracing the manifold logic of domination" (CEAAL Women's Network, 1985:5).

This new concept of the person implies a redefinition of other social identities, including, of course, that of being male. Thus the inclusion of the feminist movement in the overall process of social transformation implies a call not only for the elimination of class stratification, but also for the elimination of all forms of subordination, including the subordination of women. In this context it becomes possible to conceive of power, not in terms of domination, but rather as a capacity for taking action to transform reality.

The feminist perspective in popular education posits the necessity of starting from women's reality, "restoring the value of the domestic sphere, women's reproductive role, their sexuality, and finally their right to pleasure— not in order to maintain pleasure as an instrument of oppression, but on the contrary, to transform it into an instrument of struggle and liberation" (CEAAL Women's Network, op. cit.). This perspective recognizes the value of individual experience in social transformation and in reclaiming the meaning and value of diversity in the construction of a new collective subject.

From a feminist perspective, a key challenge for popular education with women is to formulate a pedagogical approach that fosters reflection and analysis tending to an interpretation of life as it is lived by women, giving privileged consideration to their experiences and attitudes as interpreted within their social context. This new pedagogical approach requires an ideological transformation, demystifying the perceptions that women have of themselves and their society. Fundamentally, we are speaking here of the need for a new concept of liberation, one that encompasses every dimension of the human enterprise.

Our Challenges

Our objective was to go farther, to discover ourselves as women, to raise our consciousness of how we experience reality as women— because among the poor, women are far more marginalized. We have never been paid attention to or taken into account as people. (Popular Women's Union of Loja, 1985)

"Going farther" means recognizing our value and unmasking how our oppression and marginalization is played out in each action of our daily lives. This is possible only through an educational process in which we all learn to work for change— in solidarity and through organized action. Thus popular education for women is a comprehensive process whose basic characteristics include an ongoing, coherent, and permanent program of action. Such a process requires the involvement of groups that have been organized by and for social change.

"Going farther" means working from the basis of our identity as subjects of our own lives and starting from our own experiences as women:

• In our emotional beings, in terms of sexuality, interpersonal communication, intimate relationships.
• As workers: in domestic tasks, in earning an income, and in our professional lives.
• As members of society, with respect to our civil and political rights, our organizing efforts, our militance.
• As mothers, in terms of our reproductive capacity, our physical beings, our health, our role as educators.
• As daughters, with regard to our education, our development, our aspirations.
• As bearers of life, in defense of our dignity and in the struggle against violence.

"Going farther" means strengthening the autonomy of outreach and organization with women. Our process of consciousness raising must lead to decision-making power, inside our organizations as well as outside them, at the broader— and more public— social and political level. Consciousness raising, in this sense, means empowerment at each of those levels in order to realize true equality in social life.

"Going farther" bespeaks our enormous responsibility for articulating a new perspective that permits the democratization of daily life. Likewise, we must adopt alternative methods of work that allow us to rediscover the political character of daily experience.

In the words of Carmen Tornaria (1986:6), "going farther" means developing an approach to collective practice that recognizes "I the woman," an "I" that reclaims the personal dimension. Moving outward, the "we" of women, in which we develop a collective understanding of our experiences, allows us to discover what is common to all of us. We discover ourselves as an oppressed group and can then trace out the connections to other forms of domination that are already understood.

Thus we arrive at the moment of response, in which, seeing how our experiences echo one another, we see that the domestic is also political and thus constitutes a pathway to social transformation.

Next we reach the moment of action— both inward, toward ourselves, and outward. Starting from here we bring about changes in the family environment and develop an educational practice that is appropriate to our concerns, as we become agents for the transmission of a new social project, one that reaches outward to the level of the neighborhood, the community, the workplace, the union, and the party. By linking ourselves to other autonomous social groups, we make our impact felt throughout the social landscape.

"Going farther," finally, means accepting that feminism is one political project alongside others, based on an understanding of gender that has historically been neglected. Feminism is not the only political project. Gender oppression interacts with class and race, and this is reflected in the practice and the experiences of social movements (CEAAL Women's Network, 1985:12).

"Going farther" means that we challenge not only popular education for women but also popular education as a whole to question every type of power relation as a form of oppression. Popular education needs to emphasize those demands that derive from the subjugation of women in daily life.

"Going farther" means making our way alongside grassroots women, exploring and developing with them a collective understanding of their problems, challenging traditional approaches.

The women's struggle is a vital and transcendent historical process. Vital, because it involves our family, work, and social life; transcendent, because from its starting point in our own lives it reaches out to effect universal social change. Historical, finally, because it confronts a traditionally discriminatory social order by offering a new approach to life, a new alternative historical project—the project of creating a comprehensively humane society.

Notes and Bibliography

Gajardo, Marcela, Ed., "Teoria y Practica de la Educacion Popular" [Theory and practice of popular education], Col . Retablo de Papel No. 5, Mexico, 1985.

Nunez, Carlos, "Educar para transformar, transformar para educar" [Education for transformation, transformation for education], TAREA, first Peruvian edition, Lima, 1986.

Popular Women's Union of Loja, " Y no Teniamos Voz" [And we had no voice], Loja, Ecuador, 1985.

CEAAL Women's Network, "Taller andino de Metodologia de Educacion Popular entre Mujeres" [Andes workshop on popular education for women], final report, Quito, Ecuador, 1985.

Tornaria, Carmen, "Taller-seminario sobre Feminismo y Educacion Popular en America Latina" [Workshop-seminar on feminism and popular education in Latin America], CEAAL, final report, Quito, Ecuador, 1987.