In the past we have witnessed how growing numbers of grassroots women are organizing to demand that society meets their needs for basic survival and better quality of life. Organizations concerned with food, health, housing, and the high cost of living are taking shape and consolidating themselves. Women are coming together to seek solutions to the problem of how their families can survive. Through this collective search, they are taking charge of their lives and deepening their understanding of the social structures within which those lives unfold.

Increasingly, such efforts pose a critique of a system that is incapable of meeting the needs of a majority of the population. At the same time, women involved in this process are coming to recognize themselves as women, constructing a common female identity. Their critique is no longer offered solely as a social class, but also as a gender.

This process which is currently unfolding in Latin America provides a meeting ground for the feminist movement and the movement for popular education. Their encounter has not been an easy one. Each movement has placed its primary emphasis differently: on contradictions of gender or of class. Nonetheless, for some time now, many women involved in popular education have sought to address gender issues. Likewise, the feminist movement has itself the task of tracing the connections between gender and class contradictions.

This Isis International publication. Growing Together: Women, Feminism, and Popular Education, documents experiences of organization and education with grassroots women from different countries in Latin America. Each contribution considers the double nature of oppression for those who are both women and poor. This book has been produced jointly with the Network for Women and Popular Education of the Latin American Council on Adult Education. Like our previous collaborations with Third World women's groups in the production of Isis International publications, it has been a most enriching experience.

We wish to thank Rocio Rosero, coordinator of the Network for Women and Popular Education; Gabriela Pischedda, who coordinates the network's efforts in the Southern Cone (Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay); and all the women from different organizations who have made this publication possible by writing down their experiences.

We would also like to thank Lynda Yanz of the International Council for Adult Education for her assistance with the translation of this book.

We hope that Growing Together, helps to broaden the common ground for feminism and popular education, thereby helping both movements to work more effectively for justice, equality, and freedom, for men and women alike.

Isis International
Rome/Santiago
June 1988