by Magaly Pineda

Magaly Pineda is a feminist activist, sociologist and founder of the Centro de Investigacion para la Accion Femenina (CIPAF - Center of Investigation for Women's Action) in the Dominican Republic. The following article is translated from the Spanish version which appeared in the July 1986 issue of CIPAF's monthly newsletter Quehaceres.

The Latin America feminist movement, like the feminist movement in almost all the rest of the world, and like the majority of social movements, has its roots in the middle-class. Professional women and women students — a great part of them coming from the Left — began the tortuous path of defending the rights of women in the early 197()s, supported by the example of their sisters in the industrialized countries.

Fifteen years later. Latin American feminism has begun to show characteristics that give it its own profile, and to develop new forms of organization and work, as well as raise new questions.

Although it is not always called as such, a "grassroots feminism" is beginning to develop in most of the countries of Latin America. By this is meant that, as distinct from what is happening in the First World, action is directed toward women from the more disadvantaged sectors of the population: urban and rural housewives and. to a lesser degree, salaried workers.

Although research is needed to explain this phenomenon, we will attempt to advance two hypotheses. One that the relatively recent access of middle-class women to education and work, with the benefits that these bring and without the disadvantage of the double day given the existence of an ample supply of domestic workers, permits them to harmonize their new roles (worker, executive, superwoman, etc.) with a minimum of conflict. To this should be added the cultural pattern of the extended family. These are the elements which, from my point of view, make the feminist message either unattractive to the middle class or make it lose its radical nature and involvement in the struggles of daily life.

The second hypothesis grows out of the first. The feminist movement, reduced to tiny nuclei, growing slowly when not short-lived, soon "discovered" those sectors of society in which gender subordination is experienced in a more brutal and undisguised form, but in which the alienation of daily life and the struggle for survival prevents fighting gender subordination head on. The struggle against gender subordination could, however, begin and become strong if adequate mechanisms were found to combine this with the rest of the material demands of women.

However, the structure of this grassroots feminism immediately stumbles over obstacles of a theoretical-methodological nature: How can it be made possible for poor women to discover their gender oppression? How is it possible to break the isolation, the interiorized sexism to release their potential for struggle, not only for bread or schools, but for their own rights? How is it possible to break the chains of behavior derived from submission and authoritarianism, of conformity and acceptance of the "natural" so that autonomous and strong women can arise who can confront the dictators of the country and the home, patriarchal repression and mistreatment by husbands, the high cost of living and the daily negotiations for their personal realization, pleasure and leisure?

The answers direct one to the sphere of education and, most especially, to the experiences and achievements of popular education in our continent.

This encounter between feminism and popular education could not be more frustrating, however. Popular education in Latin America does not escape, in its conceptual framework, from the lack of a gender perspective. Asexual, popular education is presented as a pedagogy for the action of the "people." for raising "consciousness." amalgamating in the category "people" not only men and women, but also diverse realities and ways of approaching practice and daily life. We will not stress here the criticism that various writers have made about the ambiguous character of the categories, theories and language used by popular education. We will simply say that this ambiguity often, hides paternalistic and populist visions and the absence of many things, including a clear commitment to socialism and — what we would like to highlight here — a clear commitment to the radical elimination of sexual hierarchies.

Given that popular education has arisen tied to the Left and the church — even though this is often thought to be a negative dialectic — it has been strongly prejudiced against the focus on gender, feeding gender prejudices with its populism and its taboos and almost always considering feminism as petty bourgeois, if not totally bourgeois and deviationist.

For many educators and popular educators, work "with" women means mobilizing them for action solely in regard to demands for water, light, health and other problems of their neighborhoods and communities. More, even when much of the neighborhood or community work is nothing else than work with the women of these areas, this reality is made to disappear by sleight of hand in order to deny studying, working, discussing and bringing up issues which derive from their particular situation as women and not only from their role as mothers.

Sexuality, abandonment, physical mistreatment, rape and authoritarianism in the family are almost always outside the scope of discussion in popular education or are approached with the timidity that comes from considering these problems as belonging to the private world or as strictly personal.

The importance that the feminist movement has given to the scientific knowledge of women's issues and the multiple forms that women's subordination takes depending where they stand in the social structure appears — although this may seem paradoxical — to be another wall between feminists and popular educators. For popular education, practice is the only and the supreme truth, and any attempt to theorize is an intellectual deviation.

This over-valuation of practice, as well as the abuse of educational techniques and dynamics, has not only contributed to limiting and caricaturing popular education, it has kept it from the necessary process of constructing theory that would allow it to go beyond its limits and to become global and transcendent.

Feminism, in attacking the very roots of the dominant, classist structure and social thought, is a radical, universal thought and as such clashes in confrontation with the limited vision and the pseudoscientific knowledge that are found in some educational projects, participatory research, action-research, etc. — creating deeper disagreements between them.

Nevertheless, in spite of these limits, we envision a promising future, necessarily criss-crossed by conflicts and contradictions, but highly enriching for both currents.

The critical currents being nurtured within popular education today, that are warning against the use and abuse of techniques, about the false neutrality of many projects, about the need to re dimension the role of theory and practice and the scientific study of the social sectors with which it is working, speak to us of a qualitative leap in this work whose contribution — in the sense of democratizing the Latin American political process, of revealing and empowering action of new actors in society — is undeniable.

The relationship of these critical currents with a movement such as feminism that focuses on daily life and its alienation, that highlights the importance of personal change and the political character of this sphere of social life, will certainly contribute in a decisive way to this leap. By appropriating the experience of these years, nourishing itself with errors and achievements, popular education for and by women will be given a new dimension that will result in greater effectiveness of grassroots work as a whole.

For more information, contact CIPAF at Benigni Filomena Rojas No.307, Santa Domingo, Dominican Republic.