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  • Title: Women and development in Latin America and the Caribbean. Lessons from the seventies and hopes for the future.
    Author: Arizpe L.
    Journal: Dev Dialogue; 1982; (1-2):74-84. PubMed ID: 12279573.
    Abstract:
    The early implicit assumptions that industrialization or, generally, modernization should automatically improve the condition of women have been challenged more and more by research and statistical data. In Latin America and the Caribbean, the theory which held that the cultural assimilation of ethnic groups of Indian and African descent into the national Hispanic or Portuguese cultures implied an improvement in the condition of women has been challenged through ethnographic and historical research. Women in closed corporate communities may have higher status, greater participation in authority, and more support from their children than those in open mestizo communities, where excessive alcohol consumption and abusive sexual relations form an integral part of the psychosocial complex of "machismo." New research has dealt with the forced integration of black women and Indian women, as concubines of the dominant white men, as a mechanism of "mestizaje," i.e., mixing of the population, against which women had no legal or "de facto" defense. Such abuse of women, masked by racial and cultural prejudice, continues in many backward rural areas in Latin America. In discussions of the peasantry and of rural development in Latin America and the Caribbean, women had been largely ignored because agriculture was conceptualized as an exclusively male activity. This androcentric view is reflected in census categories that make the component of women's labor in agriculture invisible or unimportant. Consequently, the statistical percentages have always been unrealistically low in most countries. Detailed observations and surveys conducted during the last decade have shown, to the contrary, that peasant women work longer hours than men and are more liable to increase their time and work load to offset pauperization. The research of Deere and Leon (Colombia) as well as that of other women in different countries of the region confirms that women's subordination precedes capitalism and is further used by this system of production for its only ends. Priorities in the Western feminist movements in the 1970s have been equal pay for equal work and sexual and psychological autonomy. In the 3rd world the priorities have been the right to adequate employment and to primary services such as schools, drinking water, housing, and medical services. The main strategy for women in Latin America and the Caribbean has been to participate alongside men in political movements seeking to attain national sovereignty or to challenge economic inequalities, both internally and internationally, as a precondition to the setting up of women's demands as a gender group. The research makes it clear that dependent capitalist development brings an added burden of poverty and subordination to women. Strategies to advance women must be assessed within their particular context.
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