Research on Latin American Women: In Search of Our Political Independence

Abstract

Only in the last decade have the struggles of Latin American women against discrimination in their societies had any impact on academic research.1 Women, above all, have taken up the challenge of systematising these struggles, making a conscious attempt to break with prevailing models of social analysis, whose ability to ignore and distort the varied causes of women's exploitation and oppression has contributed so much to the perpetuation of stereotypes, reinforcing the social mechanisms which lie behind inequalities of class and gender. Ironically however, the best known among the new studies of Latin American women have been carried out under the aegis of North American universities, and eagerly seized upon by publishers in the countries where the reactivation of the women's movement began.2 These studies reached Europe in their original language. They began to arrive in Spanish translation in Latin America a little later, thus gradually putting Latin American women in the strange position of making their own acquaintance through the medium of an internationally-projected, internationally-recognised image of themselves which they played little part in constructing. Total ignorance was being replaced by a kind of ABC, a minimum common account which spread like magic, and now provides the prerequisite to be learned by heart by