The Cuban Woman's Revolutionary Experience: Patriarchal Culture and the State's Gender Ideology, 1950–1976

Abstract

Soon after the triumph of the 1959 Cuban Revolution, the government led multiple efforts to reconstruct Cuban society. The state's articulation and implementation of new gender politics was central to the massive mobilization of Cubans. During the first twenty-five years of the revolution, politics were constructed through and built upon a familiar and accepted gendered framework in which men held social power. In this process, in which socially reconstructed sexual differences and roles came to serve the needs of the new political agenda, new ideas about womanhood were produced. This article contends that the revolutionary state framed its expectations of Cubans using a familiar gendered language that made possible the popular acceptance of the reconfiguration of traditional gender roles. In order to shed light on the evolution of Cuban women's gender identities under a socialist government, it contrasts Cuban premises of womanhood during the 1950s with postrevolutionary reconfigurations of, sometimes contradictory, notions of womanhood.