Why Dominican Feminism Moved to the Right: Class, Colour and Women's Activism in the Dominican Republic, 1880s–1940s

Abstract

This article analyses feminism in the Dominican Republic, and the rightward shift of the women's movement in the 1930s and 1940s, by examining the historical development of female activism in the Dominican Republic from the 1880s until the first decade of General Rafael Trujillo's regime in the 1940s. The article argues that elite female activists, most of whom were white or light‐skinned, allied themselves with the right‐wing politics of General Rafael Trujillo's dictatorship because his vision of elite women's activism complemented the class and colour interests of a select group of female reformers. Dominican feminism's rightward shift also resulted from the monopolisation of political power under the Dominican Party; the veneration of elite, bourgeois womanhood in official state iconography; the elaboration of Hispanidad nationalism; and the rejection of feminism's early roots in the political philosophy of Eugenio María de Hostos. As a result, Dominican feminism's origins in left‐leaning, potentially radical politics were ignored and erased by leading activists.