Anti-colonial Feminist Ramblings About Everything and Anything

Nash, June and Helen Icken Safa. "A Decade of Research on Women in Latin America". Pp. 3-21. Women and Change in Latin America. Massachusetts: Bergin & Garvey, 1986. The authors indicate the lack of interest, and therefore data about women's contribution to economic, political and social life (3) in Marxist predominated analyses. Buenos Aires 1974 is seen as a benchmark of the efforts to put together ehtnographic research that deals with the ways women are involved in modes of production. Some studies at this point showed the segmentation of the work force by gender and ethnicity; especially regarding the fact that women are concentrated in the non-market areas of economy, which is frequently overlooked by researchers, or even rendered invisible by assumptions of male-headed households and of paid work as equivalent of work. The authors also note that the first feminist Marxist analyses by de Beauvoir and others departed from the universality of women's oppression...

Vaughan, Mary Kay. “Modernizing Patriarchy: State Policies, Rural Households, and Women in Mexico, 1930-1940” in Dore and Molyneux, Hidden histories of gender and the state in Latin America. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. Vaughan analyzes post-revolutionary state policies that were aimed to modernize family, not to emancipate women but to accommodate the household to the interests and ideology of national development. One of the features of 20th century state policies was they sought to rationalize the domestic, private sphere; so mothers had to be disciplined and educated in order to have a healthy family that would contribute to national progress. In the same way, school was the space for children to be indoctrinated on patriotism and modernity, preparing them to be good productive workers. Throughout these policies, women were viewed as conduits for national progress, not as subjects with their own interests outside the family or the nation (for instance, women's sexualit...