Feminist ideology during the Sandinista Revolution
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The women in Nicaragua during the Sandinista Revolution saw their way of life drastically change. The new woman was depicted in Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) posters through the revolution; the idealized image of a guerilla Sandinista smiling while nursing an infant and carrying a rifle over her soldier. Once women became involved as guerilla fighters in the overthrown of the Anastasio Somoza García regime, the issue of gender would never be the same as many women mobilized to assist the FSLN bring about the revolution.
Early in the revolution, the FSLN made the emancipation of women one of its top goals. With the assistance with their partner and the predominant women's organization AMNLAE (Asociacion de Mujeres Nicaraguenses Luisa Amanda Espinosa), the FSLN made significant progress towards this goal. Specifically, the Sandinistas prohibited the use of women as sex objects, promoted breast feeding and made legalized breaks for working women to do so, eliminated the distinction between children born in and out of wedlock, banned the former "family wage" that saw male heads of households receive the wage of his wife and children's labour, required that men and women shared the household duties including child care, and also established penalties to suppress prostitution. However, not all women were happy with these gains instead viewing them as merely extensions of women's traditional roles rather than something more progressive. The main issue for Nicaraguan feminists was that a radical change was necessary to shift the common social ideologies away from the ideals of sexism and machismo that only served to maintain gender inequality.
Nicaraguan feminists were not able to find a voice through AMNLAE, who they saw as more feminine than feminist, thus many feminists cut their ties with what they see as a right-wing organization and began advocating for gender equality on their own. This became increasing difficult during the Contra war when AMNLAE, the FSLN, and other independent women shifted their focus away from emancipating women and towards winning the war. Feminists believed that promoting the deconstruction of the problematic ideologies of sexism and machismo could in fact help the war efforts and simultaneously continue the revolutionary process. However, the reluctance for AMNLAE to explicitly pursue the anti-sexism agenda and the subsequent acceptance of more traditional roles for women and families by the FSLN was largely responsible for the outcome of the 1990 elections.
The ultimate defeat came in 1990 when Violeta Chamorro representing the United Nicaraguan Opposition (UNO), was elected into office thus ousting the FSLN from power. This was not only a defeat for the FSLN and revolutionaries but for the Nicaraguan feminists in particular. Because neither AMNLAE nor the FSLN explicitly challenged the sexist controversies, they subsequently fell to a much more traditional and conservative party led by a woman president fulfilling the typical gender-roles that Nicaraguan feminists felt that women desperately needed to dismantle during the revolution.
[edit] References
- Chinchilla, Norma Stoltz. "Feminism, Revolution, and Democratic Transitions in Nicaragua" in The Women's Movement in Latin America: Participation and Democracy (2nd ed). Ed. Jane S. Jaquette. Boulder: Westview Press, 1994. 177-196.
- Chinchilla, Norma Stoltz. Revolutionary Popular Feminism in Nicaragua: Articulating Class, Gender, and National Sovereignty. Gender and Society 4 (1990): 370-397.
- Kampwirth, Karen. Feminism and the Legacy of Revolution: Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chiapas. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004. 19-46.
- Molyneux, Maxine. "Mobilization without Emancipation? Women's Interests, the State, and Revolution in Nicaragua”. Feminist Studies, 11.2 (1985) 227-254.
