Before the Revolution

Women's Rights and Right-Wing Politics in Nicaragua, 1821–1979 Victoria González-Rivera

Publish Date: 7/28/2011
Dimensions: 6 x 9
Page Count: 256 pages

Illustrations:

Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-271-04870-3
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-271-04871-0

Hardcover Edition: $64.95Add to Cart

Paperback Edition: $29.95Add to Cart

“This book is a pioneering study of the development of a vibrant feminist movement in Nicaragua during the early twentieth century, as well as of the role of a later generation of women who gave conditional support to the Somoza regime in exchange for suffrage and increased political, educational, and economic opportunities. It also offers an original analysis of sexual politics under the dictatorship and the forging of resilient right-wing clientelistic identities and traditions.” —Frances Kinloch Tijerino, Instituto de Historia de Nicaragua y Centroamérica (IHNCA-UCA)

“Victoria González-Rivera has written a very important book. By uncovering the hidden history of first-wave feminism and the Somocista women's movement in Nicaragua, she has forced us to rethink how we understand both Nicaraguan politics and women's history in general. Her book is engagingly written and jargon free, so it should be very appealing to both students and scholars.” —Karen Kampwirth, Knox College

“[Before the Revolution: Women's Rights and Right-Wing Politics in Nicaragua] is accessible, interesting and full of compelling questions.” —J. M. Rosenthal, Choice

“Before the Revolution is remarkably successful in replacing the previous narrative of Nicaraguan feminism's beginnings with, as [González-Rivera] describes it, ‘a radically different revisionist version of Nicaraguan women's history.’ The book's tone is intimate and inclusive: González-Rivera clarifies terms and explains her research methods, making her work accessible to students as well as scholars.” —Florence E. Babb, Women’s Review of Books

Those who survived the brutal dictatorship of the Somoza family have tended to portray the rise of the women’s movement and feminist activism as part of the overall story of the anti-Somoza resistance. But this depiction of heroic struggle obscures a much more complicated history. As Victoria González-Rivera reveals in this book, some Nicaraguan women expressed early interest in eliminating the tyranny of male domination, and this interest grew into full-fledged campaigns for female suffrage and access to education by the 1880s. By the 1920s a feminist movement had emerged among urban, middle-class women, and it lasted for two more decades until it was eclipsed in the 1950s by a nonfeminist movement of mainly Catholic, urban, middle-class and working-class women who supported the liberal, populist, patron-clientelistic regime of the Somozas in return for the right to vote and various economic, educational, and political opportunities. Counterintuitively, it was actually the Somozas who encouraged women's participation in the public sphere (as long as they remained loyal Somocistas). Their opponents, the Sandinistas and Conservatives, often appealed to women through their maternal identity. What emerges from this fine-grained analysis is a picture of a much more complex political landscape than that portrayed by the simplifying myths of current Nicaraguan historiography, and we can now see why and how the Somoza dictatorship did not endure by dint of fear and compulsion alone.

Victoria González-Rivera is Assistant Professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies at San Diego State University. She is the co-editor, with Karen Kampwirth, of Radical Women in Latin America: Left and Right (Penn State, 2001).

Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

1 Feminism Before Somoza

2 From Feminism to Partisan Suffragist Politics

3 The Aftermath of Women’s Suffrage

4 Somocista Women’s Lives

5 The Activism and Legacy of Nicolasa Sevilla

6 Sex and Somocismo