For those interested in democratic transition and consolidation, social movements, and gender politics, this volume is the most comprehensive, up-to-date, and probing analysis available of how women's groups are helping to reshape Latin America. The contributors document and assess the remarkable wave of women's political participation in Latin America over the past two decades. The first five case studies, on Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, and Peru, examine the origins, evolution, and goals of women's organizations as they worked together to end authoritarian rule and elaborate how women's groups have adapted in the 1990s to the day-to-day realities of democratic politics. In the 1990s, the challenge has shifted from mobilizing opposition to the very different task of working with parties and government bureaucracies in order to maintain and implement their agendas. The chapters on Nicaragua and Mexico broaden our understanding of political transitions.Seven case studies vividly illustrate the variety of women's movements in the region, ranging from the communal-kitchens movements to human rights groups. Each author discusses the strategies and debates of the feminist movements in question and records their political successes and failures. Jaquette's introductory and concluding essays provide a comparative framework, highlighting the innovative ways in which Latin American women are making gender a political issue.

This book, paying attention to the axes of identity, strategy, and democracy, grew out of the authors' shared and growing interest in contemporary social movements and the vast theoretical literature on these movements produced during the 1980s, particularly in Latin America and Western Europe.

"This is a very exciting collection that will fill an important gap in what has emerged in comparative studies of women and Latin American democracies. Maier and Lebon provide provocative overview essays, and the chapters trace a range of cases from Argentina and Brazil to Nicaragua and Venezuela, showing how institutions. leaders and culture all shape the opportunities and challenges women face."---Jane Jaquette, editor of Feminist Agendas and Democracy in Latin America --

The death of feminism is regularly proclaimed in the West. Yet at the same time feminism has never had such an extensive presence, whether in international norms and institutions, or online in blogs and social networking campaigns. This book argues that the women’s movement is not over; but rather social movement theory has led us to look in the wrong places. This book offers both methodological and theoretical innovations in the study of social movements, and analyses how the trajectories of protest activity and institution-building fit together. The rich empirical study, together with focused research on discursive activism, blogging, popular culture and advocacy networks, provides an extraordinary resource, showing how the women’s movements can survive the highs and lows and adapt in unexpected ways. Expert contributors explore the ways in which the movement is continuing to work its way through institutions, and persists within submerged networks, cultural production and in everyday living, sustaining itself in non-receptive political environments and maintaining a discursive feminist space for generations to come. Set in a transnational perspective, this book trace the legacies of the Australian women’s movement to the present day in protest, non-government organisations, government organisations, popular culture, the Internet and the Slut Walk. The Women’s Movement in Protest, Institutions and the Internet will be of interest to international students and scholars of gender politics, gender studies, social movement studies and comparative politics.

The election of Michelle Bachelet as president of Chile in 2006 gave new impetus to the struggle in that country for legislation to improve women’s rights and highlighted a process that had already been under way for some time. In Feminist Policymaking in Chile, Liesl Haas investigates the efforts of Chilean feminists to win policy reforms on a broad range of gender equity issues—from labor and marriage laws, to educational opportunities, to health and reproductive rights. Between 1990 and 2008, sixty-three bills were put forward in the Chilean legislature as a result of pressure brought by the feminist movement and its allies. Haas examines all these bills, identifying the conditions under which feminist policymaking was most likely to succeed. In doing so, she develops a predictive theory of policy success that is broadly applicable to other Latin American countries.

This thought-provoking volume, dedicated to the International Women's Decade, reflects the decade's themes of equality, peace, and development. Experts assess the progress that has been made, lament the failure of nations to take more steps to improve women's status, and analyze the divisive issues that have been at the forefront of concern and have limited the achievements of the two United Nations conferences on women. With its broad perspective of women's involvement in political systems and processes in the Middle East, Latin America, Europe, the United States, and Japan, this highly insightful book confirms the critical importance of culture in determining female political status and behavior. The chapters reflect the diversity that results from the different levels of general socioeconomic and political development of the nations in which the world's feminists live, and the importance of culture, economic factors, and ideologies in determining the variety of visions women have about the ultimate purposes of their lives and the social change being sought.

The two current trends of democratization and deepening economic liberalization have made Latin American countries a ground for massive defensive mobilization campaigns and have created new sites of popular struggle. In this edited volume on Latin American social movements, original chapters are combined with peer-reviewed articles from the well-regarded journal Mobilization. Each section represents a major theme in Latin American social movement research. Original chapters discuss the Madres de Plaza de Mayo movement in Argentina and the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico. Also included in the book's coverage of the region's major movements are los piqueteros and antisweatshop labor organizing. This is the first study to focus closely on the related issues of neoliberal globalization, democratization, and the workings of transnational advocacy networks in Latin America.

This volume brings together multi-method research on political mobilization in the USA, rights in Peru, peacebuilding in Croatia and Israel/Palestine, local forums in the Occupy movement and a crowd behaviors in the context of university party riots.

The analysis of gender and political inequality, and the women's movements that have contested it, has concentrated on the West. In this wide-ranging reevaluation, incorporating development studies and political sociology, Maxine Molyneux redresses this balance by analysing Latin American women's movements within liberal, authoritarian and revolutionary states. These studies of Argentina, Nicaragua and Cuba, alongside comparative discussions of socialism, women's movements and citizenship, examine the complex, and persistent, interaction of states and women's movements, and the diversity of responses engendered.