Domestic dissidence
Reform of property rights was a step in the emancipation of Latin American women. Books in brief: First-Wave Feminism and Women’s Civil and Political Rights in South America
First-Wave Feminism and Women’s Civil and Political Rights in South America, Carmen Diana Deere, 2026, Routledge
By Gavin O’Toole
In classic Marxist thought the nuclear family is an instrument of capitalism which, by denying women property rights, creates domestic slavery in which they undertake unpaid labour with the wider aim of reproducing the working class.
Gender struggle is not necessarily women versus men but should be seen in terms of a struggle against gendering mechanisms employed by the ruling class to maintain social order and concentrate wealth.
Nonetheless, it has always been easy for those who control capital, and hence the state, to depict equality in ideological terms as an existential affront to masculine identity, and against some form of “natural order”.
This was certainly the case in Latin America as some countries began to take the first steps towards industrialisation, when the property rights of married women were thrust on to the political agenda for the first time.
The region offers fascinating case studies of the struggles fought by wives in the early 20th century for the recognition of property rights in law, sometimes predating the emergence of women’s rights organisations more generally.
These struggles and legal debates offer a window on the broader societal transition from quasi-feudal social relations to those based on bourgeois liberal precepts in which the dominant focus became private property.
While the liberal republics of South America recognised in constitutions the right to own property of single adult women, and a range of other civil rights, this changed once a woman married.
Then, colonial-era tradition kicked in, and the character of what was owned within the marriage took a form of community property administered solely by the husband, who thereby controlled both his wife’s property and her person. Moreover, the father also controlled the person and property of the couple’s legitimate children until the age of majority.
While these relations went unchallenged in the 19th century yet were clearly open to widespread abuse, new ideas were circulating and Latin Americans were being influenced by the novel rights women were achieving in the US and Europe.
In First-Wave Feminism and Women’s Civil and Political Rights in South America, Carmen Diana Deere exmaines reforms of women’s civil and political rights in seven South American countries: Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela.
She looks at the roles played by feminists, jurists and politicians in achieving reform, and the diversity of outcomes that resulted.
In the vanguard of this historical movement was, perhaps unexpectedly, Ecuador, where the first successful reform of married women’s property rights and the enactment of women’s suffrage took place.
At first sight, this development challenges Marxist thinking, because Ecuador was not only a less-developed Andean country at that stage, but also this change took place prior to the emrgence of women’s rights organisations, unlike in the more developed Southern Cone countries.
In the case of the latter it is easier to make an argument that change reflected nascent industrialisation and with it urbanisation, whereby legal changes in turn obeyed a socieconomic transformation in which women were increasingly entering the labour force.
Nonetheless, when considered in the context of the liberal hegemony that existed in Ecuador following the revolution of 1895, it is easier to explain the anomaly.
The expansion of women’s rights in this case formed part of a broader panoply of radical measures ultimately aimed collectively at spurring liberal socieconomic change to create the conditions for capitalist growth.
Ecuador was a revolutionary society that had undergone radical social and political upheaval under the leadership of the liberal stalwart Eloy Alfaro, “The Old Warrior”, who pioneered the legalisation of divorce and challenged the Church.
Nonetheless, looked at in the round, most South American feminists framed their demands not in terms of true equality, but in “maternalist” arguments—that they needed stronger rights to be better wives and mothers.
First-Wave Feminism and Women’s Civil and Political Rights in South America represents a valuable historical source of reference documenting this approach, while expanding the wider discussion about the relationship between socioeconomic change and the legal categorisation of gender.
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