Feminist legacies are coming under increasing scrutiny in many parts of the world today.footnote¹ In Britain, a recent report asks whether gender justice has so far been just a ‘middle-class story of progress’, with gains at the top matched by indifference to the plight of the majority of women.footnote² In Latin America, Africa and much of South and Southeast Asia, ambiguous advances for women’s agendas seem inadequate in view of the devastation wrought by structural adjustment programmes. More pointedly, there is a growing concern about the convergence between certain forms of feminism and the agendas of neoliberal capitalism. Hester Eisenstein was among the first to analyse what she described as the ‘dangerous liaison’ between contemporary capitalism and a now-dominant liberal feminism. Nancy Fraser has suggested that second-wave feminism has ‘unwittingly’ supplied a key ingredient for the new spirit of neoliberal capitalism, by setting aside questions of material equality and political-economic redistribution in favour of struggles for the recognition of identity and difference. In a response to Fraser, Meg Luxton and Joan Sangster also single out liberal feminism, rather than second-wave feminism in general, arguing that its compatibility with neoliberalism is explicit and structural, not based on a ‘subterranean affinity’ between the two, as Fraser had suggested.footnote³

This contribution aims to examine the problematic of feminism and neoliberalism in the context of actually existing—historicized and culturally distinct—forms of capitalism, taking the specific experiences of Latin American feminism as its object of investigation. The unfolding of capitalist development and the diffusion of feminist ideas are not self-evident processes whose outcomes can be taken for granted, as implicitly assumed in the debate so far. While certain general tendencies can be grounded in the logic of contemporary capitalism, this does not justify a ‘one-size-fits-all’ account. The distinctive dynamics of neoliberal capitalism play out within historically determined social contexts, generating a multiplicity of localized forms which have in turn undergone their own contradictory evolution, moving from experimental to consolidated or mature articulations—and facing different processes of contestation along the way. Similarly, to adopt a simple, diffusionist explanation of feminist advance occludes the plurality of women’s experiences and serves to dull the potential of a critical feminist theory for our times. What follows, then, will explore the adequacy of Fraser’s explanation, in particular, within this framework, taking my research in Chile as its empirical point d’appui.

Fraser’s argument in ‘Feminism, Capitalism and the Cunning of History’ is based on a three-fold periodization: a post-war era of ‘state-organized capitalist society’, a neoliberal epoch from the 1980s to 2008 and, hopefully, a new post-crisis era of renewed radicalization. This schema, she underlines, applies not only to the Fordist welfare states of the oecd countries but also to the ex-colonial developmentalist states of what was then called the Third World, which aimed ‘to jump-start national economic growth by means of import-substitution policies, infrastructural investment, nationalization of key industries and public spending on education’.footnote⁴ Second-wave feminism, Fraser argues, emerged out of the anti-imperialist New Left and the global anti-Vietnam War ferment of the late sixties, as a challenge to the male-dominated nature of this ‘state-organized’ capitalism. During this first period, the feminist movement targeted four interlinked dimensions of the ruling social order: its ‘economism’, or blindness to non-distributive forms of injustice (family, sexual, racialized); its androcentrism, structured by the gendered division of labour, the family wage and devalorization of care work; its bureaucratic étatism, challenged in the name of democratization and popular control; and finally its ‘Westphalianism’, in the sense of the existing inter-state order. Across all these dimensions, Fraser argues, second-wave feminism fought for a systemic transformation that would be at once economic, cultural and political; it didn’t seek simply to replace the family wage with a two-earner family, but to revalue care-giving on an egalitarian basis; it didn’t want to free markets from state control but to democratize state and economic power.

The main reason why second-wave feminism nevertheless went on to thrive in the era of neoliberal capitalism from the 1980s onwards, Fraser suggests, was that these goals were ‘resignified’. Feminism’s critique of economism devolved into a one-sided emphasis on culture and identity, unmoored from anti-capitalism; its assault on the androcentric concept of the male breadwinner was recuperated by the ‘new economy’, which welcomed female employment as furthering the trend towards a flexibilized, low-wage workforce and normalized the two-earner family. Feminism’s critique of bureaucracy could align itself with the neoliberal attack on the state and the promotion of ngos; its internationalism fitted well with the machinery of ‘global governance’, committed though this was to neoliberal restructuring. Fraser did not target specific feminist currents or practices but rather the ‘subtle shift’ in the valence of feminist ideas: once frankly emancipatory, under neoliberalism these had become ‘fraught with ambiguity’ and susceptible to serving the legitimation needs of capitalism.

How applicable is this model to Latin America? Here, the capitalist state of the seventies was not the depoliticized bureaucracy that Fraser describes but more often a brutal military dictatorship, heavily gendered, aiming at the physical eradication of left opposition and defending starkly unequal property relations. The feminist movements of the seventies emerged in the course of revolutionary struggles against harshly repressive regimes: military juntas seized power in Brazil from 1964, in Bolivia from 1971, in Uruguay and Chile from 1973 and in Argentina from 1976, instituting technocratic dictatorships that used torture, disappearances and murder to eliminate the left, destroy the trade unions and demobilize civil society. Nor was Latin America’s import-substitution developmentalism ever fully Fordist; the family wage—male breadwinner, female homemaker—remained the privilege of a tiny minority of skilled workers, even in Argentina, Mexico and Venezuela. In contrast to the post-war oecd ‘housewife’, a majority of Latin American women worked—on the land or as domestic servants—while the women of the elite were liberated from housework by their maids. It was the failure of developmentalism—not least in the absence of redistributive land reform—to mitigate poverty and inequality in the region that underlay the militancy of the sixties, which the military dictatorships aimed to crush.

An obvious criticism to be made of Fraser’s account is that the homogeneous ‘second-wave feminism’ of her telling never existed; the women’s movements of the seventies were always multi-stranded, indeed often sharply divided.footnote⁵ Latin America’s experience helps to complicate the picture further. The feminist movements that emerged in the region were not merely imitative of us experiences; often they involved reconfigurations of pre-existing currents—socialist, anarchist, Catholic, liberal—with traditions of activism, research and cultural interventions stretching back to the nineteenth century.footnote⁶ Latin America is of course itself an abstraction, a short-hand for a wide variety of experiences and sub-regional trends. Yet while the new movements were shaped by the heterogeneous social and cultural make-up of the different countries, they also developed shared characteristics and dynamics. An important layer of feminists came from the revolutionary movements that had sprung up in the sixties, in response both to economic inequality and to us imperialist interventions, with the Cuban revolution undoubtedly a central inspiration. These groups recruited a new generation of highly educated women, who were not content with being helpmates of male revolutionaries. While women remained a minority as formal members of Communist parties and other militant organizations, they were centrally involved in a wide range of activities. These young militants of the revolutionary left became ‘the fiery feminists of the 1970s’,footnote⁷ often engaged in a ‘double militancy’, active both in left parties and in women’s groups.

Yet perhaps equally important in the long run was the upsurge of Catholic activism. Latin Americanist feminist narratives largely insist on a secular reading of women’s activism, yet the continent’s history of social mobilization makes clear that Catholic thought and practice were significant from the late fifties on. This took its most radical form in liberation theology, which influenced a new generation of lay Catholics, as well as young nuns and priests. Calls for action on behalf of the poor from the 1968 Episcopal Conference in Medellín spoke of popular education as a tool for change and ‘consciousness raising’ as a means of liberation, calling for ‘the awakening and organization of the popular sectors of society’ to press for social projects.footnote⁸ For all its contradictions, this would prove an important dimension for inter-class solidarity—not least in the social mobilizations of the indigenous movements. Far more than in Europe and North America, feminist agitation in Latin America during this period was characterized by the integration of intellectuals and middle-class activists in struggles for basic rights and equality, under repressive regimes. Socialist and radical feminists were joined by ‘popular feminists’, working-class women in Church or neighbourhood associations, organizing against the dictatorships.