Reflection IV

My political activism against the Vietnam War as an undergraduate in the mid-1970s was a significant factor in my becoming a historian.  I had also come to define myself as a radical/socialist feminist by the time I started grad school, building on the few courses I took available when an undergraduate dealing with women and gender (though the latter term was not in use yet).  Despite this prior self-identification and academic interest, I never seriously considered doing my dissertation in the field of women’s history, unlike some of my counterparts in US and European history.  This was partly because the left in Latin America in the 1970s tended to dismiss the historical movements for women’s rights as “bourgeois feminism” and the study of these movements as a function of US influence (something that, in those days, was never a good thing).  Furthermore, those historians who were writing about women’s rights in Latin America tended to be working with a diffusionist paradigm that often left them with little option but to tell a smaller-scale, less heroic version of the stories that had already emerged in the US and Western European contexts.  But beginning in the mid-1980s, when I took over as acting director of SUNY-Stony Brook’s women’s studies program and organized a conference on Third World Women, I began to perceive how I could write about women and (now) gender in a way that didn’t privilege organized (mainly middle-class) feminist movements and didn’t position Latin America as peripheral to world-historical processes.