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The following paper was presented at the Conference "Gendered Worlds: Gains and Challenges"

at Makerere University Kampala, Uganda, July 21-26 2002

Feminist Activism and Women’s Studies in Puerto Rico

Elizabeth Crespo

Bucknell University

 Paper presented at Women’s Worlds 2002

8^th International Interdisciplinary Congress on Women

Kampala, Uganda, July 21-26, 2002.

Puerto Rico is an archipelago located in the Caribbean.  It is culturally a Spanish speaking nation, politically it is a territory of the United States as a result of the military invasion of 1898.  Contrary to many common perceptions, feminist activism in Puerto Rico is not a consequence of feminist activism in the United States, and the gains of feminist movements in Puerto Rico are not a direct consequence of what happens in the United States; they have a complex history of their own. 

Feminist activism and women’s studies in Puerto Rico are not well known In the United States.  The lives, and struggles of Puerto Rican women and other women of Latin American origin who live in the continental United States have achieved a modest visibility within the United Sates.  This is not the case of the movements within Puerto Rico; these are widely ignored in the United Sates.  The projection of the movements within Puerto Rico to the rest of the world has happened through the efforts of feminist activists to form part of international networks, which they have done with considerable success. 

I take this occasion to call your attention to a book I have recently co-authored with Ana Irma Rivera Lassén, Documentos del Feminismo en Puerto Rico: Facsimiles de la Historia, Vol. 1, 1970-1979, published by the Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico.   It locates Puerto Rican feminist activism in Puerto Rico in relation to Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States, presenting and analyzing the debates within feminism during the decade of 1970, decade that marks the beginning of the second wave of feminism in Puerto Rico.  It contains interviews with feminist activists and compiles the most important documents produced by autonomous feminist organizations. 

The issues I put forward in this paper incorporate some of the research I present in Documentos del Feminismo and the discussion is meant to lay out some of the problems in teaching, research and action around women’s issues in Puerto Rico.

Authors such as Papart[i], Ong[ii], Anthias and Yuval-Davis[iii], and Mohanty[iv].  have pointed at length to the perils of the universalizing frameworks produced in western feminist discourses.  Mohanty uses the term colonization to describe the consequences of these paradigms.  “Colonization almost invariably implies a relation of structural domination, and a suppression -often violent- of the heterogeneity of the subject(s) in question”[v].  Too often, I argue, this colonization is seen only as a dynamic of western feminism.  It is important to address the fact that universalizing discursive strategies are not only produced by western or first world feminists. It is clear that they are produced in a variety of contexts, not only by groups traditionally defined as dominant, but also within subordinate groups themselves.

Western discourses cast  “the third world woman” as “uniformly poor, vulnerable and powerless, while western women were presented as the touchstone of modern femininity, educated and sexually liberated”[vi].  A source of this homogenization cast from the north, is actually constructed by authors in Latin America who write about women’s movements in Latin America.  According to some of these texts, the Latin American woman and Latin American women’s movements have been interested only with problems of economic survival. Writings such as those by Domitila Barrios de Chungara [vii] have come to represent within some sectors in the United States the prototype of the Latin American woman and her aversion to feminism.  Along these lines, authors such as Jo Fisher[viii] have argued that the feminist label appeals only to women from the upper class and that it is almost unanimously rejected by working class women in Latin America.  Statements such as this one have acted to de-legitimize feminism as elitist or bourgeois, as foreign or irrelevant to women’s daily needs.  In other texts, Latin American women’s revolutionary potential has been defined only in relation to anti-imperialist and proletarian revolutions.  Margaret Randall’s early work on women in Cuba and Nicaragua illustrate this latter perspective[ix].  All of these discourses deny the heterogeneity of women in the third world, the tremendous variety of their concerns and the diversity of feminisms. 

Although less addressed in feminist literature, third world feminists have also adopted frameworks that assume a homogeneous subject both inwardly, in relation to feminisms in their own countries[x], and outwardly, in relation to first world feminism.  This merits attention if we are to construct inclusive feminist discourses within the third world, ones that do not reproduce the power to exclude or make groups within our own countries invisible.  It is also important to address and to remedy the tendency to homogenize feminisms of the first world as uniformly privileged.  It is crucial to acknowledge the heterogeneity of feminisms and the diverse experiences of women if we wish to successfully form coalitions on an international level.  This sets the ground work for focusing on differences within a more meaningful context.

In Puerto Rico, US feminism was cast by some socialist feminists as uniformly privileged, white, bourgeois, and focused on sexual liberation. “In essence”, it was said, “the feminine movement [in the US] has focused primarily on defending the rights of petty bourgeois women and on the moral concepts of this social group”[xi].  In the mean time, in the United States, many women of color were denouncing racism within the movement but disavowing the depiction of feminism as a white movement[xii].  The characterization of US feminism by nationalist and socialist feminists in Puerto Rico was problematic because it reproduced significant elements of the same discourse used by patriarchal norms to discredit Puerto Rican feminism.  According to patriarchal discourse, feminism perverted traditional women’s roles, which were presented as national values.  Women were charged with procreating and rearing citizen for the fatherland.  Feminism threatened this traditional role and was represented as foreign.  It was important for feminists to move away from universalizing frameworks to describe US feminism in order to combat the negative casting of Puerto Rican feminists and feminism itself. 

The tendency to universalize was clearly reflected in the feminist debates in Puerto Rico during the 1970s.  In fact, one of the main impasses of the decade was the resistance of feminist groups to recognize and accept the diversity of the movement.  Each group vied for the position of the vanguard through rhetoric that described their organization as the “real representative”[xiii] of Puerto Rican women, “the alternative”[xiv] or representative of “the real feminist movement”[xv]. 

Homogenization projected inwardly produced totalizing feminist discourses  in Puerto Rico.  Some discourses attempted to explain women’s oppression as the result of a patriarchal system which predated capitalism.  The subject of this oppression was a transhistorical category defined as women.  Within this framework, women were seen as a social class[xvi].  Others theorized a stable unitary subject named “working class women”.  This category was presented as a critique of the rubric “woman” which did not consider class differences.  Nevertheless the category “working class women” created its own regimes of exclusion by producing distinctions between “good”/proletarian/revolutionary feminism and “bad”/bourgeois/reformist feminism.  The legitimate locus of good, revolutionary feminism was class struggle.  Bourgeois feminism, on the other hand, was associated with what was deemed a misplaced hostility toward men.  Responding to this portrayal, some feminists felt a need to distance themselves from a so called “anti-men” stance.  This distancing effort contained a lesbophobic subtext which is seen in statements made in feminist publications such as “we must avoid making the struggle one against men”[xvii], and “the struggle of women is NOT a struggle against men”[xviii]. 

In order to affirm women’s rights and still be accepted by men, it was necessary to affirm heterosexuality and recognize class struggle as the primary social conflict.  This established a difference between “our” feminism (heterosexual and working class) and “their” feminism (the feminism of the “other”, that is, of lesbians). Colonialist discourses produced within the colony created regimes of exclusion of their own based on dichotomous categories and assumptions of unitary subjects.

The concept of working class inherited from the left, far from opening up a specific experience of a group of women, was a universalizing framework that established distinctions between so called good acceptable feminists and bad feminists.  It also created a paradigm within academic research that left out many important themes in women’s studies: racial hierarchies, a critique of heterosexism, lesbian activism, and an analysis of growing sectors of women who are not salaried workers.  

The 1980s and 1990s were characterized by the emergence of many feminist groups who developed their activism around a greater variety of issues that were not addressed previously from feminist perspectives such as health, sexuality, work, the environment and education.  Feminists changed the terms of political debates by introducing themes that had previously been seen as personal or apolitical.  Domestic violence, for example, is an issue that has become central in political life and in the media in Puerto Rico.  The struggle against the anti-sodomy laws that criminalize consenting same-sex relations has come to the forefront.  Poverty is discussed in its gendered dynamics and not just as a national statistic.  Research on women has multiplied in numbers and in the range of topics and perspectives from which specific issues are considered.  Various centers were created within universities such as, El Centro de la Mujer del Colegio Regional de Aguadilla, el Centro de Investigación y Documentación de la Mujer (CIDOM) Interamerican University, the Centro de Estudios, Recursos y Servicios a la Mujer (CERES), and Proyecto de Estudios de la Mujer (Pro Mujer) at the University of Puerto Rico.  Nonetheless, the number of academic programs that grant degrees or certificates in women’s studies is very limited.

In the international sphere, Puerto Rican feminists who live in Puerto Rico have increased their participation dramatically not as part of the United States, where as I said earlier, they are mostly invisible.  They have formed part of international networks of non-governmental organizations and have achieved status as observers in governmental international forums. 

The formation of these networks has been facilitated by the recognition of the differences between women and by conceptual frameworks that speak of feminisms and citizenships in the plural, rather than in the singular.  In spite of political and economic difference between the countries of the region that participate in these networks, the similarities of the many problems that women confront are observed:  domestic violence, lack of access to health services, poverty, the destruction of the environment, the growing number of women whose families depend on them for their economic sustenance, and the lack of political representation.  These issues have been defined by feminists as central to affirm their rights as citizens in their countries. 

One of the central challenges posed by the gains of the feminist movements in the realm of legal reforms and the institutionalization of these gains within the structures of the state, is the loss of autonomy of feminist organizations as feminist activists come to occupy positions within the government.  This institutionalization has been accompanied by a militant backlash against the gains of feminism using elements of the same frameworks espoused by sectors of the feminist movement.  The notion that equality has been achieved is used to present challenges through the media and in the legal system (although the latter have been unsuccessful) that allege discrimination against men.  At the same time, the socio-economic gaps between men and women continue in favor of men and women continue to be killed by their intimate partners.  The state has looked to address domestic violence mostly through encarceration, and has not moved significantly to address the need to transform the patriarchal norms that sustain violence against women. 

Anti-abortion activists to try to limit women's reproductive choices using nationalist and anti-imperialist arguments against sterilization that in other moments are also adopted by nationalist feminists.  This is the case, for example, of the World Organization of the Family who argues that birth control programs and abortion rights are genocidal politics imposed on Third World countries by the rich nations of the world and pharmaceutical companies that reap extraordinary profits in detriment of the health and well being of women.  In Puerto Rico, antiabortion activist Reverend Patrick Welch[xix], denounced the experimentation of contraceptives using Puerto Rican women and argued that Roe v Wade was a decision imposed by seven judges of the US Supreme Court whom Puerto Ricans do not elect.  Furthermore, he argued that the overpopulation rhetoric and efforts to control Puerto Rican women's reproductive capabilities were examples of racism and genocide[xx].

The convergence of feminist and anti-feminist discourses points to the difficulties of applying a framework of dualistic categories such as first world and third world, metropolis and colony, rich and poor, men and women, to understand a more complex and nuanced reality, with a wider variety of actors and subjectivities than those contemplated in this framework.  I agree with Poovey's[xxi] invititation to examine the shared assumptions of feminist and anti-feminist discourses.  She has argued that the discourse of rights, privacy and choice used by abortion advocates are susceptible to appropriation by anti-abortion activists because they belong to a single set of metaphysical assumptions whose premise is that every subject has a substantive being or core that precedes social and linguistic coding.  The need to dissasemble feminist assumptions of the category woman is thus posed within the debates on reproductive rights. 

Universalizing frameworks have been a major obstacle for feminist research and activism.  It is a dynamic that continues to occur in all directions:  from the rich and most powerful countries toward the poor countries of the world, from the latter to the former, and within poor countries and subordinated groups themselves.  The task of breaking down these frameworks needs to come from all directions.