Cooking, Nursing, and Loving: Demystifying Sandinista's Narratives on Womens Roles during the Sandino Rebellion, 1927–33

Cooking, Nursing and Loving: Demystifying Sandinistas Narratives on Women Roles during the Sandino Rebellion, 1927-1933

Richard Grossman

In 1927 Augusto Sandino organized a guerrilla resistance to the occupation of Nicaragua by U.S. Marines.  Sandino’s base of support was the mountain peasants of northern Nicaragua and thousands contributed what they could to the struggle. This paper will explore peasant women’s participation and what roles these women actually filled during the rebellion.  The modern Frente Sandinista de Liberacion Nacional (FSLN) partially based their ideology on Sandino and they mythologized him into an idealized “hero”.   Among the myths was an exaggerated claim of women as combatants under Sandino.  However, my research shows that instead Sandino created an explicit “brotherhood” among his soldiers and therefore forbade women from carrying arms. While women were very active, they mainly carried out traditional gendered roles as  “camp followers”, i.e. cooks, nurses, lovers, etc. Some were also messengers and spies. All these activities were essential in allowing the Sandinista guerrillas to be able to survive. Thus it is clear that many of these peasant women strongly identified with the movement. For this paper, beyond examining women’s specific activities, I will also discuss the more complicated questions of how and why they were mobilized.