The Making of Revolutionary Feminism in El Salvador

I present my book, The Making of Revolutionary Feminism in EL Salvador, the first full-length history about Salvadoran revolutionary women. The book covers five decades of struggle, from 1965 to 2015, telling the stories of peasant and working-class women who organized class struggle against landowners, military officers, and imperialists. I demonstrate how women confronted sexism and developed a vision of women’s liberation within radical movements. The book narrates a dynamic and contentious political process in which rank-and-file women changed the meaning and course of revolution. As a result, I challenge dominant characterizations of revolutionary movements as monolithic, static, and dominated by urban intellectual men.

My book makes two major contributions. First, I build on recent scholarship that has identified peasants and teachers as popular intellectuals. In contrast to other studies, I show the role of gender in shaping the lives of those workers and labor organizers. I specifically demonstrate how women built powerful labor movements that organized fifteen years prior to the start of the armed insurgency in 1980. In the 1960s and 1970s, a multigenerational movement of women broke with many aspects of patriarchal tradition to participate politically. This rupture facilitated disruptive action and elevated the labor movement to unprecedented levels. These women continued organizing during the war itself, from 1980 to 1992. Second, I document the transnational making of revolutionary feminism, a theory and practice that confronted both patriarchy and capitalism in the 1970s and 1980s. This constitutes the book’s most original contribution. It challenges dominant binaries (within and outside academia) that situate feminism in opposition to socialism and armed struggle.