Insurgent Butterflies: Gender and Revolution in El Salvador, 1965-2015

Abstract

Drawing from archival sources and fifty oral histories, this dissertation recovers the political interventions of rank-and-file Salvadoran women, recognizing both the sexist currents within leftist movements and the alternative revolutionary praxis that women developed. It identifies some of the women who built the base of revolutionary movements in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, and demonstrates how they intervened in key ways through their labor, organizing practices, and political theorization. Women synthesized liberation theology, Marxism, and feminism to meet their specific needs, and in doing so strongly influenced the political practice of the Salvadoran left.

I trace women’s organizing over five decades of struggle, from 1965 to 2015, paying special attention to praxis, or the interplay between theory and practice. I highlight the role of everyday practices, internal negotiations, and transnational networks in shaping revolutionary processes. Praxis is a useful concept because it illuminates how oppressed people who are engaged in collective political struggle acquire an understanding of their collective conditions, and how they produce theories to analyze and act in the world. Praxis is not a linear or one-way process; political consciousness arises from experience, and in turn, actors develop theories and practices that are applied and refined to confront new challenges.

Through collective organizing, teachers and peasants sought to create a world without landlords, dictators, paramilitaries, and imperialists. Struggles for better wages and workplace dignity generated a process in which women and girls took leftist principles such as dignity, equality, and solidarity to new radical conclusions. In the mid-1960s and early 1970s, women fought hard to join labor organizations and legitimate the social movement participation of women. Their entry into the revolutionary movement was by no means a foregone conclusion. As women waged a class struggle against the landed oligarchy and military governments, women also confronted patriarchal authority at home. Those two earlier decades of struggle created fertile soil for the emergence of a new revolutionary feminist praxis in the 1980s. Within the guerrilla territories, women intervened to shape the daily practices of armed struggle. Abroad, exiled Salvadoran women collaborated with other leftist women who also denounced both class and gender oppression. Salvadoran women developed a broad vision of revolution that linked socialism to women’s liberation. This dissertation offers a new account of the emergence, meaning, and practice of revolutionary feminism in El Salvador. In so doing, it also offers a new periodization of Salvadoran feminism. While standard narratives date the rise of feminism to the 1990s, when many women abandoned the FMLN party and formed self-identified feminist organizations, I demonstrate how women developed feminist practices in earlier decades within the context of peasant and working-class movements.

The study contributes to two important fields: studies of the Salvadoran revolution and feminist studies of revolutionary women. It challenges dominant characterizations of the revolutionary movements as monolithic, static, and dominated by urban-based male intellectuals, expanding on an emergent current in scholarship on the civil war. Second, it contributes to feminist studies by demonstrating the role of women in reshaping revolutionary thought and practice by linking women’s liberation to anti-capitalist politics.