This interdisciplinary volume provides a historical and international framework for understanding the changing role of women in the political economy of Latin America and the Caribbean. The contributors challenge the traditional policies, goals, and effects of development, and examine such topics as colonialism and women's subordination; the links to economic, social, and political trends in North America; the gendered division of paid and unpaid work; differing economic structures, cultural and class patterns; women's organized resistance; and the relationship of gender to class, race, and ethnicity/nationality. Author note: Christine E. Bose is Associate Professor of Sociology, Women's Studies, and Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University at Albany, SUNY. >P>Edna Acosta-Belen is Distinguished Service Professor of Latin American and Caribbean Studies and Women's Studies and the Director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and the Director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University at Albany, SUNY.

Over recent decades, women in Latin America and the Caribbean have increased their labor force participation faster than in any other region of the world. This evolution occurred in the context of more general progress in women’s status. Female enrollment rates have increased at all levels of education, fertility rates have declined, and social norms have shifted toward gender equality. This report sheds light on the complex relationship between stages of economic development and female economic participation. It documents a shift in women’s perceptions whereby work has become a fundamental part of their identity, highlighting the distinction between jobs and careers. These dynamics are made more complex by the acknowledgment that individuals are part of larger economic units—families. As development progresses and the options available to women expand, the need to balance career and family takes greater importance. New tensions emerge, paradoxically made possible by decades of steady gains. Understanding the new challenges women face as they balance work and family is thus crucial for policy.

This indispensable text reader provides a broad-ranging and thoughtfully organized feminist introduction to the ongoing controversies of development in Latin America and the Caribbean. Designed for use in a variety of college courses, the volume collects an influential group of essays first published in Latin American Perspectives--a theoretical and scholarly journal focused on the political economy of capitalism, imperialism, and socialism in the Americas. The reader is organized into thematic sections that focus on work, politics, and culture, and each section includes substantive introductions that identify key issues, trends, and debates in the scholarly literature on women and gender in the region. Demonstrating the rich and multidisciplinary nature of Latin American studies, this collection of timely, empirical studies promotes critical thinking about women's place and power; about theory and research strategies; and about contemporary economic, political, and social conditions in Latin America and the Caribbean. Valuable as both a supplementary or primary text, Rereading Women makes a convincing claim for a materialist feminist analysis. It convincingly shows why women have become an increasingly important subject of research, acknowledges their gains and struggles over time, and explores the contributions that feminist theory has made toward the recognition of gender as a relevant--indeed essential--category for analyzing the political economy of development.

This interdisciplinary volume provides a historical and international framework for understanding the changing role of women in the political economy of Latin America and the Caribbean. The contributors challenge the traditional policies, goals, and effects of development, and examine such topics as colonialism and women's subordination; the links to economic, social, and political trends in North America; the gendered division of paid and unpaid work; differing economic structures, cultural and class patterns; women's organized resistance; and the relationship of gender to class, race, and ethnicity/nationality.

A comprehensive state-of-the-art review of gender in one of the world's most diverse and dynamic regions. The authors draw on a wide range of sources, including their own field research, to explore changes and continuities in gender roles, relations and identities during the late twentieth century into the twenty-first. Debunking traditional universalizing stereotypes, diversity in gender is highlighted in relation to the cross-cutting influences of age, class, sexuality, ethnicity, rural-urban residence, and migrant status.

Since the early 1980s Ecuador has experienced a series of events unparalleled in its history. Its &“free market&” strategies exacerbated the debt crisis, and in response new forms of social movement organizing arose among the country&’s poor, including women&’s groups. Gendered Paradoxes focuses on women&’s participation in the political and economic restructuring process of the past twenty-five years, showing how in their daily struggle for survival Ecuadorian women have both reinforced and embraced the neoliberal model yet also challenged its exclusionary nature. Drawing on her extensive ethnographic fieldwork and employing an approach combining political economy and cultural politics, Amy Lind charts the growth of several strands of women&’s activism and identifies how they have helped redefine, often in contradictory ways, the real and imagined boundaries of neoliberal development discourse and practice. In her analysis of this ambivalent and &“unfinished&” cultural project of modernity in the Andes, she examines state policies and their effects on women of various social sectors; women&’s community development initiatives and responses to the debt crisis; and the roles played by feminist &“issue networks&” in reshaping national and international policy agendas in Ecuador and in developing a transnationally influenced, locally based feminist movement.