Women's Movements in Latin America: The Struggle for Human Rights

Catalog description

This class explores twentieth and twenty-first century Latin American thinkers and activists who forged a dynamic, cross-hemispheric feminist movement. In particular, we will engage with the ideas of feminist leaders from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Panama, and Uruguay. We will learn about their fights and demands concerning suffrage, nationality, and reproductive rights, equal pay for equal work, and broader possibilities for self-determination, while considering how their painstaking efforts led to the enshrinement of women's rights in the United Nations Charter and the development of a framework for international human rights ("human rights for all"). At the same time, we will also examine deep divides within the movement, especially concerning imperialist and colonialist presumptions concerning who should lead.