From the Back Cover
Women in Latin America and the Caribbean is one of four volumes in the Restoring Women to History series. The original teaching packets on which the series is based, published in 1988 by the Organization of American Historians, played a key role in the revision of the history curriculum and the incorporation of women into the study of world history. The explosion of scholarship on women over the past decade has prompted a major re-examination and expansion of the original materials into four separate volumes. Dealing with women in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and the Middle East, these volumes consider what questions are in currency at this stage in the field of women's history, what type of evidence is available, and what gaps exist within the scholarship. Each volume features an introduction by an expert in the history of the area. The general introduction by Cheryl Johnson-Odim and Margaret Strobel sets out the general themes and issues that emerge from the series and addresses points of comparison and difference between the regions. The aim of Restoring Women to History is to demonstrate the value of comparative history while generating new questions and shedding new light on current scholarship in the non-Western world.
In this volume, Marysa Navarro examines the role of women and gender ideology during the pre-contact and colonial periods. She looks at both early indigenous societies and the Spanish and the Portuguese who claimed the "New World," noting the interaction of race and class factors. Navarro also illustrates these dynamics through portraits of individual women, as well as through an examination of legal status and economic roles. Virginia Sanchez Korrol views the changing roles of women in Latin America and the Caribbean from the early decades of the nineteenth century to the present. She documents the part played by women in the struggles for national independence, their legal status in the new republics, and their quest for education. Sanchez Korrol considers the shifts in women's roles between the 1880s and 1930s and the accompanying broader societal transformations. She shows how women, as activists, continue to strive to eliminate double standards, exploitation, and inequality among class and ethnic groups in the specific historical periods and geographic regions.
About the Author
Marysa Navarro is Charles Collis Professor of History and chair of the Latin American, Latino and Caribbean Studies Program at Dartmouth College. She has written a biography of Eva Peron, on the feminist movement in Latin America, the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, and on women and democracy in Latin America.
Virginia Sa(accute)nchez Korrol is professor and chairperson of the Department of Puerto Rican and Latino Studies, and director of the Center for Latino Studies at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. She has written numerous book chapters on U. S. Latinas. She is best known for From Colonia to Community: The History of
Puerto Ricans in New York City. More recently she co-edited Recovering the U. S. Hispanic Literary Heritage.
Kecia Ali is in Duke University's graduate program in religion. She is the author of "The Historiography of Women in Modern Latin America: An Overview and Bibliography of the Recent Literature" in the Duke University of North Carolina Program in Latin American Studies working paper series.
