Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2022
On International Women's Day in March 1958, ten thousand women gathered in the largest stadium in Caracas to celebrate the fall of the dictatorship of Major Marcos Pérez Jiménez and to commemorate the many women who had taken an active role in opposing it. This gathering was the first mass meeting following the demise of authoritarian rule. Despite the array of political views represented in the audience and on the dais, unity was stressed by every speaker. Women had struggled against the dictatorship united, and united they would promote their own rights in the fledgling democracy. But within a year, the women's group that had sponsored the rally disbanded. Women did not hold another nonpartisan meeting for sixteen years, and then only when the United Nations' International Women's Year in 1974 galvanized the two thousand participants. During the first thirty years of democracy in Venezuela, women held no more than 5 percent of congressional seats and few of the decision-making positions in political parties.
The research on which this article is based was undertaken in 1994–1995 in Caracas. It was made possible by the generous support of the U.S. Fulbright Program, the Fundación Ayacucho, the Knowles Fund, the Stanford Center for Latin American Studies, the Stanford Institute for International Studies, and the Centro de Estudios de la Mujer at the Universidad Central de Venezuela. I would like to thank the interviewees for their kind cooperation, especially Argelia Laya, Isabel Carmona, María del Mar Alvarez, Esperanza Vera, and Guillermo García Ponce. I am grateful to Terry Karl, Martin Friedman, Brooke Ackerly, Karen Booth, Susan Okin, and the anonymous LARR reviewers for their helpful comments on previous drafts. All translations are mine.