This book is a collection of ten essays originally presented at the Third Central American Congress of History in 1996. (Several of the contributions have recently been reprinted in English in Hidden Histories of Gender and the State in Latin America, ed. Elizabeth Dore and Maxine Molyneux [2000].) The work announces from the first pages that it intends to demonstrate that women have had a “growing, decisive, and transformative” effect on Central American society. It also aims to disprove claims that Central American women are passive subjects, incapable of challenging patriarchal authority (p. vii). Overall, the book succeeds in its aim of revindicating female agency, but this reader at least was left with the feeling that doing this is a fairly easy task.
The least ambitious chapters stick narrowly to this agenda, but the volume also contains some excellent historical research. The chapter by Eugenia Rodríguez is a first-rate...
