Writing in 1972, Ann Pescatello bemoaned the underdevelopment of Latin American women’s studies, a field so much in its infancy that it was difficult to identify major trends and authors, much less conduct research.1 Seven years later, Asunción Lavrin observed that historians still lagged behind social scientists in filling in the gaps and pointed out directions that Latin American women’s history might take.2 Scholars have since followed the paths Lavrin indicated, provoking a steady flow in work that focuses on women, and since the mid-1980s, and a great surge of studies that use gender as a category of analysis. Twenty-odd years after Lavrin’s prophetic essay, the field that she and a small group of Latin American and Latin Americanist colleagues pioneered is again exceedingly difficult to review. The problem now, however, is the large quantity of significant work, the variety of topics, theoretical approaches and methodologies, and the...

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