Victoria González and Karen Kampwirth have undertaken a daunting but important task in editing this collection of studies, which covers twentieth-century Central and South America, and employ politics and women—from the Left to the Right of the political spectrum—as an analytical category. One of their achievements is to have compiled essays that go beyond the traditional approaches that are confined to leftist and antiauthoritarian movements. The result is an interesting, if unbalanced, collection of ten articles by scholars from different disciplines (anthropology, history, and political science), as well as an activist woman. Their stories of radical women challenge portrayals of men as violent and women as inherently peaceful. They also prove that there is not an automatic sisterhood among women, even those belonging to the same class and ethnicity.
The essays fall into two broad groups. The first deals with women’s movements in Central America (Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala)....
