In Sex and the State, Mala Htun makes an important contribution to the literature on Latin American gender politics, offering a detailed history and analysis of the battles over family, divorce, and abortion laws in twentieth-century Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. Dictatorial military governments in all three countries liberalized family laws (such as those related to marital property and parental rights), a surprising outcome given that, as she noted, “[d]ictators did not intend to grant women more rights” and instead “aimed to usher in a return to traditional family values” (p. 67). Yet, even though they embraced patriarchal values, they all ended up liberalizing family laws, because they also saw themselves as modernizing forces. Under the dictatorships, family law ended up being framed as a technical issue in need of modernization, as a matter of concern for experts. And the “closed nature of these governments insulated technical decisions from societal...

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