Before the Revolution: Women’s Rights and Right-Wing Politics in Nicaragua, 1821–1979

Victoria González- Rivera has written a wonderful book about an unpopular subject: Somocista women. She describes well how unpopular it was with Nicaraguan feminists, with US Latin Americanists, and, of course, with Sandinistas. Before the Revolution tells an important, untold story that many people didn’t want to hear about early Nicara-guan feminists, women leaders in the Somozas’ Nationalist Liberal Party (PLN), and the Somozas’ female grassroots following. González- Rivera’s book forces us to see the Somozas in a new light. Focusing on the Somozas’ female leaders and supporters, she fleshes out the patron- clientelism that sustained the dynasty. She shows that a number of Nicaragua’s early cohorts of university- educated, middle- class women supported the Somozas because their regime represented modernization. The Somozas promoted policies associated with liberalism: women’s suffrage and the expansion of education and the state apparatus. González- Rivera also shows that when Anastasio Somoza Debayle, the last...