This book documents the discourses and activities of elite and educated Dominican women who were politically active from the 1920s to the 1970s in collaboration with or opposition to the authoritarian regimes of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo (1930–61) and Joaquín Balaguer (1966–78). Giving equal time to both streams of activism, Elizabeth S. Manley aims to debunk myths of women's political absence and silence and to complicate simplifications of their political activism into tropes of angel, mother, victim, martyr, and villain. She also sets out to show that transnational activist women's networks were crucial to both pro- and antiauthoritarian women and that a self-limiting discourse and practice of maternalism—justifying women's political participation in terms of their maternal nature and value to male-led state projects—was common to both camps until the 1970s. Ultimately Manley wants to engage in “gendered narrative repair” in order to help present-day Dominicans, especially feminists, recuperate a usable past...

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