Abstract
This article argues that Argentina’s recent feminist “green wave” emerged from the political militancy of working-class women responding to the economic violence of the 1990s neoliberal reforms and the nation’s financial collapse in 2001. The first section details the gendered experience of the 1990s neoliberal crisis from the “feminization” of the workforce, the rise in child mortality due to malnutrition, and, as a result, the increase in deaths from clandestine abortions. The second section details the development of gendered consciousness among working-class women through the formation of espacios de mujeres (women’s spaces) after 2001. The espacios allowed piqueteras (unemployed women) to organize against patriarchal violence and gendered marginalization in their homes and organizations. The third section examines how working-class women’s participation in the yearly National Women’s Encounter transformed it from a small women’s gathering to a conference that brought together social movements under a shared feminist abortion rights banner.
This article is a history of how working-class women contributed through social and political action to Argentina’s current feminist praxis. It examines how the 1990s neoliberal economic crisis altered the lives of Argentine working-class women, pushing them into the ranks of social movements and politicizing them in the process. As they participated in the union and piquetero1 or unemployed workers’ movements, many women realized that they, like their male compañeros, were willing to poner el cuerpo, or put their bodies on the line, in their confrontations with the factory bosses and the police but remained politically sidelined within their movements.2 Many women did not have the political language to explain their experiences of gender oppression and marginalization in their homes and organizations. The patriarchal roadblocks to allowing women’s full inclusion in social organizations led them to look elsewhere. The argentinazo, or nationwide revolts, following the nation’s economic collapse in 2001 became the political catalyst not only for the growth and militancy of the social movements but a transformative moment for working-class women who found their way in noticeable numbers to the Encuentro Nacional de Mujeres (National Women’s Meeting; ENM).
To highlight shifts and developments in feminist consciousness and praxis, this article uses Maxine Molyneux’s methodological approach to analyze women’s political formation. She studies how women begin to articulate their “feminist political practice” in moments of social change.3 She employs a bottom-up approach to analyzing “women’s consciousness” by centering women’s experiences, actions, and discourse within social movements. To do so, she examines moments of politicization that motivate working-class women to defend or expand their practical gender interests in “response to an immediate perceived need,” such as food, housing, and education for their children.4 Through organizational participation, women identify shared practical interests that develop into a political language of social demands. The shared experience of political action and a common gendered language of demands are transformed “into strategic interests that women can identify with and support which constitutes a central aspect of feminist political practice.”5 Molyneux therefore challenges the idea of singular feminist politics. She instead studies each social movement through its goals and deeds, examining transclass, racial, and ethnic alliances within a specific women’s movement. As she affirms, “Such unity has to be constructed, it is never given.”6
In using Molyneux’s approach, this essay historicizes those three stages. The first section centers on the 1990s neoliberal economic crisis that radically changed working-class women’s lives. The dismantling of the welfare state and the privatization of nationalized industries left many working-class men without work and, as a result, pushed working-class women to find employment. However, working-class women’s entry into the workforce was a catalyst for disrupting family structures, making some women breadwinners and instilling confidence as they learned to control their finances.7 Nevertheless, underlying the economic crisis was a gendered crisis in which more women sought abortions. Due to its illegality and unsafe conditions, many women died from botched procedures. These experiences functioned as the backdrop of the gendered social crisis when the Argentine economy collapsed in December 2001. Building on that social reality, the next section analyzes the pivotal participation of unemployed women in the 2002 and 2003 meetings of the ENM. Encuentro workshop discussions on abortion rights, lesbianism, and sexuality led piqueteras to question their delegated roles as cooks and caretakers of the movement and motivated them to create espacios de mujeres (women’s spaces) within their organizations. The third section examines the same period but focuses on the political role of union factory workers at the ENM. They incorporated union politics and social demands in Encuentro discussions and declarations, making those issues feminist concerns. Between 2002 and 2005 a new feminist movement politics and political practice shaped into an abortion rights campaign that brought together seventy organizations, and abortion rights became the movement’s earliest strategic gender issue.8
To center activist voices, I used feminist activists’ posts on Indymedia Argentina from 2001 to 2005. Indymedia started as an alternative news site to give activists a platform to report on events related to the World Trade Organization protest in 1999 in Seattle, Washington. Its popularity led to its widespread use across the world. Indymedia was widely used by social movements, especially after the 2001 crash. Activists posted pictures, videos, and audio recordings of protests, announced upcoming meetings and marches, reported on events, and debated topics in the comments section and forums. Página 12, another source, was the only mainstream newspaper that covered the women’s movement. Marta Dillon wrote most of the paper’s articles, interviewing piqueteras while sitting on a bridge or a picket line. In short, this article seeks to demonstrate that the feminist movement in Argentina took many long, difficult years to build. As the movement took shape, many women died from economic and gender violence and through their direct participation in street protests as they confronted the state’s violence. This is their story.
The 1990s: A Gendered Economic Crisis
Argentina in the 1990s was a country in crisis while experiencing an economic boom. The social cost of Argentina’s prosperity, like that of other neoliberal “poster child” nations promoted in the 1990s by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), led to the demise of its once-envied Latin American middle class as unemployment numbers soared and growing numbers of children died from malnutrition. If the economic crisis made class positions tenuous and living a daily struggle for survival, it also accentuated the gendered inequalities present in capitalist patriarchal society.9 In examining that historical moment, this section has two goals: to show how the economic crisis of the 1990s pushed working-class women to enter the labor force, and to demonstrate how the crisis drove more individuals to seek abortions. These two key developments informed shifts in working-class women’s political consciousness in the 1990s and were the basis for changes in feminist political practice discussed in the following two sections.
Unlike neighboring Chile, whose military dictatorship (1973–90) dismantled its social democratic state, Argentina went through this process following the return to democracy under the Peronist presidency of Carlos Saúl Menem (1989–99).10 In Chile open-market reforms led to the collapse of multiple national industries, but it was a crisis managed by a dictatorial regime.11 Argentina’s IMF-led restructuring plan attempted to offset the economic “shock” experienced in Chile. The government instituted the Washington Consensus’s ten points, which decreased corporate payroll taxes, weakened labor regulations, allowed capital’s free flow to draw investors, and pegged the Argentine peso to the US dollar to secure a “competitive exchange rate.”12 Mass unemployment caused by the privatization of Argentina’s once robust nationalized industries (oil, railroads, electricity) led to business closures and an unmanaged decrease in state revenues that affected public sector workers. With the collapse of its homegrown industry, imports increased by 300 percent between 1991 and 1998, and the country solved the resulting trade imbalance with international loans.13 Argentina’s IMF loans reached $142 billion in 2001. Due to the country’s inability to make its high-interest payments, the IMF demanded further austerity measures in November 2001 before securing the next loan installment of $1.3 billion.14 This uncertainty proved too great for many investors and accelerated capital flight, causing a bank freeze to retain the remaining capital. Panic set in as thousands took to the streets, targeting banks and ultimately forcing President Fernando de la Rúa (1999–2001) to resign.
Working-class and poor women experienced a gendered economic crisis throughout the 1990s. The feminist economist Marcela Cerrutti explains that as male unemployment and labor instability increased throughout the decade, more women sought employment to offset their family’s financial hardships. The result was an almost 20 percent increase in female labor force participation, primarily among women from marginalized, working-class, and middle-income families, from “38% in 1991 to 46% in 1995.”15 The employment opportunities that these women typically acquired were in the informal economy and usually temporary, low pay, or under the table. In other words, as corporations downsized their labor force, they restructured to create a more “flexible workforce” to increase profits at the cost of lower wages and poorer working conditions. Menem’s new labor laws facilitated these shifts.
Cerrutti argues that a gendered analysis of Argentina’s employment statistics shows patterns that diverge from the Western hypothesis that 1960s women’s radicalization was due to access to higher education, resulting in demands for equal employment.16 Even though there was a close gender employment parity in Argentina’s professional sector, it did not spark feminist activism, since most radicalized youth joined guerrilla movements. Moreover, because Argentina’s welfare state economy, which expanded under the presidency of Juan Perón (1946–55), prioritized male employment as heads of household, most working-class women were dissuaded from entering the formal economy. Instead, the rise in female labor force participation took place in low-paying and factory work between 1993 and 1995, at the height of the unemployment crisis.17 Employment statistics from 2001 underscore that on a national scale, women accounted for 41 percent of professional employment and 49 percent in the technical field but only 28 percent as operatives in factories.18 On average, most women who entered the workforce in the 1990s held low levels of education and had high turnover rates because of familial obligations and temporary positions. This led to women experiencing higher mobility rates and looking for new employment more frequently than men.19
As working-class women entered the workforce, unemployment numbers rose, reaching 60 percent in 2002 accompanied by a significant increase in child hunger.20 By 2001 at least 25 percent of children under the age of five suffered from malnutrition, and three children died per day nationally.21 Notably, most children that died from malnutrition were in the northern provinces. Considering that statistics underrepresented the extent of the crisis, about eight children died per week in Tucumán and fifty in 2002 in Misiones.22 Therefore it is unsurprising that as the economic crisis deepened in Argentina, more individuals sought to terminate their pregnancies.
Between 1995 and 2000 abortion rates increased by 46 percent in Argentina.23 A 1921 law mandated four years’ imprisonment for abortion patients and providers, with legal exceptions for therapeutic abortion and cases of rape. However, the government primarily targeted abortion providers, 80 percent of those arrested from 2002 to 2008.24 Government abortion data from that time accounted only for women who sought medical attention or died from complications from abortion. The Argentine government estimated half a million pregnancy interruptions in a population of about forty million. In 2000 a woman died every thirteen days in Greater Buenos Aires due to an abortion. However, 72 percent of the women who died due to complications from abortion lived in the northern provinces, the areas hardest hit by the recession. That data correlates with other figures that show that abortion rates increased by 148 percent in San Luis Province, 143 percent in La Rioja Province, and 103 percent in Santiago del Estero Province.25
Class and race determined access to abortifacient options. For example, the 2002 Reproductive Health Law made misoprostol (a drug that causes contractions) available, leading to a decrease in maternal deaths.26 Yet lack of anecdotal knowledge about misoprostol meant that poor women continued to be hospitalized for abortion complications. On the topic of race (see next paragraph for explanation), a 2004 study by the National Gynecological Congress estimated that half of women in Tucumán who interrupted their pregnancies died from home or self-induced abortions. The study calculated regional maternity death figures per 10,000: Greater Buenos Aires, 0.9; Córdoba, 1.3; the Chaco region, 15; and the northeastern region, 20.27 A few years later the Tucumán provincial legislature voted for nonadherence to the national 2002 Reproductive Health Law and the 2006 Comprehensive Sexual Education Law, approving the latter only in 2022.28
Tucumán Province has been historically marked by the sugar industry’s boom-and-bust cycle and regional migration by Indigenous and mixed-race workers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.29 The national racial imaginary characterizes the province as Indigenous and mestizo within a nation that, as Sandra McGee Deutsch notes, has cloaked “more inhabitants within the mantle of whiteness” while rejecting others.30 The Argentine film director Fernando Solanas, in Memoria del Saqueo, describes the rise of child mortality throughout the 1990s, spotlighting Tucumán as a demonstration of the government’s complicity in attempts to “disappear” the other Argentina.31
While maternal deaths from abortion decreased over the years, pregnancy interruptions rose from 300,000 in 1973 to 385,931 in 1991 and 500,000 in 2005.32 A 2007 study by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean estimated that on a national scale, roughly 55,000 women sought medical treatment in hospitals due to complications from an abortion in 2005.33 The study deduced that 60.8 to 65.4 of every 1,000 women interrupted their pregnancies, which placed the annual figures between 485,974 to 522,216 on a national scale.34 Comparing those numbers with recent government figures from 2015 to 2019, during which 368,000 individuals sought abortions of 1,310,000 pregnancies in a population of 44 million, shows a decrease in the abortion rate.35 These figures highlight two trends. First, the 2019 abortion rates resulted from improved sexual education and resources, producing fewer unintended pregnancies. Second, the high abortion rates between 1990 and 2005 coincided with an economic crisis in which women and pregnant people had to choose between having an illegal abortion that could lead to their death or giving birth to a future starving child.
Espacios de Mujeres: Finding Gender in Class Politics
The women’s space or espacio de mujeres is a social and political area of analysis with a robust historiography that examines the female private sphere in contrast to the male public sphere.36 Yet only in the last few decades has social reproduction—as a theory and strategy of political action—expanded as an area of feminist scholarship. This section examines how the women’s space transformed from an area of social reproduction to a politicized space within the unemployed movement. It places the economic crisis as a disrupter of female responsibilities as familial food providers, incentivizing working-class women to join the Movimiento de Trabajadores Desocupados (Unemployed Workers’ Movement; MTD) and similar organizations. In response to sexism and gender violence in the home and their organizations, MTD women created espacios de mujeres to discuss gender-related issues and create sorority. As a result, those spaces became a bridge between the social movements and the burgeoning feminist movement, politically transforming both spaces in the process.
Writing in 1990–91, the Argentine political scientist Elizabeth Jelin framed housework as a form of labor power that embodied the women’s space, recognizing social reproduction as a direct contributor to formal production.37 Jelin described housework and the responsibilities associated with the family unit’s reproduction as a measurable social and economic activity. For Jelin, the patriarchal omission of female labor power rationalizes the private/public dichotomy: “As organizers of family consumption, women necessarily enter into contact with institutions in the distribution sector and with the state as the provider of services. There is, in effect, an obvious public dimension to women’s role as a housewife because they constantly relate to those offering goods and services and to other consumers.”38 As distributors and organizers of essential services, women collected basic goods, which had become scarce during the 1990s. While the scholarship on social reproduction has evolved since Jelin’s text on the topic, she framed the economic activity of working-class and middle-class women as organizers and movers of necessary goods for their families’ survival.
In response to the state’s 1991 economic restructuring, working-class women demanded state financial support. In 1992 the Buenos Aires provincial government began distributing food baskets (canastas básicas de alimentación) consisting of basic subsistence food items for unemployed families. The government mobilized thirty-five thousand women to disperse government aid. According to Laura Mason, one of the plan directors, “Women were chosen because it was unquestionable [to think otherwise and] we knew women would be more honest and would better emanate the resources.”39 Mason’s gendered language reiterates a first-wave feminist politics of difference that fought for inclusion while maintaining the specified gender roles under patriarchy. Andrea D’Atri and Celeste Escati believe that the government perceived unemployed women as “less combative” and their participation as a form of “vocational solidarity.”40 The government allowed certain levels of militancy, such as fighting for their families’ welfare, describing them as “neighborhood armies” or “armies of love.”41 The program reaffirmed women’s work as vocational by not paying women for their labor. Nevertheless, working-class women gained experience distributing goods for a state-led program that became network training and the basis for new social organizations.
The piquetero movement emerged from a June 1996 mass rebellion in the southern oil town of Cutral Có in Neuquén following the layoffs of 38,500 employees between 1991 and 1992.42 The oil industry, Yacimiento Petroliferos Fiscales (YPF), once represented the clientelistic policies implemented during Perón’s first presidency that, over the years, had maintained a certain standard of living for its workers. However, that changed after the privatization of the YPF in 1993. While most piqueteros were men, women participated and became central figures, such as Laura Padilla, who signed an agreement with the governor on behalf of protesters.43 Padilla was not an oil worker but represented the experiences of working-class women politicized by their material and social realities. As the sociologist Javier Auyero notes, “Revolts can also change the life of people, or at least the way in which they understand themselves.”44
The Cutral Có pickets became neoliberal resistance heroes, motivating workers across the country to mimic their protest methods.45 Piqueteros typically wear T-shirts to cover their face and burn tires to block the road. Auyero describes these “new forms” of protest as complementary to rather than displacing strikes. The loss of state industries and the deproletarianization of thousands of workers created “new actors (unemployed) and new demands (work) . . . [and] the identities constructed while protesting acquired a specific political character.”46 Auyero underscores that the new movements demanded trabajo digno (dignified work or employment) from the state as a solution to the social crisis. The demand became a unifying call, but it did not include unemployed or underemployed working-class women.
As the unemployed movement grew in the 1990s, it also helped shape the new public and political discourse for the working class. These organizations incorporated social issues like housing and food distribution as part of their demands, but these issues were understood as secondary to trabajo digno. Employment became the principal contended issue central to the Argentine male’s working-class identity as the family provider and head of household. Early on, the piquetero movement replicated the gendered public and private spheres in their organizational work. The social scientist Florencia Partenio describes how limiting women’s political participation in the piquetero movement to the perceived female sphere either in the kitchen or in distribution to meet basic needs “impeded their involvement with the realms of representation and the political leadership of the movement.”47 Piquetero male leaders viewed women’s roles much like the government officials who described their labor as food distributors as “armies of love.” Partenio underscores that even though the piquetero movement had developed a plan of broader social demands, which motivated women’s entry into the movement, the central demand remained employment perceived as a male right. The sidelining of women is notable, considering that between 65 and 70 percent of movement members were women.48 Following the 2001 crash, however, the refusal to acknowledge women’s demands and leadership within the piquetero movement proved untenable.
The 2001 argentinazo was a moment of social and political rupture that altered the feminist and piquetero movements. These two movements crossed in the streets and coalesced in the ENM’s meeting rooms. Argentine feminists founded the yearly ENM in 1986 following the 1975–85 United Nations’ Decade on Women and the biannual Encuentros Feministas Latinoamericanas y del Caribe (Latin American and Caribbean Feminist Encuentro) inaugurated in 1981. The ENM gathering fluctuated between six hundred and eight thousand participants during the first decade. A noticeable increase occurred at the 2002 ENM, held in the northern province of Salta, where seventeen thousand women arrived and sizable contingents from the union and piquetero movements participated.49 The journalist Andrea D’Atri noted, “A different Argentina, a different Encuentro.”50 This development continued in 2003, when fifteen thousand women gathered at the ENM in Rosario.51
Piqueteras’ participation at the 2002 and 2003 Encuentros ignited gender consciousness, because they envisioned themselves as political actors. A few months after the 2003 ENM, piqueteras organized the First Assembly of Piqueteras on Pueyrredón Bridge in Buenos Aires.52 The assembly flyer asked: “Do you speak in assembly meetings? Did you decide on your maternity?”53 Significantly, Pueyrredón Bridge was where the piqueteros Darío Santillán and Maximiliano Kosteki were murdered by police on June 26, 2002; thereafter, for several years, the bridge became a congregation site for piqueteros mobilizing on the twenty-sixth of every month to demand justice and jobs. The piqueteras who attended the assembly had previously met during political actions on that bridge. However, the assembly was the first time that, as Zulema Aguirre recollected, “we recognized ourselves as political subjects.”54 When piqueteras presented their conclusions to the general membership of their respective organizations, the men responded like “stones thrown into an empty tank.”55 Piqueteras were ridiculed by sexist jokes or given the cold shoulder at meetings. Some members described male partners assaulting them in response to their political demands.
As piqueteras prepared for the second assembly in July 2004, male piqueteros described their organizing meetings as a “reunión de tupper” (Tupperware party). Marta Dillon interviewed numerous piqueteras during the second assembly who expressed victory when a piquetera read a declaration on behalf of several social organizations the previous month commemorating the killing of Darío and Maximiliano. Alejandra Giusti, a twenty-five-year-old piquetera, explained: “The moment the act began it became very noticeable when the press was asked to step down from the stage, we [women] resisted or else it would have happened again; a swelling of male presence because they are the accredited ones. We have put our body [on the line], but we must put [forward] our voice.”56 Alejandra had proudly proclaimed herself a journalist representing the piqueteras. In another interview, sixty-two-year-old Elsa Basterra told Dillon that she left her previous organization tied to political interests and joined the MTD. Basterra attended the Rosario Encuentro, explaining: “We went from our neighborhoods because they invited us and we collected the money for the trip. [At the ENM] we became aware that we had not discussed anything beforehand. It could be due to the autonomous nature of our organizations, but [we] also did not view it as a priority. . . . Men would tell us, ‘We have to establish our priorities.’”57 In this reflection, Basterra describes the Rosario Encuentro as a transformative moment in which piqueteras discussed women’s issues. It made her question why her organization had never discussed those topics and why men dictated their organization’s political work. In an Indymedia Argentina interview, Adriana from MTD–Aníbal Verón in Lanús described the development of espacios de mujeres to discuss reproductive and bodily autonomy, abortion rights, sexual freedom, and domestic violence. Adriana explained how working-class women experience double exclusion due to their double work shifts as social movement militants with expected household and familial responsibilities. She further described the need to distribute labor within the organization better. The Indymedia correspondent Zula Lucero asked if she thought women joined piquetero organizations for their children and family. Adriana responded that was probably the case initially; however, she added, “I think they now see it for themselves.”58
Dillon discerns that following the experience at the Rosario ENM, female MTD members decided to construct their own space. The sisters Zulema and Alejandra Giusti, both members of MTD–Aníbal Verón in Lugano, explained that when they returned from Rosario, they proposed that their assembly participate in the September 28 demonstration, the Day for the Legalization of Abortion in Latin America and the Caribbean. Alejandra explained: “There were five minutes of silence when we stated that we wanted to march as members of MTD–Aníbal Verón on September 28 for our reproductive health, as discussed in Rosario. It caused confusion and they told us to do whatever we wanted as though what we proposed had little importance.”59 Zulema noted, “Then [the men] asked us if we planned on expanding the kitchen.” Further describing the political shift within the piquetero movement, twenty-one-year-old Mónica and MTD–Almirante Brown member explained: “We found it challenging to discuss the things we discussed at the Rosario Encuentro, especially on abortion. In the Rosario workshops, it was beautiful to see women motivated to discuss how they went through such an experience that no one desires [to experience] previously unmentionable because we felt shame or guilt.”60 These quotes capture a political moment in which piqueteras began to articulate their demands, breaking the private/public spheres that functioned to the benefit of patriarchy. Their participation in the ENM gave them a political language to describe and frame issues that affected them and their community, specifically abortion access. The Encuentros motivated the women to form their own women’s space to discuss, plan, develop, and grow within the unemployed workers’ movement. The confidence they gained through those activities helped them shatter the guilt and shame they once felt about discussing abortion and sexuality openly.
Abortion Rights at Rosario and Beyond
By 2004 over ten thousand workers were involved in the factory recovery movement across Argentina.61 Like all social movements after 2001, they represented working-class attempts to solve social problems, specifically unemployment and poverty. The word recovery was intentional, indicating their action to take over (tomar) the factory, an act of recuperating the nation dismantled by neoliberalism. The seamstresses at the Brukman factory in Buenos Aires joined the recovery movement but stood out for two reasons. First, they represented a majority-female and older workforce, between the ages of forty and sixty, whom the capitalist bosses and their managers viewed as disposable. Second, Brukman workers, alongside the Zanón ceramic factory workers in Neuquén, took their battle for recuperation farther by demanding expropriation under workers’ control. The gendered and political role of the Brukman struggle elevated these workers as central figures in the ENM and the women’s movement.
The Brukman struggle stemmed from the 2001 economic crisis. During the year employees’ paychecks became irregular. On December 17 workers did not receive their scheduled paycheck, forcing a couple of workers to sleep over at the factory because they could not afford the public transportation fare home.62 When workers arrived the next morning and realized what had happened, a group confronted management over their owed wages. In an interview I coconducted in 2002, Nilda Bustamente, a Brukman seamstress originally from Jujuy Province in the north, described how a company manager mocked their grievances: “What do you expect us to do? Withdraw our money from abroad to pay you?”63 Celia Martínez, the union president, explained that the owner, Jacobo Brukman, responded to that confrontation by handing over the factory keys in frustration, “If you think you can run this factory better than we can, then here are the keys.”64 According to Martínez, Brukman had underestimated their organizational capacity. Soon after factory management left the facilities, a group of workers decided to examine the production logs, estimating that the company had maintained a sizable profit margin and had deposited the money in overseas banks. They realized that the owner had used the crisis to slash wages and accumulate wealth.
The day after the takeover, massive protests erupted across Buenos Aires. Martínez explained that they were initially fearful but realized that they needed to act and maintain a permanent presence at the factory. They organized a twenty-four-hour watch to dissuade the owner from sending people to steal the machinery. The workers reorganized their factory and union in more egalitarian terms and connected with workers at other recuperated factories. A solidarity network quickly formed between factory workers, the piquetero movement, and other organizations and individuals supporting social movement causes. That network proved pivotal in resisting a police eviction on March 16, 2002.
A week later, on March 24, Brukman workers participated in a mass rally commemorating the 1976 coup victims. D’Atri and Escati documented the Brukman workers’ chants, and in one instance, they yelled, “They killed us in ’76 / thousands of comrades / Brukman remembers them / Fighting for workers’ control.”65 Their chant placed factory takeovers within the legacy of workers murdered and disappeared by the authoritarian regime. One can also interpret Brukman workers as retaking the historical memory of the nation, which had been scarred by the military state’s violence and, once more, by the economic violence of neoliberalism.
During the rally, Brukman workers crossed a feminist column telling them to join their struggle. The feminists responded with a Brukman chant: “Brukman belongs to the female workers / And to those who dislike it / They can go fuck themselves, fuck themselves!”66 Feminists’ reciprocation was a vocal and corporal act of class solidarity and sorority in the streets. The chant describes Brukman’s fight as female-led and belonging to the female workers. Brukman workers’ presence at the 2002 and 2003 Encuentros showed other working-class women that they now belonged and could lead. Brukman workers also defied feminine convention by exclaiming to those who oppose them—male union leaders, the factory owners, and the state—that “they can go fuck themselves!” Chants are political expressions enacted in the streets that can relay a political program, social issue, or political debate or capture a historical moment. In this case, the chants exchanged between feminists and Brukman workers at a rally commemorating the dictatorship victims encapsulated the nascent moment when feminists and working-class women, including the piqueteras, met at a political crossroads produced by the economic crisis and the social movements that were the working classes’ response to that crisis.
Months later Brukman workers attended the 2002 ENM in Salta, the Encuentro that D’Atri described as “a different Argentina, a different Encuentro.”67 In marking their presence at the Encuentro, Brukman and the Pepsico workers’ union representatives read a joint declaration to conference participants. The first part focused on rebuilding the union movement by challenging the union bureaucracy. They underscored support for the recuperated factory movement and “our unemployed sisters” who deserve the right to trabajo digno. In this declaration, they introduced union battles into the Encuentro arena and positioned themselves as leaders for union democracy. However, more significant for this article was their assertion that working-class women also deserved trabajo digno. They spotlighted that battle because it spoke to 2002 Encuentro participants, leveraging their demand for trabajo digno for all working-class women as a worthy Encuentro battle flag.
Toward the declaration’s end, they explained their panorama of struggle:
Women do not only endure unemployment, misery, [and] exploitation on the job. We have a double work shift because we also do all the housework. We are the ones who are paid less than men, even though we do the same work. We are the ones who experience sexual harassment, rape, abuse, and violence. We are the impoverished within the poor and the ones who . . . have less access to education. We are the ones who die from clandestine abortions or pregnancy and giving birth since we cannot count on basic health care; the most affected by malnutrition and AIDS.68
They described grievances that resonated with conference participants, centering the economic crisis as a gendered experience. While the early Encuentros debated double militancy, the declaration highlighted the double work shift and unequal pay as societal problems.69 They highlighted topics such as gendered violence and abortion as practical gender issues around which to organize. Feminist groups, social organizations, and leftist parties signed the declaration. The 2002 ENM remanded an alliance by working-class women and feminists that was severed when Eva Perón appropriated the women’s suffrage struggle to benefit the Peronist party.70
If the 2002 ENM marked the moment when working-class women made their political stamp within the Encuentro, the 2003 ENM marked a shift from recognition toward organized resistance. As in the previous year, women workers wore their work uniforms and organizational vests to show their class and political affiliations. The 2003 Encuentro was also emblematic because it was when Catholics for Choice distributed the green kerchief as a symbol for abortion rights.71 The ENM organized workshops that ran throughout the three-day conference to generate specific action plans. For the first time, a workshop titled “For Free and Legal Abortion” presented abortion as a demand and not as advice or an act of murder.72 Another workshop, “Strategies for the Right to Abortion,” formulated the demand “Sex education to decide, contraceptives to not abort, and legal abortion to not die.”73 Openness to discussing abortion as a right resulted from the experiences of the 1990s.
After the 2003 Encuentro, one can observe its impact on working-class women’s political consciousness. In previous years, leftists and feminist organizations mainly observed dates commemorating women’s issues: March 8 (International Women’s Day), September 28 (Day to Decriminalize Abortion in Latin America and the Caribbean), and November 25 (Day against Gender Violence). Between the 2003 and 2004 Encuentros, social movements transformed these commemorative dates into political action days. September 28 was the first commemorative day after the 2003 Encuentro, when eight thousand people rallied in Buenos Aires, showing the new influx of working-class women into the women’s movement.74 Notably present were members of the MTDs, Partido Obrero (Worker’s Party), Movimiento Independiente de Jubilados y Desocupados (Independent Movement of Retirees and Unemployed), and other mass organizations. A rally description in Página 12 wrote, “At par with decriminalization, they demanded immediate national implementation of the Reproductive Health Law, and at the [presidential house known as the] Casa Rosada a delegation demanded condoms and birth control ‘in everyone’s pockets.’”75 The bold demands show that the new women’s movement regarded birth control and condoms as social issues and not private matters.
Indymedia posts allow one to visualize rally participants’ movements. Activists’ posts included rally descriptions accompanied by photographs or audio clips. Zula Lucero reported on the March 8, 2004, activities in Buenos Aires, detailing how activists marched from Plaza de Mayo (in front of the Casa Rosada) to the national court, city legislature, the main Catholic cathedral, and back to the Casa Rosada.76 Lucero’s posts represent the route of the march, which started with a few hundred and ended with a few thousand, mainly from the piquetero movement. In her post on the city legislature protest, Lucero included a picture of two women holding signs that read “Indigenous Women Present.”77 While many piqueteros were and are Indigenous Guaraní and Aymara, they entered the movement as unemployed workers and made Indigenous demands subservient to the movement’s broader goals. That Indigenous women presented themselves as Indigenous political actors within the feminist movement underscores the openings made by the movement. As Molyneux notes, even when women participate in movements with broader demands, their lived experiences inform the universal struggle surrounding women’s formation as political subjects.78 Automatic subservience to the universal cause is not a given. The piquetero movement made trabajo digno the universal cause, but the ENM had unfurled other demands that, with time, would also become universal for the feminist and labor movements.
Lucero posted an extract from the document read during the rally signed by “MTDs Aníbal Verón and MUP [Movimiento de Unidad Popular].”79 The extract highlighted another political shift within the new women’s movement. While the Brukman-Pepsico declaration captured working-class women’s union politics, the MTD-MUP declaration framed social change as the starting point:
We fight for social change that we are building step by step within our [social] movements and in our neighborhoods. This social change will not be complete if it does not include our rights as piquetera women. We, piquetera women, demand our rights to decide over our bodies in a free and responsible manner. [For the] right to enjoy a free, fulfilling, gratifying sexuality; [For the] rights to receive free quality public care during pregnancy, childbirth, puerperium and menopause in health centers and public hospitals; [For the] right to a life free of violence in both the public and private spheres; [For the] right to be valued and educated in equality with men, we repudiate concepts of inferiority or subordination for the fact of being women; [For the] right to build our autonomy to participate in decisions that affect our personal and social life; The right to pleasure, without discrimination or prejudice; For work, dignity, and social change. Without women, human rights are not human.80
While it is challenging to measure the pace of political consciousness, the March 8, 2004, declaration demonstrates piqueteras’ political evolution from their first ENM to their assemblies on Pueyrredón Bridge in late 2003 in which they asked, “Do you speak at assembly meetings?” By March 2004 piqueteras were no longer asking but demanding and imagining the social rights and sexual life they desired.
Significantly, twenty thousand women participated in the Mendoza ENM in October 2004.81 The workshop “Strategies for the Right to Abortion” best captured the Encuentro’s momentum. In May 2005 workshop participants met with seventy organizations, including the Central de Trabajadores de la Argentina (Argentine Workers’ Central Union), to launch the National Campaign for the Right to Legal, Safe, and Free Abortion.82 The green kerchief became the movement’s unifying symbol, adding to the design the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo kerchief emblem surrounded by the fighting words, “Sex education to decide, contraceptives to not abort, and legal abortion to not die.”83 The petition campaign ended on November 25, 2005, when thousands of abortion rights supporters in Buenos Aires marched to Congress to deliver the hundred thousand signatures collected.84 Carrying a banner that stated “Not One More Woman Dead from Clandestine Abortion,” the rally embodied the broadening of the movement. There was greater visibility of queer groups and college students, including a student-led tetazo.85 Congress ignored the petition, but the abortion rights movement had just started and demonstrated a willingness to organize offensive actions against the state that would only continue to blossom.
Conclusion
This article describes the transformative years of the social and feminist movements in Argentina from 1990 to 2005. Since 2005 the feminist movement has transformed into a mass movement with regular street protests and clashes with the police. In 2015 the founding of the #NiUnaMenos (#NotOneWomanLess) movement against femicide expanded the movement’s reach farther to include those reluctant to support abortion rights, placing greater pressure on the state to enact change. In 2019, in an inclusive move, the ENM changed its name to the Encuento Plurinational de Mujeres, Lesbianas, Trans, Travestis, Bisexuales y No Binaries (Plurinational Meeting of Women, Lesbians, Trans, Bisexual, Intersexual, and Nonbinary). That same year the government created the Ministry of Women, Genders, and Diversity to lead campaigns to confront gender violence, institutionalize more protections for transgender people, and implement the 2006 Integral Sexual Education Law. Finally, after several failed attempts, in December 2021 the Argentine Congress legalized abortion as a sea of green bandanas celebrated in the streets.86
The momentum for more feminism has not dissipated, for the struggle against femicide, among other issues, remains at the forefront. As the piquetera Mariana Gerardi Davico reflected on her political transformations since 2003: “Feminism is those purple glasses in which the day you put them on, you cannot see reality any other way. We had to fight for our place, leave behind the everyday, the domestic, to understand that more than the organizational, our role was political and, furthermore, our words had political meaning.”87 As new generations in Argentina put on those purple glasses, new feminist futures continue to be forged. But, most important, if those purple glasses are available to all to speak, think, act, and build feminism, the voices of those most marginalized by the capitalist patriarchal state will continue to be elevated in the movement. Their feminist future can also be ours but, as this article shows, that feminist practice “has to be constructed, it is never given.”88
Notes
Piquetes (pickets) refers to picketing as a form of demonstration; the participants are piqueteros (male) and piqueteras (female). They also use the gender-neutral piqueterx. All translations in this article are mine.
Argentina’s first-wave feminist movement fractured under Juan Perón’s presidency (1946–55), rendering women’s politics auxiliary to the Partido Justicialista. Once the dictatorship fell in 1983, feminist groups rebuilt with the support of the ENM.
I use Zillah Eisenstein’s definition of capitalist patriarchy “to emphasize the mutually reinforcing dialectical relationship between capitalist class structure and hierarchical sexual structuring” (Capitalist Patriarchy, 7).
Argentina’s dictatorship ruled from 1976 to 1983.
The Washington Consensus was a ten-point neoliberal economic policy by the British economist John Williamson based on discussions with politicians and economists in Washington, DC, in the late 1980s (Féliz, “Note on Argentina,” 83; Williamson, “Short History”).
McGee Deutsch, “Insecure Whiteness,” 27; Chamosa, “Indigenous or Criollo”; Edwards, Hiding in Plain Sight.
See Memoria del Saqueo (dir. Fernando Solanas, Argentina, 2004). The disappeared also include those who were murdered during the dictatorship and whose bodies were never found.
Lavrin, Women, Feminism; Craske, Women and Politics; Twinam, Private Lives; Dore and Molyneux, Hidden Histories.
Benson, “Political Economy”; Dalla Costa and James, Power of Women; Vogel, Marxism; Bhattacharya, Social Reproduction Theory.
Dillon, “Rebelión en el piquete”; D’Atri, “XVII Encuentro Nacional de Mujeres”; Parodi and Canteros, “Que en todos lados”; ANRed, “La primera asamblea de mujeres.”
See The Take (dir. Avi Lewis, Canada, Argentina, 2004).
Celia Martínez and Liliana Torale (Brukman workers), interview by author, April 23, 2002; Koppel and Green, “Workers in Buenos Aires.”
Indyná, “XVIII Encuentro Nacional de Mujeres”; Alma and Lorenzo, Mujeres que se encuentran, 115, 124.
Lucero, “Dia de la Mujer/Anibal Veron”; Lucero, “Dia de la Mujer en las Tribunales”; Lucero, “Dia de la Mujer/Escrache”; Lucero, “Mujeres en la Legislatura”; Lucero, “Mujeres en Plaza de Mayo.”
Lipcovich, “Multitudinaria marcha”; Campaña por el Derecho al Aborto Legal, “BsAs”; CMI, “Marcha por el derecho.”
Tetazos are confrontational protests in which people exhibit their breasts to challenge prudish social mores.
