Mariátegui and Latin American Marxist Feminism: A Necessary Revisit

Women and Politics

For Mariátegui, the guarantee of women’s access to political rights that had already been guaranteed for men was a major theme of the twentieth century. In “La mujer y la política” he argued that this meant establishing legal and political equality between men and women. However, when pointing to women in power and in the public sector, he was talking about something that did not yet exist in Peru, specifically the Russian and English experiences, citing examples such as Alexandra Kollontai (one of the leaders of the Russian Revolution of 1917) and Margaret Bondfield (Britain’s first female minister of labor). This emphasis on the role of women from the European continent was not Eurocentrism but rather a matter of connecting these struggles in the central countries with Peruvian reality. Catalina Adrianzen (1974) addressed the importance of Mariátegui’s work to Latin American feminism and in particular to the Peruvian Marxist feminist movement and the massive participation of Peruvian women in the guerrilla warfare of the 1980s. Also important was the intellectual role of women in Amauta, the journal founded and directed by José Carlos Mariátegui in 1926. For Sara Beatriz Guardia (2017), Amauta was the first place where women could express their opinions on events and the political life of the country and the world, publishing articles and poems and writing about books, music, and cinema. The journal incorporated the writings of Peruvian women who changed the course of history. Mariátegui disseminated the indomitable force of revolutionaries such as Carmen Saco and Blanca del Prado, socialist political activists yearning for a more just homeland who fought against the patriarchal discourse of the early twentieth century.

Mariátegui’s perspective had no immediate effect in Peru, but half a century later it was essential in the formulation of the Peruvian Marxist and proletarian feminist movement. Taking the Russian Revolution as a central reference, he argued that it was a revolution that focused on women. He often quoted Kollontai, who, in addition to occupying one of the most important revolutionary positions, wrote many intellectual pieces during the Soviet regime. In 1922 she was appointed adviser to the Soviet embassy in Norway, the third woman to hold a diplomatic post in the twentieth century. She addressed issues of women in the public sector, morality, bourgeois sexuality, and the latter’s role in motherhood. For her, maternal rights should not be an end in women’s lives but rather a means of being a mother and remaining a political subject. This opened up the debate over the society’s conservative values by arguing that the way of breaking with them was the political and sexual liberation of women. For her, equality between men and women would establish a class with a new moral value that would make revolutionary women central to society.

For Mariátegui, the history of the Russian Revolution was radically connected to the achievements of feminism, a legacy that ended precisely because it distinguished not between the sexes but between bourgeois and proletarians: “The Soviet constitution accords women the same rights as men” (Mariátegui, 1924a). He went on to point to female collaboration during and after the revolution, explaining that communism initially encountered resistance from Russian women, especially peasant women, because of the dominance of religion throughout the country, and therefore the revolutionary agenda focused not only on the inclusion but also on the active participation of women. In this connection, Mariátegui criticized the French Revolution as an exclusively male democracy that, to a certain extent, maintained the foundations of the feudal domination and exploitation of women. In his opinion, however, the bourgeois revolution heralded a "new time" from the point of view of women’s struggles and political organization, since capitalist civilization would give women the concrete and objective conditions for increasing their productive capacity and, consequently, achieving a better position in society. He emphasized that in entering the workforce as proletarians, women acquired the necessary means of political training and awareness, thereby stepping out of a condition imposed on them that relegated them to the home and to being objects for reproduction.

Mariátegui’s optimistic view of the entry of women into the world of work was based on the Russian revolutionary experience and the influence of Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884). For Engels, the liberation of women depended on their participation in social production and the abolition of the monogamous family. Both Engels and Mariátegui saw a liberating dimension in capitalist development from the perspective of proletarian women, believing that opportunities for gain could also be opportunities to break from the confines of family and community life. The transition from the European Middle Ages to capitalism had, however, proved deeply reactionary for proletarian women by deepening the inequalities of the feudal era through the monetization of the workforce under the capitalist system. The work of proletarian women was either poorly paid or treated as a “natural resource.” With low wages or no access to paid work, proletarian women were increasingly dependent on their husbands and subject to patriarchy.

Along these lines, while the discussion of women and work did not overlook the historical and social attributes of the female sex, it had to do with the way these attributes were incorporated into the sexual and gender division of labor in colonized countries with a history of slavery. Therefore, we are not talking about a single historical subject but about historically determined social class formation. The particular condition of this class under the Soviet regime served as a point of view for Mariátegui’s writings by reinforcing the role of women in politics and in the public sector in the Peruvian reality of the early 1930s. According to him, this higher level of action would mean more involvement in proletarian struggles and the recognition of subjects with equal rights. He pointed out that this process would confront obstacles and cited as an example the response of conservatives, who not only sought to preserve the “feminine model,” restricted to the home and subordinated to men, but also rejected the rise of women in the public and political spheres.

Mariátegui showed that antifeminism was an idea that had already been shaped, and it was precisely this movement, led by men, mostly from the bourgeois aristocracy and owners of the means of production, that imposed a degraded and subservient condition for women in the world of work. This was how agendas including equality between the sexes and equal pay for equal work, for example, were prevented from becoming a reality in the capitalist world. Perhaps this explains his concern to give visibility to the yoke of colonization and slavery in Latin American countries. Addressing this issue, he shrewdly expressed the recognition of transformations in the world of work and their expressions, approximations, and latent differences between central and peripheral countries. As he saw it, the deleterious effects of slavery-based colonization made it impossible to analyze working Latin American women in the same way as European women, and in addition the formalization of salaried work had occurred in Europe through industry and had extended to Latin America at different times and in different ways.

Apart from that, in thinking about the reality and experiences of working women in Latin America we first must recognize the selective and organizational structure of world economies and the peripheral role of developing countries and their specific expressions of degradation both of working conditions and of the material conditions of production and reproduction in the lives of workers. Without feminist demands this struggle does not happen. Hence the importance of this movement in history, because the fight for women’s rights ends up being a fight for a new society.

Feminist Demands

As previously mentioned, one of Mariátegui’s main concerns was to bring the Russian revolutionary experience closer to Peruvian feminism without disregarding the latter’s specificities. In “Las reivindicaciones feministas,” published in Mundial in December 1924 (Mariátegui, 1924b), he explained that feminist concerns in Peru were not abstract or exotic, as the conservatives claimed, but a specific expression of a human idea inherent in the civilizing process:

Feminism has not appeared in Peru artificially or arbitrarily. It has appeared as a consequence of the new forms of women’s intellectual and manual work. The women of real feminist affiliation are the women who work, the women who study. The idea of feminism thrives among women of the intellectual or manual trades: university professors, workers. It finds an environment conducive to its development in university classrooms, which are increasingly attracting Peruvian women, and in labor unions, in which women from factories enroll and organize with the same rights and duties as men.

He focused attention on the struggle of women for political, economic, social, and cultural liberation and, fundamentally, for equal rights between the sexes. Here again we see that the positivist medical model of Lombroso and Ferrero (2017) did not emerge without a substantive reason. The pursuit of supposedly scientific knowledge to justify the ideas that women were inferior to men and that the female profile was one of crime and prostitution was undertaken as an antifeminist response to the struggles for women’s rights and freedoms that preceded the French Revolution, but it undoubtedly strengthened, legitimized, and expanded what we know today as feminism(s).

Karen Offen (2015: 53–54) points out that the word “feminism” widely used in Western countries today was already being used as a synonym for the emancipation of women in French political discourse in the late nineteenth century, and therefore it is possible to contest attributing its origin to Charles Fourier:

The first self-proclaimed feminist was French women’s suffrage advocate Hubertine Auclert, who, beginning in 1882, used the term in her newspaper La Citoyenne (The [Female] Citizen) to describe herself and her associates. Her words gained popularity following discussions in the French press relating to the first feminist congress that was held in Paris in May 1892, sponsored by Eugénie Potonié-Pierre and her colleagues in the Solidarité women’s group, which soon after juxtaposed féminisme with masculinisme (a term that meant something analogous to what we now call male chauvinism).

“Feminism” is a term whose meaning varies with both culture and society. Thus even briefly addressing feminist struggles and their legacy as a continuum requires examining their historical context, avoiding anachronisms and attending to criticism from within the struggle itself. Thinking about the demands of women also requires collecting information about their priorities from women themselves. Another pertinent issue is the idea that feminism is antimasculine, since “not all women are feminists nor are all feminists women” (Offen, 2015: 56). This clarification from Offen is important for two reasons: first, to avoid the idea that feminism is antimale or that all men are potential oppressors and, second, because in the course of history feminist agendas have had (albeit limited) support from men. Given, for example, that ever since the sixteenth century the idea of knowledge and humanity has been dominated by males, how would feminist agendas have gained recognition “on their own”? For example, Offen (2015: 55) mentions François Poullain de la Barre in seventeenth-century France, Condorcet and Theodore Gottlieb in France and Prussia at the end of the eighteenth century, and Charles Fourier, Ernest Legouvé, John Stuart Mill, and August Bebel in nineteenth-century France, Germany, and England. As for the participation of men in the feminist struggle in Latin America, it is worth mentioning José Carlos Mariátegui in twentieth-century Peru.

Another issue that grounded feminist struggles in the European context in the eighteenth century was the emergence of distinct relational and individualistic arguments. According to Offen (2015: 57), the relational perspective emphasized the rights of women as women, using as a key marker of difference their ability to bear, raise, and educate children, valuing the feminine conceived as biological, and therefore seeking an economic contribution based on these attributes. Thus “they appeal[ed] to the autonomy of women as individuals, but always to their autonomy as embodied feminine individuals.” The individualist feminist perspective, in contrast, sought an abstract affirmation of individual human rights, rejecting female roles including those related to motherhood. However, it did so without criticizing what also, within these relationships, ended up being specific to the female sex/gender— restricting this equality to rights without affirming and recognizing the differences. “The emphasis in this tradition is on an individual who, in a sense, transcends sexual identification and is effectively disembodied, beyond gender” (Offen, 2015: 57). These two perspectives characterized a given historical moment created out of the specific conditions and guidelines considered fundamental. However, precisely because they are based on the needs and demands of women themselves, these guidelines will not always be defined by a single social body. At the same time, these disputes and tensions reinforce ties of solidarity and collective struggle between women who think about life projects and society that are also different and have class content. While these two historical perspectives form the basis for the conceptualization of feminism as the emancipatory matrix for women, interpretations of emancipation will not necessarily follow a homogeneous and hegemonic path, because this is not a neutral category but one crossed by and made up of societal, ideological, political, economic, social, and cultural processes. To this effect, Offen (2015: 57–58) writes: “In its own right, feminism can be seen historically as a rapidly developing system of critical thought. As such, it embodies a broad spectrum of ideas and is international in scope, a scope whose phases of development have historically depended on and come into tension with male-centered political and intellectual discourse but whose more recent manifestations transcend the latter.”

Today’s widespread feminist system of critical thinking was born in the nineteenth century from a practical theory that came into opposition to the antifeminist movement. The work of Lombroso and Ferrero (2017), published in 1893, shows how this movement, almost 100 years later, was legitimized by supposedly scientific knowledge about women. Although feminist theory made its greatest progress in the late 1980s, its agenda in the previous century was decisive in the promotion of what we understand today by “rights”—to work, school, education, citizenship, etc.

According to Offen (2015: 136), the nineteenth century, especially the 1830s, 1848, 1871, and the 1890s, was a time of eruption, revolution, and political effervescence for women. From the 1860s on, feminist challenges developed at a steady pace, flowing expansively throughout the period of rapid socioeconomic change between 1890 and 1914. During this period, feminist struggles involved difficult confrontations with the dominant hierarchy of men both in private (family) and in public (government) spaces and in the church, which, in its institutional relationship with the state, sought to regulate women. It is no coincidence that the religious institutions in Europe were responsible for the “recovery” of criminalized women, prostitutes, the poor, and those in extreme poverty.

Meanwhile, in Europe, the postrevolutionary period was marked by supposedly scientific publications that sought to build barriers between the public and private spheres so that only the latter could be recognized as arenas to which women could have access. Thus the possibility of women’s expressing themselves as subjects with rights and autonomy came to be questioned by members of this group, in particular, because for them women could not occupy the same spaces as men, who were at the forefront of public life. The works of Émile Durkheim are an excellent example of how this generation of conservative knowledge about women spread. Despite not having specifically been written about the relationships between men and women, they focused on the family and the rites that determined social roles. Writing about suicide, for example, he argued that women were “more instinctive than men” and that any division of labor by sex had to be very cautious because its spread would end up threatening the marital relationship. Durkheim (2012: 20–21) said that in modern society women provided love and care while men were providers and the source of intelligence and went so far as to say: “The volume of the male and female skulls, even when comparing subjects of the same age, weight, and size, reflects considerable differences in favor of men, and this inequality also increases with civilization, which leads us to conclude that, when looking at brain mass and intelligence, women are increasingly distanced from men.”

This was the scenario that feminist women faced in the nineteenth century. One of its facets was the struggle for equality of access to education, which, despite having been a right for some of them since the eighteenth century, remained selective. During this period, education was obtained less as a supplement to erudition than as a ticket for entry into the world of work. Industry in search of labor began looking to women, who, in addition to receiving less pay, were exposed to duress and violence. In Friedrich Engels’s book The Condition of the Working Class in England (2008) women gave birth on the factory floor, took their other children to work, and were humiliated and discriminated against for being workers. This condition was relentlessly questioned by feminist women, who began to demand a higher position in the public sector, the right to a university education, and better working conditions.

For Offen (2015: 140), the nineteenth century was a turning point for feminist theory, since from then on women began to formulate the struggle for rights in terms of five issues. The first of these was education, especially primary education and its extension to women from the lower classes. The second, not unrelated to the first, was the formation of the nation-state, with female representation on the agenda under the influence of cultural nationalism. The third was economic development and the production and expansion of textile and metallurgical industry, with textiles being directly linked to the demand of the female workforce, introducing major changes to domestic work. The conservative agenda rejected women’s leaving the home to do formal work, claiming that it would affect family values and care in the private sphere and, beyond that, take away men’s sovereignty in governing them and their public lives. It was in this context that women began questioning their subordination in the world of work and the moral values connected with marriage and the family, acquiring a collective consciousness about these socially imposed values. In addition to this was the matter of housework, which they demanded be revisited. Working conditions and sexual morality with regard to women meant an increase in female poverty. Monetization came to shape the social relations of the buying and selling of labor and to create an increasing need for resources for subsistence (Offen, 2015).

The fourth issue was the critique of petty-bourgeois feminism. While previous to 1842 socialist and liberal feminists walked together under a single flag, from 1889 on socialists criticized liberals for not giving centrality to class content. While the socialists founded the Second International, the liberals understood that women’s liberation was an issue for everyone regardless of class status. For them all women were “sisters” because they were all subordinate to men. Finally, there was the expansion of feminist organizations across the European continent and in the United States from 1900 on. Numerous national and international seminars and congresses were launched aiming to disseminate feminist critical theory (Offen, 2015: 138–147). This was a period of great success in artistic creation, in literature, theater, film, and novels that addressed women’s issues. These were the latent questions at the outset of the twentieth century, which also saw a world war and the 1917 Russian Revolution.

Capitalism in wartime has taken advantage of the existence and vitality of women. Russian women pushed vigorously for a left-leaning reform of the relationships between men and women, and Kollontai made significant progress in pointing to the shortcomings of capitalist society with regard to the party’s own handling of the debate on private property and the relations between men and women in the new post-Bolshevik-Revolution social structure, whose objective was to affirm the feminine sex and the transformation of the institutions rigidly constituted by the monarchy with regard to women’s lives and ways of living.

The twentieth century has shown the need for women in both the communist and the liberal bloc to act as subjects of a history written by them instead of one that viewed them as abject figures. The radical difference was in the position they recognized as their banner, which in the United States was work in its most individualistic form and in Russia was work in a communist society. However, in both cases, women continued making demands that were restricted to systems of power that had been created and continued to be dominated by men.

Aware of these contradictions, Mariátegui stressed that from a Marxist perspective feminist demands were closely linked to the world of work. However, he insisted on showing that, along with Marxist and class feminism, other feminisms and their demands emerged in the European context. He treated Marxist feminism as an organic movement because it started from the material and concrete conditions of working women and men. And precisely because this movement was founded on the unequal relations between social classes, it incorporated various work activities, making no distinction among professional categories. Adopting this classist and Marxist position, he showed that other European feminisms were only involved in a struggle for individual rights, reinforcing the legacy of the French Revolution by taking the agenda of women’s rights as a central issue without incorporating class: “The historical roots of feminism have a liberal spirit.” He identified this latter feminism as bourgeois, but he gracefully addressed feminisms in the plural, not as a single movement (Mariátegui, 1924b):

Feminism necessarily has numerous colors and wide-ranging tendencies. Feminism is distinguished by three fundamental tendencies, three substantive colors: bourgeois feminism, petty-bourgeois feminism, and proletarian feminism. Each of these feminisms formulates its claims in a different way—the bourgeois woman in terms of the interests of the conservative class, the proletarian woman in terms of the faith of the revolutionary multitudes in the future society. The class struggle—a historical fact and not a theoretical assertion—is reflected on the feminist plane.

For Mariátegui, this distinction was essential, because by marking the importance of class in the feminist struggle a new societal project would become the struggle’s central agenda. This struggle would mark a break with the conservative and elitist bases that had been perpetuated over the centuries, exploiting and subjugating the working class—a structure maintained by the work and reproduction of women. Therefore, while treating feminism in the plural, he showed that men and women in a society might be reactionary, centrist, or revolutionary and therefore feminisms would take these antagonistic forms. Thus he demystified liberal feminism’s idea of universal and collective solidarity among women, pointing out that among bourgeois women this solidarity would always be, in the first instance, articulated in relation to capital and privileged class status.

Mariátegui argued that it was impossible to be both a feminist and a conservative. Conservatism aimed solely at maintaining society’s traditional organization. To do this, it sought to consolidate a conservative morality that made it impossible for a feminist to be associated with it. He explained that bourgeois feminism distorted reality and sought to fragment the true feminist struggle, since bourgeois feminists accepted all the consequences of the current order, including subordination to unequal relations between the sexes, because they would not give up their class condition. Marxist, classist feminism was revolutionary because in addition to persisting in the class struggle it recognized women in society as social beings, “something more than a mother and a female, similar to how a man is more than just a male” (Mariátegui, 1924b). He closed by writing:

This is an extensive subject. This brief article merely attempts to verify the character of the first manifestations of feminism in Peru and to test a very succinct and brief interpretation of the physiognomy and spirit of the world feminist movement. Sensitive men and the great emotions of the time should not and cannot feel strange or indifferent to this movement. The question of femininity is but part of the question of humanity.

By saying that feminism had no ready-made “model” for struggle and that this was a result of the dialectical movement of history, he identified the feminist question as simply part of the human question, but this was a prism accessible only from the concrete experience of the working class.

From Mariátegui we learn that the European feminism that emerged in the eighteenth century served Latin American women as the foundation for organization, struggle, recognition, and criticism—as in the case of liberal feminism. At the same time, the agendas, organizational forms, and strategies of occupation of the public world were different. In the European context, the subordination of women was more connected to issues of equal rights and female emancipation. Women there understood that with modernity the relations between the sexes would also improve and therefore called for the consolidation of a different position in society, one that countered the private lives that they led in subordination to men.

Turning to Latin American reality, it is important to question certain central elements that deepen and strengthen the oppression and historical inequalities between men and women—first and fundamentally colonization, which employs all its forms of domination and disparities here, leaving a disastrous legacy for the relationships later established with regard to working Andean and black women. The abrupt and violent colonization—the trafficking in black men and women from the African continent and the extortion of natural resources, which continued even after independence—was a form of exploitation of native peoples. Putting this relationship in its place makes it evident that demands for equality between men and women, a feeling that grew in Europe during the eighteenth century, arrived later in the peripheral and dependent reality of Latin America.

The two feminist perspectives that emerged in the eighteenth century in the European context—the individualist current and the correlational focus—were reconceptualized at the end of the nineteenth century and continued throughout the twentieth. While the United States was predominantly tied to the individualist one, Europe and especially French feminism followed a tendency that corresponded much more to class and sex/gender relations. It was during these times that Simone de Beauvoir published her 1949 book The Second Sex (2009). Taking into account progress in the contradictory course of the history of feminisms in Europe and the end of the Soviet regime, she showed that in modern society, despite rights’ being guaranteed to women, discourses defining them were applied to them at each moment of history. In this context they were identified as sorceresses/witches, crazies, criminals, and saints, and throughout there was a knowledge base that differentiated them from men, always placing them as opposite to the masculine essence. The “second sex” was defined by the legitimation and recognition of the first.

De Beauvoir revealed the shortcomings of capitalist society, a descent into the illusion of paid work as the only place for emancipation and the limits of sexual freedom. Adding to this, she presented us with reasons to think that the masculine was conceived as such simply because it not only referred to the feminine but disqualified it either because of its biological condition or because of what had so far been identified as “women’s role.” It was in this way that it questioned not only the roles assigned to the female sex but also what was understood as a woman, since our points of reference say more about the Other than about ourselves. From birth to adulthood, women’s lives in society went through a ritual of markers that reinforced the way they are built and what the female sex was for. From childhood play to romantic love in adulthood, women, even when “emancipated” as far as rights were concerned, achieved little in their own libertarian experiment, especially when it came to the realization of their own freedom. De Beauvoir’s radical critique was aimed at the oppressive and exclusive conception of women’s existence in terms of their biological condition. While men were granted their condition as male and free, for women rights and liberty were always conceived in terms of the civilizing promise of the masculine world.

The idea of feminism and classist feminist struggle in Latin America as an organized movement linked to the working class ended up being formalized primarily in the context of the military dictatorships (from the mid-1960s on during the twentieth century). During this period, the forced exit of these women from their countries, turning them into exiles largely on the European continent, paved the way for their entry into feminist consciousness-raising groups. In the face of civil, political, and military repression, women workers in factories, intellectuals, and members of the leftist movement began to align their demands, which included better working conditions and opposition to unequal relations between the sexes and the values that limited the female body and sexuality to mere reproduction. In the words of Alba Carosio (2017: 32), “The Latin American feminism of the seventies and eighties was iconoclastic and rebellious. It was made up mostly of educated middle-class women, but it was approaching and articulating itself with grassroots movements, linking and sowing ideas and principles.”

The organization of women around a public agenda in Latin American countries became most expressive in terms of recognition and incorporation into the class struggle a century after what happened in Europe, but it is undoubtedly in the Latin American context that Marxist and class-based feminism is most firmly grounded. For Carosio (2020: 239), this is because the Latin American feminist movement has become a major political agent, one that Mariátegui called “organic.” According to him, the movement

interpellates crucial issues that politics had not taken into account until now—the body, love, desire, sexuality, motherhood as an option and not an obligation, the right to abortion, female poverty, the economy as a sustainer of life, the participation of women and their effective rights—but above all it interpellates social transformation and the depth and scope of emancipation.

These are issues that have been studied since the late 1970s by Latin American feminists who recognized the need to advance the classist agenda with the debate on the “sexual revolution,” a topic that was addressed in 1929 by Mariátegui in a short essay entitled “El III congreso internacional de la reforma sexual.” Enthusiastically writing that "the sexual question was never discussed with the freedom and the breadth that it is today," he argued that taboos and the predominance of religious morality were in check with the advances with regard to the sexual debate and the protagonism of women. He continued: “The Soviet state has a sexual policy, just as it has a pedagogical policy, an economic policy, etc. And the modern States also have it, albeit less declared and defined. . . . One does not study, in our time, the life of a society without ascertaining and analyzing its basis: the organization of the family, the situation of women” (Mariategui, 1929).

Even after the end of the Russian Revolution, Latin American feminists returned to Mariátegui’s thought and his writings on feminism, among them the Peruvian Marxist Catalina Adrianzen, whose work stands out for its theoretical-practical effort to denaturalize and de-essentialize being a woman. She and other feminists took up the demands addressed by Mariátegui, seeking to understand oppression in capitalist and patriarchal society in terms of the inherent relationships among class, race, gender, and sexuality. Their work was an advance over Marx’s social theory in showing that these forms of oppression were not disconnected but rather interrelated. Regarding the relational dialectical capacity present in Latin American feminist critical thinking, Carosio (2017: 30) writes:

Feminist thought has the capacity to modify visions and theoretical perspectives and to develop the tools that make it possible to address crucial issues in the real world in which we live, relating to human existence in its concrete forms, in relation to both societies and their material organization. Hence its potential to explain—and not only describe—both the existing inequalities between women and men and their mechanisms of reproduction and legitimation.

The relevance of Mariátegui’s analysis can be recognized almost a century after the publication of “Las reivindicaciones feministas” in addressing the idea that work is a transitional path to women’s political emancipation in that this depends on the radicalization of the consciousness and sociopolitical organization of workers. According to him, “work radically changes the feminine mentality and spirit. Through work, women obtain a new notion of themselves.” In contemporary times, the situation of working women, in addition to being further degraded by historical factors such as sexual inequality at work, is further deepened by the international division of labor. Mariátegui’s attribution of a revolutionary character to the entry of women into the world of work had the aim of showing that the development of productive forces was inherent in struggles between capital and labor, beyond the specific nature of sale and purchase, to the extent that other agendas were set back or paralyzed by the conservatives’ dismissal of rights and consolidation of values including that of women’s subordination to men. In calls for Latin American feminism, Mariátegui identified the class debate as a central issue and the feminist struggle as a timeless insurgency.

Conclusion

Nearly 100 years after “La mujer e la política,” we have made little progress with regard to the entry of women into politics. In Europe the entry of women into the struggle for rights and recognition was shaped by an opening to the New World. Modernity opened windows, and in this movement many women saw rejecting their destiny as a given. All this served, as it still does, as a reference for the collective struggle and for the importance of women’s questioning the knowledge imposed and constructed by men. Faced with the rise of conservatism in Latin America, “feminist demands” continue to be an “exotic idea,” since feminist agendas and struggles are being diminished and repressed with respect to their political content on a daily basis by a minority of white heterosexual men who have been radicalized in oligarchic and bourgeois power throughout Latin America. Additionally, the barriers imposed by capital on the monetization of the female workforce have made greater support by women for feminist struggles and revolutions in Nuestra América impossible. This conservative and authoritarian yoke limits and criminalizes women for claiming the right to their own bodies, a theme addressed by Mariátegui in writings dated October 1929. Of all of his writings, these seem to me farthest from anything he could have believed possible a century later.

However, every revolutionary struggle requires time and strategy, and nothing is more laudable than recognizing the feminist resistance of the Argentine women who, since the 1970s, have been fighting for legal abortion. On December 30, 2020, the Argentine Senate approved a bill legalizing abortion in the country. This struggle began with the Russian revolutionaries a century ago and is now gaining ground in Latin America. Mariátegui called Marxist feminism organic, meaning that its agendas and achievements constituted tangible and substantial change for all of the world’s proletarian women. As a result, the victory of Argentine feminists is a victory of past and present feminists committed to a different project for society.

While the Russian revolutionaries were the first to debate the question of work and the condition of women in society from a Marxist perspective, it is up to us to endorse this criticism in the light of the new forms of degradation in the world of work, including the global and unequal internationalization that compels women across the planet into forced informality, risk, poverty, and death merely because they are women. Although there have been changes over the past century, the conditions for survival of women in the capitalist world have deteriorated. Overcoming these negative conditions and inaugurating a new civilizing process remain our commitment, and Mariátegui is essential to this struggle. For us as it was for him, the feminist struggle is a human revolutionary and civilizing cause.