Making Feminist Sense of Neoliberalism: The Institutionalization of Women’s Struggles for Survival in Ecuador and Bolivia

Since the early 1980s, community-based women’s organizations have emerged throughout Ecuador and Bolivia in response to persistent poverty, economic crisis, neoliberal-development policies and related political and cultural crises. In Ecuador, women and men currently face an unprecedented financial crisis, the “dollarization,” and the new 1998 Constitution. In Bolivia, various sectors of women have addressed the harsh economic measures implemented since 1985, growing tensions surrounding migration, rising home-lessness and poverty rates, and the “War on Drugs.” In both countries, women have been among the first to make connections among everyday life and development policies. In this article I examine the contradictions organized women face as they struggle for economic and political empowerment in the context of neoliberal development. I argue that development policies that rely upon women’s unpaid labor sometimes contribute to institutionalizing women’s struggles for survival rather than merely empowering them, as they hope to do, through their community participation.