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Women's Movements and Democratic Transition in Chile, Brazil, East The City University of New York !"#$%&'()"*$#$%+'(,%-(.$#"/0,+1/(20,%'1+1"%(1%(3415$6(70,8156(9,'+(:$0#,%;6(,%-(<"5,%- =>+4"0?'@A(B1',(7,5-$8 C">0/$A(3"#D,0,+1*$(<"51+1/'6(E"5F(GH6(I"F(G(?=D0F6(JKKG@6(DDF(JHGLJMJ <>N51'4$-(N;A(Ph.D. Program in Political Science of the City University of New York C+,N5$(OPBA(http://www.jstor.org/stable/4150176 . =//$''$-A(KQRKSRJKQQ(QSAGK Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. 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Ph.D. Program in Political Science of the City University of New York and The City University of New York are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Comparative Politics. http://www.jstor.org Women'sMovements and DemocraticTransition in Chile, Brazil,East Germany,and Poland Lisa Baldez In many countrieswomen have respondedto transitionsto democracyby mobilizing along gender lines to advance their own agendas. In countries as diverse as Argentina,Korea, Spain, and SouthAfrica, women saw populardemands for democ- racy as an opportunity to press for the democratization of everyday life and the extension of women's rights. They mobilized across class and party lines to demand that incoming democraticgovernments ensured women's equal participationin poli- tics. Yet not all transitionsto democracyhave been accompaniedby the mobilization of women as women. In most of the transitionsin Centraland East Europe women who participatedin dissident movements did not organize on the basis of their status as women. Within democratictransitions, when will women mobilize on the basis of their gender identity? There are three significant causes of women's mobilization: resources, the way issues are framed,and the exclusion of women from the agenda- setting process within the opposition. The key resources that lead to gender-based organizingare preexisting formal or informalnetworks in which women participate. Direct contact with the internationalfeminist community allows women to frame their situation in terms of their status as women and to organize separately from men. Finally, the systematic exclusion of women from the process of agenda setting affords them an opportunityto unite in a broad coalition on the basis of their shared identity. This article focuses particularlyon this last point. Women'smovements represent many differentidentities, interests, and issues.1Despite importantdifferences, however, many women's movementsexperience a particularmoment at which women unite on the basis of their genderidentity. At this moment,the peak of mobilizationin women's movements,a diverse arrayof women's organizationscomes togetherto form a coali- tion that transcendscleavages along class, race, or partisanlines. These peak moments typicallyoccur at a rally,a demonstration,or a conference.They differfrom other points in the evolution of a movementin terms of their size, breadthand significance.They frequentlyconstitute the largestconvocation of organizationsin the history of a move- ment. They representthe acme of unity and the ideal expression of the goals of the movement,while at the same time encompassinga wide arrayof interestsand issues. 253 ComparativePolitics April 2003 They typically inaugurate a movement in the public eye and introduce women's demandsinto the publicarena. Peaks of protest consolidate women's political clout. They attractthe attentionof (primarily)male political actors,who seek to harnesswomen's capacity to mobilize for their own electoral goals. Interestfrom political parties leads to the incorporationof women's demands in the political agenda and furtherfuels popular support for the movement.The coalitionsthat emerge out of such momentsoften come to serve as the institutionalrepresentatives of the women's movementin the political arena. Scholars and activistsalike uniformlyacknowledge the importanceof these momentsin the his- tory of a movement;they take on mythic proportionsin historiesof movementsand in the memoriesof activists. The formationof such coalitionsis not inevitable,as women'smovements typically include groupswith diverseand conflictingagendas. What prompts women's groups to coalesce is their exclusion from the process of realignment,the point at which actors within the democraticopposition form new allianceswith one another.The exclusionof women and women'sconcerns from the agendasarticulated by primarilymale opposi- tion leaders heightens the political salience of gender relative to other cleavages and triggersthe formationof a unitedfront among women's organizations. At the same time, these peak momentsprove difficult to sustain.Conflict seems to break out among groups within the women'smovement almost as soon as the peak of unity occurs.But the ephemeralnature of these momentsdoes not underminetheir sig- nificance. Peaks of protest demonstratewomen's capacity for mobilization, which attractsthe attentionof partyelites. Once male politicianssee women as a constituency worth coopting, they begin to compete for women's support.The advent of electoral competitionfragments the movement. This argumentwill be examined with regardto three countries in which women mobilized duringdemocratic transition-Brazil, Chile, and East Germany-and one in which women did not-Poland. These cases providevariation on the dependentvariable and enhancethe validity of the inferencesthat can be drawnfrom them.2The women's movementsthat emerged in Chile and Brazilwere two of the largestand most vibrantin Latin America;they joined human rights groups, feminist organizations,and shanty- town groups organizedaround issues of economic subsistence.In East Germanythe movementincluded women's peace organizations,lesbian collectives, radical feminists, socialists, and neighborhoodgroups. In Poland the level of autonomousorganizing amongwomen remainedminiscule in comparison. Organizational resources constitute a necessary but not sufficient variable for women's mobilization.In all these cases, women participatedin formal and informal networksthat provided the infrastructureto build a women'smovement. Only in Chile, Brazil, and East Germanywere the othertwo variablespresent. First, direct contact with feminist activistsin other countriespersuaded dissident women to considerthe advan- tages of gender-basedmobilization. Second, male oppositionleaders excluded women 254 Lisa Baldez and women's issues from the agendas they establishedduring the process of realign- ment, as groupswithin the oppositionformed new coalitionsthat challengedthe exist- ing regimes. In Polandonly one of these three factorswas present:Polish women were highly mobilized throughmembership in dissident unions. Yet they had very limited access to internationalfeminist ideas, and male opposition leaders included women's concernsin theirnegotiations with the existing authoritarianregime in the early 1980s. These two factorsgave Polishwomen less reasonto organizeautonomously. Women's Movements and Democratization Initially,research on democratizationpaid little or no attentionto women'sparticipation, but studies of the role of women'smovements in democratictransitions have exploded in the past decade and generateda wealth of informationand empiricaldetail about many cases.3 Many explanationsof the conditionsunder which women mobilize have been offered. Most studies concur that women's movementsemerge as a function of some combinationof resources,framing, and opportunities,but the way in which these variablesare defined differs from case to case. None can be generalizedto explain all cases. Systematiccomparison across cases and regionsreveals three factors as criticalto the mobilizationof women in democratictransitions: organizational networks, direct contactwith internationalfeminism, and exclusionfrom the process of decisionmaking withinthe opposition. Resource Mobilization One school of social movementanalysis points to organiza- tional resourcesas the factorthat gives rise to mobilization.According to this perspec- tive, movementsemerge as a functionof individualdecisions aboutthe costs and bene- fits of collective actionor as a functionof materialresources that can be broughtto bear on organizing.4Factors such as money, leadership,and (especially) existing organiza- tional networksfacilitate mobilization. People who alreadyparticipate in groupscan be mobilizedaround other issues more easily thanisolated individuals. Organizationalnetworks constitute a necessarybut not sufficientcause for the emer- gence of women'smovements. In all four cases discussedhere, significantnumbers of women
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