Rural women and the agrarian reforms in Peru, Chile and Cuba

Abstract

This contribution reproduces one of the first articles analyzing rural women’s participation in the Peruvian agrarian reform, published in 1983, along with a new preface by the author. It is argued that processes of socio-economic change are not gender neutral; supposedly gender-neutral reforms may have a negative impact on the position of women. Neither the Peruvian nor Chilean agrarian reforms of the 1970s had an explicit policy to incorporate women into the reform, in contrast to Cuba in this period, where the participation of women in the new production cooperatives was a policy goal. As a result, few women were direct beneficiaries in Peru or Chile in comparison to Cuba. The criteria for being a beneficiary of the reform was the main mechanism of exclusion in the former two countries, specifically, the requirement that these be household heads. The exclusion of women had negative consequences for the success of the production cooperatives. In Cuba, women became cooperative members on their own account; moreover, attention to their domestic responsibilities in the new agrarian communities that were created, along with the support of and effective coordination between the peasant’s and women’s associations, largely explain both how women came to be over one-third of the members and the early success of the cooperativization process.