Neo-liberalism in Latin America and elsewhere has been successful to the extent that state-civil society institutional relationships are permanently transformed. In Gendered Paradoxes Amy Lind endeavours to capture these transformations by ‘making feminist sense of neoliberalism’ in Ecuador. This is a carefully researched and tightly argued study of neo-liberal restructuring that shows the ways in which women's activism has been in part responsible for the successful institutional transformations in that country. Depending on their specific class location, and through their organisations and politics, Ecuadorian women have made fundamental contributions to the restructuring of state-society relations. For example, activists from poor communities, who are the primary focus of this book, have stepped into the vacuum left by a retreating social state to deliver much needed services to their neighbours. At the same time, their organisations have become institutionalised and activists from popular areas have ended up making a major contribution to the goals of neo-liberal state restructuring. They have, in effect, engaged in ‘mothering the crisis’. As far as the women's movement more generally is concerned, its goals of ‘strengthening civil society and engendering national politics’ have converged with what Lind calls ‘the globally inspired, neoliberal goal in Ecuador to transfer responsibilities to the private sector’. Thus, feminist strategic negotiations with the state and with the present modernisation and development projects have had their own unintended consequences. As a result of contemporary feminist activism, Ecuadorian women have important legal rights and protections, while at the same time the overwhelming majority of them lack basic social rights and continue to be marginalised. This is, indeed, the story of contemporary feminist politics throughout Latin America, and Gendered Paradoxes makes an important contribution to the ever-expanding field of Latin American feminism and women's politics.

This book relies on an interdisciplinary approach that is rooted in feminist political economy, and is sensitive to a cultural-political perspective on gender politics, to analyse institutional shifts associated with neo-liberalism as the outcome of women's negotiation of their economic identities and roles with the state, modernisation and development projects. Lind makes a very persuasive case for the need to recognise that organised women have been neither purely victims in their interactions with the state, nor exclusively engaged oppositional struggles. Instead, their activism has taken place at multiple, and at times contradictory, levels, and the outcomes of their strategic negotiations have had unintended consequences. What is innovative about Lind's study is her attempt to rescue women's agency in the analysis of their interaction with the restructuring state, while also attending to the economy as itself socially constituted, ‘embedded in global power relations’ and ‘subject to negotiation by women’. The result is a rich and nuanced account of women's activism ‘in and out of the state’ and of its implications for women in poor areas. In a historical chapter on ‘Myths of Progress’, Lind argues that the changing nature of women's participation within the state, and in civil society organisations, itself contributes to shaping the state and shifting development projects. Furthermore, this interaction has been contradictory and has had positive outcomes. This was especially the case as women began to frame their struggles in terms of gender. Beginning in the late 1970s, explicitly identified feminist groups initially emerged mainly in Quito, and in the 1980s, feminist groups also sprung up in Quito's urban poor, or popular sectors. Since then, these organisations have appeared throughout the country. This activism had significant gendering effects on politics and social policy. More generally, this fascinating historical chapter offers a complex analysis of the shifting notions of gender and women's struggles in different moments of state formation. The chapter covers the period 1900–1980 and reminds us of the important point that earlier efforts of women's organising in labour, peasant and leftist organisations are the basis of later feminist organising. This is something that many feminist analysts of Latin American women's movements, carried away by the supposed newness of different moments of women's activism, have tended too easily to overlook. Lind's discussion of the 1930–1960 period – characterised by a new moment in state formation (the rise of the developmentalist state), by the emergence of the professional field of development, and by shifts in the country's political economy following the discovery of oil – is particularly important for understanding the contemporary activism of Ecuadorean women. New relationships were established in the post-World War II period between the developmentalist state and women. Indeed, it is during this period that the discursive terrain of the modern policy field, with its particular (Eurocentric) ideologies of motherhood and national identity, against which contemporary feminists have shaped their relation to the state, took form.

In a chapter on ‘Remaking the Nation: Feminist Politics, Populist Nationalism, and the 1998 Constitutional Reforms’, Lind very effectively captures the contributions of feminist activists to ‘remaking the nation’ through their protests, their influence on new legislation, and their intervention in public political discourse, through an analysis of the four ‘strands of feminism’ which were active during the short but significant Bucaram populist administration (1996–1997). Three of these strands of feminist action work in and out of the state and have been shaped by transnational, especially UN, gender mainstreaming initiatives. Their activism is framed in the language of rights, and their goals are to engender traditional politics, state institutions and civil society. The result of this feminist activism has not been a stronger feminist network within the state, Lind shows, but further tensions and divisions within feminists. These have led to the rise of a critical strand of feminism, or the autónomas, who are critical of what they perceive as a feminism dominated by a gender technocracy and with limited power for autonomous action. Given this complex story of feminist negotiation with and against the state, the author suggests that the best way to understand the relation between women's activism, the state and the present development project, is as ‘paradoxical’. Women as a group, alongside other historically marginalised groups, have made some political gains during the neo-liberal period, as their socio-economic conditions eroded. This reminds us, of course, of the internal differences and hierarchies of the women's movement, something that the book highlights for different historical periods. Indeed, by the 1990s, Ecuadorian feminist politics shares the same characteristics of feminist politics throughout the region: ‘the fragmented nature of 1990s Ecuadorian feminist politics was characterised by competition and access to the market (access to funding, to institutional power, to international funders) rather than by cross-class solidarity, a strong, earlier ideology of feminism in the 1960s and 1970s.’ In Ecuador, as elsewhere in Latin America, the question that continues to preoccupy many is to what extent feminists can work creatively and critically from within the neo-liberal state. This question becomes paramount for those wanting to think about alternative models of development, representing women differently, and struggling for the social rights of women and other groups marginalised by the present development project.

Lind has followed the women's movement in great detail for a number of years and has much to say that is of interest not only for students of Latin American feminisms and gender politics, but for those interested in gender and development more broadly.