***
Religiously motivated mobilisations against liberal change in cultural and social values have surged across the world in recent years. In Latin America, ‘anti-gender ideology’ movements have mobilised thousands on the streets in defence of traditional gender roles and family structures and against legislation seeking to expand sex education, access to abortion and LGBTQ+ rights.Footnote 1 In the numerous protests that have swept the region since 2015, involving a diverse array of social and political actors,Footnote 2 women often constitute the majority of those taking to the streets. Women head ‘pro-life’ and ‘pro-family’ organisations and marshal online activism in close alliance with religious actors and conservative politicians. Yet despite the rapidly growing literature on anti-gender movements,Footnote 3 a notable lacuna remains, as most research centres on gender in the form of contested policies and less on how these issues might shape who engages in mobilisation and why.
This lacuna becomes especially relevant given conservative–religious women’s history of activism in the region. A closer examination reveals that women have been central to religiously motivated mobilisations, particularly during the conflicts between liberal and conservative forces in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Footnote 4 Historical precedents show that women rose against proposed changes to religious regulation, including laws separating church and state and other secularisation efforts, and in favour of blocking attempts to introduce sex education in schools. These conflicts prefigure subsequent waves of conservative–religious women’s mobilisation.
Studies of religion have focused increasingly on gender. Many aspects, however, remain unexplored. Until recently, lay women have been largely overlooked as important research subjects.Footnote 5 Yet research consistently shows that women constitute the majority of faithful with widespread engagement in religious institutions.Footnote 6 Women’s stronger beliefs and involvement in religious activities compared to men is a constant across denominations, time and space.Footnote 7 The argument advanced in this article, however, does not imply that men refrain from engaging in conservative mobilisation or that a majority of women necessarily support conservative positions. On the contrary, recent election surveys show that women tend to support progressive alternatives to a greater extent than men.Footnote 8 Rather, our argument concerns the central role that women play in the region’s conservative–religious movements and the observable patterns of their mobilisation.
This article seeks to explore mobilisation at the intersection of gender and religion in Latin America: what role do women play in contemporary conservative–religious mobilisations? What triggers their activism, and how has it changed over time? We argue that conservative women mobilise to defend religious values, beliefs and agendas against a perceived threat that also attacks their identity by offering alternatives to conventional family structures. Women typically place issues concerning the ‘traditional’ family at the centre of their activism, defending a conservative–religious order that puts women in charge of reproductive tasks, children’s education and the transmission of moral values. Changes that threaten this order may thus dislocate a realm where women hold influence. This mobilisation in response to a threat to the conservative gender structure constitutes a key continuity across time and space in the region, from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries.
To develop this argument, we employ a double comparison through descriptive qualitative analysis, focusing on Chile and Mexico during two distinct time periods. These cases present different religious configurations as well as variations in institutional characteristics and regime trajectories but share similar forms of mobilisation, providing an opportunity for a most-different systems design (i.e. two cases that differ on relevant criteria but share an outcome). First, we draw on historical cases from the early twentieth century as a theory-building exercise to uncover when conservative–religious women mobilise, and their claims and strategies. Second, we centre on contemporary cases of conservative–religious women’s mobilisation. We discuss similar patterns of mobilisation as a response to threats to Christian-supported gender hierarchies, as well as how such activism has changed over time. In the twenty-first century, women no longer mobilise based on their membership in female-only organisations formally affiliated with the Catholic church. Rather, they do so through a diverse set of organisations, groups and associations that have rendered the gendered dynamics of religious mobilisation less visible. Moreover, as the growth of evangelical churches and the non-affiliated has transformed Latin America’s religious landscape,Footnote 9 contemporary mobilisations include a broader and more heterogeneous set of actors.
Existing literature considers varied forms of right-wing women’s mobilisation in Latin America, but without clearly differentiating and characterising conservative–religious activism.Footnote 10 We focus on a specific subset of conservative women: those who mobilise in defence of religious principles. We refer to the women under study as ‘conservative’, located on one end of the conservative–liberal political spectrum and defined by their opposition to change in cultural and social values – including broadly the family, gender and social diversity agendas. This spectrum differs from the Left–Right dimension. The Right is ‘a political position distinguished by the belief that the main inequalities between people are natural and outside the purview of the state’,Footnote 11 and thus more associated with distributive conflicts. The two dimensions certainly interact; hierarchies constructed around social categories often reinforce material inequalities, but they can also vary separately, as is common in the region, where the conservative Left supports economic redistribution while maintaining gender hierarchies.Footnote 12
In what follows, we first present the theoretical foundations for the argument, (a) drawing on the idea of threats within the social movements literature as a trigger for conservative–religious mobilisation and (b) addressing the question of why women, in particular, engage in such activism. In the research design section, we discuss our case selection and methods. The empirical section is organised around the two junctures following a similar structure: the context of the religious conflict in each country, women’s mobilisation in defence of conservative and religious agendas, and how this mobilisation has played out in the discussion of sex education. We conclude by highlighting our findings that show how women play central roles in conservative–religious mobilisation across time and space in Latin America, highlighting continuities and changes in women’s activism and suggesting avenues for future research.
Theoretical Foundations of Conservative–Religious Women’s Mobilisation
Threats to the Religious-Based Traditional Gender Order
Political threats constitute important triggers for social mobilisation. An anticipated danger to a set of core values or to the inherent characteristics of a group might encourage them to respond using established routines – as argued by Charles Tilly – to generate more collective action.Footnote 13 Following existing studies, we define threats as ‘consistent dimensions of the political environment that provide incentives for collective action by affecting people’s expectations that costs are higher than individual or public interests by not acting’.Footnote 14 Threats that stimulate mobilisation can range from material concerns to symbolic values.Footnote 15
Threats related to the regulation of religion, churches’ influence in society and issues related to doctrine have been strong triggers for conservative actors and movements in Latin America and beyond.Footnote 16 Explorations of religious foundations, however, have been scant in the literature focused on the region. Existing research shows that conservative resistance to liberal movements’ rights-based agendas is often rooted in religious beliefs. Theological resources, including teachings such as scriptures and other written sources, discourse and knowledge that inform practice, determine whether a policy or social practice is considered a threat and incites mobilisation.Footnote 17
For mobilisation to take place, however, not only a perception of an active threat is required but also the availability of spaces where members of religious associations can engage and be encouraged to take to the streets. Research indeed shows that religious institutions’ resources can facilitate collective action by providing the faithful with access to organisational and material opportunities.Footnote 18 In addition, church-based movements have access to strong organisational networks and pre-existing, routinised communication channels.Footnote 19 Religious institutions further supply cultural goods that can engender mobilisation as doctrine provides meaning and direction through beliefs and practices.Footnote 20
Threats to doctrine can also challenge ways of life that are only loosely linked to religious beliefs. Less religious or even secular grievances and demands ‘found in the wider social and political context’ interact with theological resources and religious spaces to create mobilisation.Footnote 21 Threats to gender orders, in particular traditional family structures that provide women with specific identities as wives and mothers, constitute one such grievance. Religious beliefs and practices indeed play a key role in maintaining existing gender orders. For the faithful, they can serve to confirm, reproduce and legitimate gender inequality.Footnote 22 The conservative gender roles within religious ideologies put men in a provider position, whereas women primarily care for the reproductive aspects of the household – child-bearing and rearing, including children’s education. Through such gender specialisation, women become the ones who carry out social reproduction and take on the role of guardians of the traditional nuclear family.Footnote 23 Attacks on these structures render threats personal and prompt mobilisation on behalf of conservative–religious women, who are not only more religious than men but also more likely to subscribe to a literal interpretation of scriptures that normalises and upholds traditional gender roles.
Women’s Religiosity, Traditional Gender Roles and Mobilisation
Studies focusing primarily on the US case show that traditional religious belief systems tend to normalise gender differences and inequality between the sexes. Scriptures such as the Bible operate as interpretative frameworks that shape individuals’ attitudes and understanding of their social world, including gender relations.Footnote 24 In contemporary times, studies show that conservative–religious women prefer to make wife and mother their primary identity rather than the ‘confusing and contradictory roles open to women in late modern society’.Footnote 25 Religious women are more likely than men to subscribe to a literal interpretation of the Bible and possess a literalism closely linked to adherence to traditional gender roles.Footnote 26 This form of biblical literalism reinforces endorsement of traditional gender identities and normalises gender inequality.Footnote 27 Moreover, among conservative denominations, a prioritisation of motherhood is linked with piety and chances at salvation.Footnote 28
Empirical studies on anti-gender mobilisations in both Europe and Latin America indeed show that female activists engage in mobilisation in direct relation to their role as wives and mothers to protect children and defend the nuclear family model. Women are particularly involved in mobilising against ‘gender ideology’ in schools, as they as they understand gender fluidity and sexual diversity to threaten children’s psychological well-being; sexualise them in ways that risk ‘physical or psychological abuse’; and ‘erase the traditional concepts of family and parenthood’.Footnote 29 Female activists justify their engagement as a ‘maternal, visceral reaction to an ideology posing a danger to children and the sustainability of the traditional family model’.Footnote 30
The anti-gender message thus directly taps into parental responsibilities, targeting mothers who interpret it in relation to their daily educational practices. They share an educational ethos that values particular family, gender and sexuality models deemed necessary to transmit to the next generation.Footnote 31 Threats to these values represent social instability, and women mobilise with the aim of restoring an order where their traditional roles are more valued.Footnote 32 Conservative–religious women thus see themselves as guardians of a natural order.Footnote 33 Importantly, even if women activists refrain from explicitly drawing on their gender identity as a motivation for mobilisation, being women gives them greater political capital to engage in these debates,Footnote 34 especially as opposing movements also tend to be dominated by women – such as the feminist movement.
Research Design and Data
In recent years, Latin America has become a centre stage for conservative–religious mobilisation and thus constitutes an important location to understand and characterise this type of activism. Women constitute the majority of Latin America’s religious practitioners, making up at least two-thirds of faith consumers, and demonstrate higher levels of religious commitment than men.Footnote 35 Among Catholics, women are more likely than men to consider religion highly important in their lives, and Catholic women are more likely to attend weekly services. Moreover, Catholic women are ‘significantly more likely than men to pray daily’.Footnote 36
Within the region, the empirical section of this paper focuses on Chile and Mexico, following a most-different systems design, i.e. two different cases that share an outcome.Footnote 37 Chile and Mexico have rather different histories of church–state conflict. They also differ in institutional design, with Chile being unitary and Mexico a federal country, and in their regime trajectories and political dynamics, both historically and currently. The 1910 revolution put Mexico on a long-term trajectory of a hegemonic party regime. For much of the twentieth century, Mexico was an authoritarian regime dominated by the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party, PRI). Only in 2000 did Mexico inaugurate an era of democratic electoral competition. On the other hand, Chile is one of the countries with the longest democratic trajectories in the region, but it experienced a harsh dictatorship between 1973 and 1990.
Most relevant for this research, Chile and Mexico have quite different religious landscapes. As Table 1 shows, Chile is one of the most secular countries in the region, with rapid religious disaffiliation, and it has a sizeable evangelical minority. With a history of political influence by religious parties and the Catholic church,Footnote 38 it constitutes a good case for examining how conservative–religious mobilisation plays out in a secularising country. Mexico, on the other hand, remains a solidly Catholic country with limited growth of evangelicals and the non-religious since the 1990s.Footnote 39 These two cases, then, allow us to analyse conservative–religious mobilisation in different religious contexts.Footnote 40
Religious Affiliation in Latin America, 2023
Table 1 Long description
Percent shares by country are listed for three affiliations: Catholic, Evangelical, and Non affiliated. Argentina: Catholic 55, Evangelical 15, Non affiliated 26. Bolivia: 65, 23, 10; Brazil: 50, 29, 14; Chile: 40, 16, 39; Colombia: 67, 15, 11; Costa Rica: 54, 27, 16; Dominican Republic: 47, 25, 22; Ecuador: 68, 15, 11. El Salvador: 42, 36, 18; Guatemala: 50, 38, 8; Honduras: 38, 45, 14; Mexico: 73, 6, 14; Panama: 54, 28, 10; Paraguay: 79, 13, 6; Peru: 70, 18, 8; Uruguay: 23, 10, 63. Catholic is the largest category in every listed country except Uruguay, where Non affiliated is highest. Evangelical ranges from 6 in Mexico to 45 in Honduras, and Non affiliated ranges from 6 in Paraguay to 63 in Uruguay.
Source: Latin America Public Opinion Project (LAPOP) 2023. Dataset available from https://www.vanderbilt.edu/lapop/raw-data.php.
Notes: ‘Evangelical’ includes Protestants. ‘Non-affiliated’ includes those who believe but do not belong to a religion, atheists and agnostics. There are no data for Nicaragua and Venezuela for 2023. Cuba is not included in LAPOP surveys.
The most-different system design facilitates generalisation. The observable similarities in terms of conservative women’s activism in these two very different Latin American countries suggest that the idea that threats to religious institutions and traditional family structures spark women’s mobilisation applies to the region more broadly, as conservative mobilisation has occurred in countries with varying religious landscapes. And the differences also allow us to observe how, despite a common process of conservative activism, the dynamics in the two countries vary in terms of the forms of mobilisation, the role of political parties and civil society organisations, and the active Christian denominations.
We conduct case studies – understood as the intensive study of a unit for the purpose of understanding a larger classFootnote 41 – that highlight women’s activism during two junctures in the early twentieth and twenty-first centuries when religious institutions and their agendas were under threat. While the periods under analysis may appear different in nature – in respect of mobilisation, tactics and demands – we use the historical cases, following Marcus Kreuzer, ‘as a domain of discovery … [because past events] provide inferential guidance for explaining tomorrow’s events’.Footnote 42 Applying a historical lens to the contemporary case makes the gendered nature of this mobilisation visible – an aspect that has remained hidden since contemporary activism is no longer based on women-only organisations as in the early twentieth century. An understanding of the historical case thus serves as theory-building for contemporary and politically relevant processes. We therefore do not aim to make an empirical contribution with the historical cases.
The focus on these two periods (the 1920s and 1930s in the first case, and 2000s onward in the second) does not mean that conservative women have not mobilised at other times. While some degree of organisation is always present, movements become stronger and more salient at particular junctures, when threats are more significant. Importantly, the salience of a threat is context dependent. In the United States, the conservative movement and the religious Right mobilised in the 1970s, partly in reaction to the feminist movement, with activists such as Phyllis Schlafly organising conservative women.Footnote 43 In Latin America, the periodisation is somewhat different. Right-wing women’s mobilisation in the region has historically constituted a class-based reaction to leftist governments and their politics. Although right-wing women’s appeals to the family and homeland are somewhat similar to what we observe in contemporary anti-gender mobilisations, including the use of church networks to disseminate information, the trigger for protest differs from the dynamics considered in this paper.Footnote 44 Put differently, while conservative women have different incentives to take to the streets, we centre on a subset of mobilisations triggered by threats to religious doctrine and social institutions.
We draw on a variety of data sources to conduct the case studies. For the first juncture (early twentieth century), we use archival data and key contributions from feminist historiography on women and gender that has emerged since the 1990s to produce narratives that show how Catholic women in Chile and Mexico mobilised in defence of the church during times of increasing secularisation. For the two contemporary cases (Chile and Mexico in the early twenty-first century), we look at legislative records, newspaper articles and the websites of conservative organisations to identify those involved in defending religious beliefs, focusing on groups seeking to ban abortion, same-sex marriage and mandatory sex education. We complement this data with official party and electoral data, triangulating a variety of primary data sources to show how women continue to spearhead mobilisations against perceived threats to religious institutions and the gender order they defend.
Collecting data on the gendered composition of conservative organisations entails several challenges. Existing scholarship and newspaper reports rarely account for the gender of those participating in protests, nor do protest databases offer sex-disaggregated numbers. Second, conservative and religious organisations tend to follow existing societal structures in which leaders typically are men, whereas activists and members are women. Moreover, these types of organisations are elusive and hard to pin down – websites come and go, and organisations change names. Finally, the contours of conservative activism remain fuzzy, especially in terms of its religious character. While many organisations deny religious affiliation, they typically share values indistinguishable from core Christian traditions and have links to the Catholic church, albeit unstated.
For each juncture, we comparatively analyse (1) the context and threats that spark mobilisation, (2) how women are central to this conservative–religious mobilisation, and (3) the specific women-led campaigns that reflect their fight to maintain traditional gender roles. Overall, through this descriptive analysis, this paper seeks to open up a research agenda focusing on women’s roles in conservative–religious activism, providing insights into dimensions fruitful for future exploration and more rigorous causal analysis.
The First Juncture: The Secularisation Threat and Defence of Traditional Gender Orders
Spanish colonial implantation provided the Catholic church with a central role as religion, society and the state were intertwined. After independence, and particularly in the second half of the nineteenth century, this relationship was put into question as liberals pushed for greater secularisation in education, healthcare and other spheres previously controlled by the Catholic church. The conservative–liberal divide marked the period. In this section, we explore the cases of Mexico and Chile in the early twentieth century, paying special attention to the emergence of a religious cleavage and conservative women’s defence of the Catholic church’s prerogatives and values, which placed their identities as mothers and wives at the centre of the traditional gender order. While large-scale mobilisations via religious organisations included women of all classes, elite women typically led philanthropical organisations that spearheaded morality campaigns.
The Conflict around Religion in Chile and Mexico
A central feature of Latin American politics during the second half of the nineteenth century revolved around the conflict between liberals and conservatives over the role of the Catholic church. In Mexico, a first wave of reforms in the 1850s and onwards under the government of Benito Juárez separated church and state, secularised cemeteries and nationalised clergy property.Footnote 45 Around the same period, in Chile, the liberal–conservative conflict was sparked by the ‘Sacristan Question’ in 1856, a dispute between religious and civilian authorities that originated in the firing of a priest.Footnote 46 When the issue failed to be solved within religious institutions, the aggrieved party resorted to civilian justice, which ruled in his favour, but Archbishop Rafael Valentín Valdivieso refused to accept the ruling. The dispute over whether civilian courts could intervene in church affairs led to political parties taking sides and aligning with clerical or anti-clerical positions, giving their definitive form to the nineteenth-century party system, with the Partido Liberal and the Partido Conservador (Liberal and Conservative parties) as the dominant actors.Footnote 47
The following decades in Chile were of liberal dominance. During the administration of liberal Domingo Santa María (1881–6), a key set of secularising laws was passed, including the creation of civil matrimony and lay cemeteries. The 1925 Constitution introduced the formal separation of church and state, putting to rest the main differences between conservatives and liberals. So, while similar reforms were introduced in the two countries, in Chile, it was a more gradual process, and church property was not touched, signalling a milder dispute.
By contrast, one of Latin America’s severest religious conflicts took place in Mexico, where the Catholic church inherited its strength from the colonial period and operated as the established state church. Following the Mexican Revolution (1910–17), the post-revolutionary regime brought in some of the severest restrictions against religion ever included in an official political document, ushering in a deep split between church and state.Footnote 48 The 1917 Constitution stripped religious organisations of their legal status, prohibited clergy’s participation in public affairs, and banned parties from having religious or denominational affiliations. Among numerous regulations limiting church powers, Article 3 restricted religious education, Article 27 gave the state the right to expropriate church land, and Article 130 formally laid out the state’s exclusive power to regulate religious worship, prohibited priests from teaching, and allowed the government to tax churches.Footnote 49
President Plutarco Elías Calles’ (1924–8) application of the Constitution’s anti-clerical regulations was unpopular among Catholics, and the dismissal of Archbishop José Mora y del Río in February 1926 for critiquing the Constitution marked the beginning of the Cristero Rebellion (1926–9). Demanding the return to an idealised past characterised by a deep Catholicism and traditional family values, 50,000 rebels rose to fight post-revolutionary governments’ religious restrictions and modernising secular projects. While the peace agreement three years later ushered in more amicable church–state relations, Mexican Catholics continued to view the church as under threat.
Women Organise in Defence of Religion
Following the Sacristan Question in Chile, a set of women’s organisations emerged with the purpose of opposing secularisation policies and attacks on the church. Elite women sided with Archbishop Valdivieso, who was sentenced to exile for disobeying the Supreme Court’s ruling. Well-connected women lobbied justices and even the president to overturn the sentence, albeit unsuccessfully. Women’s activities were not simply a result of their religiosity but also responded to Valdivieso’s efforts to organise women in support of the church’s social work, creating the Sociedad de Señoras para la Caridad Cristiana (Ladies’ Society for Christian Charity) in 1851.Footnote 50
The first newspaper created and run by women, El Eco de las Señoras de Santiago (The Echo of the Santiago Ladies),Footnote 51 emerged in 1865 amidst the debate around the freedom of worship law propelled by the arrival of Protestant foreigners.Footnote 52 The newspaper’s inaugural issue claimed: ‘The adversaries of our religious exclusivism have launched a multitude of clouds to the atmosphere that not only tarnish the brilliance of our prosperity, but threaten with enfolding us in misery and tempest … The Catholicism that has civilised the world and exalted Chile is our most soaring honour.’Footnote 53 The creation of this newspaper shows that these women’s initial organisational motivation revolved around defending the church.
These were not, however, isolated voices. The religious conflict generated a female elite organised around charity causes that extended into the twentieth century. Women’s participation in church-related charity work reflected women’s greater religiosity. This was a well-established fact at the time, so much so that clergy referred to women as the ‘devout sex’.Footnote 54 With the encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891), the church’s social work took on a greater role. As the ‘social question’ acquired increased salience in the early twentieth century, women’s charity work also aimed to counteract the advance of socialism among working-class women.Footnote 55 New organisations such as the Liga de Damas Chilenas (Chilean Ladies’ League), founded in 1912, and the Cruz Blanca (White Cross) were spearheaded by prominent elite women.
Similarly, the purpose of women’s organised entry into politics in Mexico – in the mid-nineteenth century, using collective petitions directed at Congress – was to express their Catholic faith and defend the church.Footnote 56 This activism reflected how women felt secularisation threatened their role within the traditional family. As Margaret Chowning writes, in respect of the 1856 campaign against religious tolerance, ‘Much of the [1849 Orizaba] petition was concerned with [the] historical and cultural comparison of the position of women under Catholicism to their position under all other religions, with the emphasis on women’s roles in marriage’,Footnote 57 and how these roles were comparatively beneficial for them.
In the twentieth century, Mexican Catholic women actively opposed the post-revolutionary governments’ anti-clerical efforts. Women had already played an important role in contesting the regime’s secularism during the Revolution, using their community influence to protect clergy and organise secret networks and meetings.Footnote 58 Willing to risk their lives to defend the church, many formed ‘brigades for intelligence gathering, provisioning, and armed combat’ during the Cristero Rebellion.Footnote 59 Although unable to formally change anti-clerical policies in its aftermath, Catholic women challenged the regime’s strict stance and succeeded in reopening churches and schools.Footnote 60
The Unión de Damas Católicas Mexicanas (Union of Mexican Catholic Ladies, UDCM) constitutes a prominent example of such activism. Founded in 1912 as a non-political lay organisation dedicated to re-Catholicising Mexican society in response to a perceived religious apathy, the UDCM was primarily a charitable organisation and successfully appealed to broad sectors of women through the focus on strengthening families, for example, by promoting Catholic marriages and engaging in moralisation campaigns.Footnote 61 By 1925, the UDCM had 22,825 members across Mexico.Footnote 62 President Calles’ anti-clerical policies propelled the organisation into politics with campaigns that revolved around defending the rights of the Catholic church and the family. As the Cristero Rebellion inched closer, UDCM members aided rebels by distributing propaganda, housing fugitive priests and arranging mass – activities that continued after the police raided and closed its Mexico City headquarters.Footnote 63
Catholic women’s associations gradually became more visible and active in their defence of religious practices.Footnote 64 After 1929, women were key to developing lay organisations, among them the Acción Católica Mexicana (Mexican Catholic Action, ACM). Women remained highly active in organisations like the Unión Femenina Católica Mexicana (Mexican Catholic Women’s Union, UFCM)Footnote 65 and the Juventud Católica Femenina Mexicana (Youth Association of Mexican Catholic Women, JCFM). By 1934, the JCFM had 31,107 members, rising to 102,491 in 1942. Simultaneously, the UFCM experienced a rise in membership, with 67,775 women enrolled in 1936 and 149,514 four years later.Footnote 66 These numerically significant organisations became important vehicles for mobilising Catholic women’s opposition to the state’s anti-clerical politics and its attempts to secularise education.
Sex Education and Morality Campaigns
Catholic women’s demands in Mexico revolved around the autonomy to maintain religious values in both public and private spheres and, specifically, to provide their children with the educational values they felt were appropriate. As the central government began to implement secular education, women mobilised across Mexico to safeguard Catholic values, making up the largest contingents at demonstrations. Women protested against the closure of churches and seminaries as well as of schools that refused to comply with socialist guidelines, rallied in front of government buildings, and organised boycotts: such events at times resulted in violent altercations with the police.Footnote 67 The UFCM and other women’s organisations established alternative schools to allow Catholic parents to remove their children from those implementing socialist education, and Catholic teachers, predominantly women, eschewed the government’s anti-clericalism by following a curriculum that included church teachings.Footnote 68
Discussions on sex education further triggered women’s mobilisation. In 1932, the Secretaría de Educación Pública (Secretariat of Public Education, SEP) began studying the possibility of introducing sex education in Mexican primary schools, based on guidelines from the 1930 Pan American Children’s Congress, and Education Minister Narciso Bassols’ socialist education vision.Footnote 69 The initiative sparked outrage as opponents felt it not only attacked freedom of education but also imposed an ideology on children that contradicted parental beliefs.Footnote 70 Defending the right to educate their children on sexual matters, Catholic women showed up at the SEP to speak to Bassols in person,Footnote 71 boycotted teachers, and threatened to stop sending their children to school. They also challenged the proposal through the Unión Nacional de Padres de Familia (National Union of Parents, UNPF), which led thousands of parents and teachers to take part in marches, rallies and strikes against the proposal.Footnote 72
The bulk of these activists derived from church-linked organisations such as the UFCM.Footnote 73 Women were indeed especially valuable to the UNPF, which called for all Mexican women to join the mobilisations, and its action plan specifically included women sending protest letters to the president. Between January and February 1934, over 294 individuals – mostly women – sent letters requesting a halt to the sex education project.Footnote 74 Shortly afterwards, Bassols resigned.
In line with the less conflictual religious landscape, no such proposals were put forward in Chile in the first half of the century. A more general goal of (re)establishing morality in society guided some Catholic women’s organisations at the time, such as the Liga de Damas Chilenas, which was established in 1912 to carry out a theatre and film censorship campaign.Footnote 75 Through the Revista Católica, the church openly legitimised elite women undertaking these tasks and forming a censorship committee.Footnote 76 The League, in response to the increasing influence of secular actors, opted for a more proactive approach, using their roles as guardians of family and societal wellbeing to promote women’s education and form working women’s Catholic unions.Footnote 77 Another important threat was sensed in education. The Asociación General de Madres de Familia (General Association of Mothers of Families) was established in 1935 to strengthen the moral base of young women’s education – conceived as a mother’s right.Footnote 78 Their identities as mothers, in a traditional gender order, moved Catholic women into action.
Some of these women linked their social work to political work. Since 1935, Chilean women had been able to vote in local elections so, unlike in Mexico, electoral politics played a greater role in conservative women’s mobilisation.Footnote 79 In 1932, Adela Salas de Edwards established Acción Nacional de Mujeres de Chile (Women’s National Action of Chile, ANMCh), a close ally of the Conservative Party and key to registering and mobilising new voters. The ANMCh had 18,000 women on its books,Footnote 80 considerably more than liberal women’s organisations of the period. It had a conservative platform of defending the family and establishing a Christian social order.Footnote 81 Its first principle sought to advance ‘the establishment of the social order according to the principles of the Catholic church’. It then added ‘the morality of the family is the basis of national morality’ and rejected individualism.Footnote 82 While the church was wary of women’s political participation in broad terms, their right to vote in municipal elections was already a reality, and clergy therefore called on them to participate.Footnote 83
In the following years, state-building projects in both Chile and Mexico resulted in the creation of new, albeit limited, spaces of female autonomy while simultaneously institutionalising male breadwinner ideals. In Mexico, the post-revolutionary state’s rural development policy sought to remake the family ‘in the interests of nation building and development’,Footnote 84 aiming to rationalise female-dominated spaces, for example, by educating mothers for household and reproduction purposes. While it subordinated women to the patriarchal family, it also inadvertently created some emancipatory space. Similarly, in Chile, newly created state agencies sought to educate and discipline the poor under the banner of national development, transforming men into ‘reliable breadwinners’ and women into ‘diligent housewives and mothers’.Footnote 85 During the period of the agrarian reform implemented by the governments of reformist Eduardo Frei and socialist Salvador Allende (1964–73), women acquired new spaces of autonomy, such as access to healthcare and birth control, or participation in new forms of collective action, while men’s dominance over land property and the family was maintained.Footnote 86 Overall, these early- to mid-twentieth-century state-led development projects emancipated some women, but entrenched the patriarchal status quo that was still largely in place by the twenty-first century.Footnote 87
The Second Juncture: Renewed Salience of the Religious Cleavage
The renewed salience of the religious cleavage in Latin America in the early twenty-first century responded primarily to feminist and sexual diversity movements’ advances across the region and the threat they allegedly posed to religious worldviews – in particular to the nuclear family through attempts to decriminalise abortion and legalise same-sex marriage.Footnote 88 The multiplication of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in the religious sphere brought new actors advocating for restrictive definitions of family and sexuality on to the public arena with anti-gender mobilisations emerging in Brazil, Colombia, Paraguay, Peru and Ecuador, among others.Footnote 89 The advancement of policies perceived as threats to religion prompted conservative women in Mexico and Chile to mobilise, ushering in a new phase of women spearheading the defence of the nuclear family.
Abortion, LGBTQ+ Rights and the New Salience of Religion
Policies perceived to threaten religious institutions and their doctrine advanced significantly in the early 2000s and onwards, prompted by liberal social movements and their allies. In 2007, Mexico City’s legislative assembly decriminalised abortion. Merely two years later, it also legalised same-sex marriage. The conservative reaction against the reforms triggered restrictive change throughout Mexico, and the battle continued in subsequent years at both subnational and national levels.Footnote 90 In 2015, a Supreme Court verdict ordered all states to guarantee marriage equality.Footnote 91 In 2016, President Enrique Peña-Nieto launched a proposal that called on the Federal Congress to modify civil codes and adopt complementary laws to guarantee the right to same-sex marriage, adoption, sex change and comprehensive sex education.Footnote 92
By contrast, policies related to women’s and LGBTQ rights in Chile remained very restrictive during the 1990s and early 2000s. Electoral institutions established by the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship that provided the Right with veto power, plus the church’s high moral authority among the governing Centre–Left coalition – due to its defence of human rights during the dictatorship – impeded any questioning of church-defended policies.Footnote 93 However, as the church lost its moral authority due to sexual abuse scandals,Footnote 94 alongside a favourable international climate and the feminist movement’s reorganisation, progressive and mainstream right-wing governments enacted policies that threatened conservative–religious groups’ worldview, including the liberalisation of abortion (2017), a gender identity law (2018) and approval of same sex-marriage (2021).Footnote 95
These policies sparked conservative mobilisation in both countries. Mere days after Peña-Nieto sent to Congress the proposal to extend same-sex rights to all Mexican states and expand sex education, the Frente Nacional por la Familia (National Front for the Family, FNF) was formed. A loose umbrella network, it included over 1,000 civil society organisations across Mexico that came together to defend traditional notions of the family, gender and sexuality and oppose the government’s ‘gender ideology’.Footnote 96 The FNF’s function as a national-level coordinator facilitated quick mobilisation. On 10 September 2016, thousands of people took to the streets in marches in over 100 cities across Mexico.Footnote 97 The initiative engaged newly emerging associations as well as re-activating those that had worked towards similar goals for years, focusing on the defence of the heterosexual family, including parents’ right to educate children on matters related to sexuality and demands to restrict abortion access and to roll back same-sex marriage rights.
In Chile, the response was more fragmented. Still, the policies – concerning abortion, same-sex marriage and gender identity – sparked a response from conservative sectors, leading to the formation of different organisations in defence of the family, several of Christian inspiration. Examples include Reforma Chile (Chile Reforms, 2015), the Observatorio Legislativo Cristiano (Christian Legislative Observatory, 2017), and the Comisión Nacional Evangélica por la Familia (National Evangelical Commission for the Family, ConFamilia, 2017). Although some organisations worked together in campaigns on the internet, there was no equivalent to the formation of the FNF in Mexico. Unlike in Mexico, however, the conservative sectors’ ‘pro-family’ mobilisation manifested itself most clearly in the electoral arena, where an increasing number of Christian candidates started competing in the 2017 legislative elections, and two evangelical parties obtained enough signatures for the first time to establish themselves legally in 2019 and 2020.Footnote 98 Around the same time, Chile underwent two rounds of constitutional drafting and a general election, all of which kept issues such as abortion, sex education and parents’ preferred role in children’s education on the agenda, invigorating the salience of the religious cleavage. These issues have determined religious voting and support for parties and candidates on the Right that campaign against LGBTQ and abortion rights.Footnote 99
Women Organise to Defend the Traditional Gender Order
Women activists took leading roles in several of the organisations that formed in defence of the family in both countries. Similar to the first period under analysis, some organisations and movements comprised solely women, such as the Mujeres de Blanco (Women in White) who in 2015 mobilised against Chile’s abortion law.Footnote 100 Most organisations were, however, mixed. While the FNF in Mexico had male directors at the national level, including its president Rodrigo Iván Cortés, women took on leadership roles at the subnational level. In states such as Baja California, Puebla, Jalisco, Veracruz, Sinaloa and Morelos, women assumed positions as local presidents and coordinators.Footnote 101 In Chile, several organisations similarly have male leadership, such as ConFamilia or the Red Evangélica de Unidad Nacional (Evangelical Network of National Unity, REDUN),Footnote 102 but women constitute the movement’s most visible members.Footnote 103 This gendered division of labour aligns with existing literature, which shows that, within religious communities, ‘men are predominantly in positions of authority; … women … sustain faith through their religious devotion and … through unpaid voluntary labor’.Footnote 104
In the southeastern state of Yucatán in Mexico local branches of national organisations coordinated mobilisation against same-sex marriage.Footnote 105 By 2016, Ivette Laviada Arce, an FNF founder, had become an established conservative activist in the state. As one of the founders and previous presidents of the Red (Network) Pro-Yucatán, she had significant experience organising against the demands of liberal social movements. In 2009, following an attempt to legalise marriage equality, the Red Pro-Yucatán rapidly gathered signatures supporting restrictive legislation in Yucatán. Ultimately, its initiatives resulted in reforms that not only outlawed same-sex marriage and adoption but also restricted the state’s abortion policy. Following the blueprint of like-minded organisations, the Red Pro-Yucatán and its affiliated groups used language identical to Catholic doctrine to motivate their initiative, basing the rejection of same-sex rights and abortion on the need to protect the ‘natural order’, traditional gender roles – including the defence of the nuclear family – and the ‘right to life from the moment of conception’.Footnote 106 An explicit aim to return to traditional gender identities was at the centre of their activism, promoting values of ‘life, marriage, and the family’. These are fuelled by the conviction that men, women and children can develop and thrive only within the ‘natural heterosexual family’. Women’s roles in the conservative nuclear family revolve around reproductive tasks and constitute the ideal that such organisations seek to transmit.Footnote 107
Among the many organisations that joined the Red Pro-Yucatán’s mobilisation in 2009 was Vida y Familia, Asociación Civil (Life and Family, Non-Profit Association, VIFAC). Founded by Maria Guadalupe Mariscal de Vilchis in 1985, the organisation aims to safeguard the ‘natural order’ by preserving traditional family values and formations. Specifically, the organisation seeks to ensure that women do not have abortions and claims to have saved thousands of babies’ lives.Footnote 108 Present in 24 out of Mexico’s 32 states, VIFAC works actively against abortion. In 2008, the organisation joined other ‘pro-life’ organisations in the Manos a la Vida (Hands for Life) alliance that protested against Mexico City’s abortion decriminalisation.Footnote 109 One of VIFAC’s collaborators, the Centro de Estudios y Formación Integral para la Mujer (Centre for Study and Integral Training of Women, CEFIM), is similarly women-founded and run. Focused on training female leaders and women in precarity, it operates in several states where it promotes women’s growth within the framework of ‘family values’.Footnote 110 CEFIM participated in FNF activities in Yucatán, for example, in a 2021 ‘pro-life’ demonstration.Footnote 111
These female-dominated organisations constitute an important part of Mexico’s conservative civil society and participated actively in the FNF’s 2016 mobilisations. In more recent rallies, women activists continued to take the lead. In 2017, VIFAC joined other ‘pro-life’ organisations in protesting against Mexico City’s abortion decriminalisation a decade after its passage. Gathering in the city centre, participants included the organisation Pasos por la Vida (Steps for Life), which was taking part in its sixth anti-abortion march.Footnote 112 Established in Mexico City, it conducts activities to defend life and support vulnerable pregnant women.Footnote 113 In addition to its director, Pilar Rebollo, women members have acted as spokespersons (Lianna Rebolledo, 2021; Luisa Argueta, 2022; Fátima Guzmán de Anda, 2023) for the organisation’s annual ‘pro-life’ marches.Footnote 114
Many of these women have years-long involvement in similar organisations. Alison González, previously director of Pasos por la Vida, is currently a member of the A Favor de la Mujer y la Vida (Woman and Life) organisation, as are Rebolledo and Argueta. In 2023, the organisation carried out ‘pro-life’ marches in Zacatecas, San Luis Potosí and Querétaro, among others. These organisations have links to the Red Pro-Yucatán, which continues to be woman-led.Footnote 115 Current President Alis García de Ortiz represented the network at the Organisation of American States’ General Assembly in 2023. She joined other activists in Washington DC – among them Ivette Laviada, CEFIM – seeking to protect ‘fundamental values’, including heterosexual marriage and the traditional family.Footnote 116
In Chile, similar organisations working on abortion have existed since the 1990s. Chile Unido (United Chile), for example, works to help women with unwanted pregnancies and strengthen families more broadly. Although it has a mostly male board of directors, the executive team is all-women, led by Verónica Hoffmann. These pro-life organisations, typically Catholic, work regularly with vulnerable women. Politically, they mobilise when new proposals emerge that seek to enhance abortion rights, as was the case in 2017.
More policy-engaged organisations emerged during this wave of activism. Such activists engage in party and electoral politics, in legislative debates, and in broader campaigns against policies understood as threats. Antaris Varela, for example, who began her activism in 2011 when she protested against the newly passed civil unions law,Footnote 117 has played leading roles in the two evangelical Christian parties, first as president of the Partido Conservador Cristiano (Conservative Christian Party, PCC), then as general secretary of the Partido Social Cristiano (Social Christian Party, PSC), formed in 2022. She also ran for the Senate in 2021 and, while not elected, she was the fourth highest-polling candidate in the Biobío region in the south of the country.Footnote 118
Carolina Gárate is another case of a figure who has circulated through different organisations. She started her activism in 2018, complaining about a book by the Ministry of Education that introduced art – including The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch – to third graders (8- to 9-year olds); Gárate considers the work to be ‘too sexualised’ for such young children.Footnote 119 She has been the national coordinator of REDUN and the president of the Movimiento Ciudadanos en Acción (Citizens in Action Movement), focusing on issues related to childhood. She entered electoral politics in 2021 as a candidate for the Constitutional Convention, the body mandated to draft a new constitution, supported by the PCC, and ran for Congress that same year as part of the far-right Republican Party. She is now a member of the PSC.
In explicitly religious organisations, such as ConFamilia or REDUN, men – usually evangelical pastors – have roles on their boards, while women lead the daily activities. Three better-known organisations – with tens of thousands of followers on Facebook – have women as their most visible figureheads. Marcela Aranda of the Observatorio Legislativo Cristiano, Ingrid Bohn of Con mis Hijos no te Metas (Don’t Mess with my Children, CMHNTM; see further below) and Antaris Varela of ConFamilia are well-known figures in the conservative movement.Footnote 120 Marcela Aranda became a recognisable figure when, in 2017, she led the ‘freedom bus’ campaign, with a bus emblazoned with slogans against same-sex parents and transgender people that circulated in the cities of Santiago and Valparaíso.
In addition to these prominent figures, the membership of PSC constitutes the most feminised in Chile, with 57.2 per cent women members.Footnote 121 Across all parties, women make up 48 per cent of the membership, so the percentage of women in the PSC is noteworthy, signalling that the agenda of protection of traditional values from a Christian perspective is particularly valuable to women. In terms of elected offices (local council members, regional council members and National Congress), of the PSC’s current (late 2024) 14 representatives 11 are women. In its short life, the party has put the defence of the traditional family at the core of its activities.
While the different iterations of Chile’s evangelical party – first the PCC and then the PSC – folded following poor performance (obtaining less than the required percentage of votes), it has an established constituency that is able to gather signatures and will surely be able to re-register the party in some form. Mexico’s Partido Encuentro Social (Social Encounter Party, PES), widely considered a neo-Pentecostal party, also failed to obtain the minimum 3 per cent of votes in the 2021 elections and subsequently lost its registration, but by contrast, it has not been able to re-register as a national party.Footnote 122
Mobilising against Sex Education
Women activists’ focus on defending traditional family structures and their parental ethos is particularly visible in campaigns against sex education. Whereas limited abortion rights, gender identity, same-sex marriage and adoption have all become law in Chile, sex education constitutes a key battle where conservative activism has been able to stop legal changes. A 2010 law centred on fertility established sex education in secondary schools,Footnote 123 but progressive sectors have demanded broader regulation on sexuality and affectivity, or Educación Sexual Integral (Integral Sex Education, ESI). In 2020, a bill on the topic was debated and rejected. Among the arguments of civil society organisations invited to the congressional committee during sessions on the bill, defending the role women play in a traditional order was observable throughout. Conservative activists sustained that the feminist movement had led to a loss of ‘femininity itself’.Footnote 124 Another activist claimed that the state cannot be in charge of educating in affection as it ‘does not have love’, whereas Christians ‘have other educational models, where parents take charge of their children’.Footnote 125 Activists also argued that the curriculum was ‘based not on biology but on ideology’,Footnote 126 and that gender identity should be shaped by parents, with fathers, in particular, teaching that males play an active role in courtship and seduction.Footnote 127 Religious freedom was another central argument of these interventions. Overall, conservative women activists reflect a defence of traditional gender identities and models of femininity, and the role of the (Christian) family in the transmission of values. In mid-2023, organisations of this kind sponsored the collection of signatures against a new attempt to legislate on sex education.Footnote 128
In Mexico, echoing the mobilisations in the 1930s and onwards, organisations such as the FNF and the Red Pro-Yucatán likewise work to safeguard parents’ right to educate their children, especially on matters concerning sexuality. Following Peña-Nieto’s 2016 initiative to extend same-sex rights to all Mexican states, the Red Pro-Yucatán – spearheaded by its then-president Laviada Arce – jointly with the FNF and like-minded organisations submitted a counterproposal seeking to ensure that marriage remain a heterosexual institution, that parents’ rights to educate children in line with their own moral, ethical and religious convictions be guaranteed, and that adopted children have both a mother and a father. The main goal of the counterproposal was to protect the institution of the family.Footnote 129 The campaign promoted a fear of what might happen if traditional gender and sexuality orders, including conventional family structures, were no longer upheld and young children were exposed to various forms of diversity, implying that the loss of family values put society at grave risk.
The proposal reflected the overriding interests of the FNF and its incorporated organisations: preserving the natural family and protecting parents’ right to educate their children on sexuality. The FNF’s manifesto indeed outlines how ‘parents have the innate, primary, and inalienable right to educate their children; for this reason, they must be recognised as their children’s first and principal educators. They have the right to educate their children according to their moral and religious convictions.’Footnote 130
Peña-Nieto’s 2016 proposal was rejected in the legislative committees of the Congress for reasons related to the division of powers within the Mexican federation. The counterpetition put forward by the conservative–religious block similarly failed.Footnote 131 The FNF and its partner organisations nevertheless continue to oppose sex education in schools, primarily by rejecting the free textbooks distributed by the SEP. In 2023, parents mobilised in multiple states against the updated version of the books, characterised by them as spreading ‘gender ideology’ – with activists going as far as to burn books in Veracruz, Puebla and Chiapas, among other states. Protestors held up signs stating: ‘Yes to education, no to indoctrination’, expressing a wish for their children not to be exposed to alternative modes of sexuality and family.Footnote 132
In Chile, there have also been battles around sex-related content in education. In July 2023, Congresswoman Francesca Muñoz of the PSC led the attempted constitutional impeachment of the Secretary of Education Marco Antonio Ávila. Different arguments were used for the impeachment but, for the more conservative sectors, a core issue was Ávila’s use of guidance regarding LGBTQ language in the education system, with the conservatives claiming the minister wanted to introduce specific views on sexuality without parents’ consent. The process was also tainted by homophobia, as Ávila was openly gay and some activists claimed his sexuality was affecting his role as head of the education ministry.Footnote 133
The importance of sexuality and gender education as a parental prerogative can be seen in the CMHNTM movement. Born in Peru in 2016, the organisation has chapters in Argentina, Colombia, Ecuador and the United States, as well as in our countries of interest, Chile and Mexico (Mexico City in particular). Founded by an evangelical pastor, women participate in and lead the movement, one prominent example being US Christian activist Jenny Donnelly.Footnote 134 These organisations are weak in Chile and Mexico, but the popularity of the slogan, used in rallies and campaigns,Footnote 135 signals how strongly it resonates among conservative activists.
Conclusion
Conservative women in Latin America have a rich history of mobilising in support of religious institutions and agendas across time and space. The dynamics of their mobilisation, however, remain understudied. In this paper, we argue that conservative women organise in defence of religious institutions when secularisation or liberal social movements threaten religious principles. These threats question the traditional gender order that values women as wives and mothers. These identities are central for conservative women and motivate them to mobilise. Empirically, we focus on two periods of religious politicisation in Chile and Mexico to demonstrate how the argument applies to different historical contexts and across Latin America.
Beyond the broad pattern of continuity in conservative–religious women’s mobilisation, the case studies also reveal how activism has changed over time. In contemporary times, mobilisation does not emerge solely from gendered organisations directly affiliated with religious institutions, but it also includes organisations with male leadership without an obvious religious link. Today, new forms of mobilisation, such as digital activism, have become more prominent and with them comes a broader range of participants. Additional aspects of change are visible across the empirical cases. While conservative activism appears to remain primarily Catholic in Mexico, evangelical organisations in Chile seem more vocal and capable of attracting followers based on an ‘anti-gender ideology’ agenda, although there are signs of strategic ecumenism, i.e. the joint organisation of Catholics and evangelicals with the common goal of protesting against liberal agendas.Footnote 136 Moreover, the actors who initiate mobilisation differ across the cases. In Mexico, civil society organisations constitute the main vehicles for channelling conservative women’s activism. In Chile, activists have also turned to the electoral arena, where evangelical and right-wing parties operate as mobilisers.
The observable differences across Christian denominations open up questions for future research. Latin America’s religious landscape is transforming, and its changing nature is likely to affect the kinds of mobilisation that will emerge in the foreseeable future. The rise of evangelicals as an increasingly influential social and political force in parts of the region elicits the question of whether significant differences also exist across denominations concerning the role women play in defending religious institutions and their doctrine. For example, recent research shows that Pentecostal messages encourage women’s leadership roles and that Pentecostal women are more willing to participate in public life compared to other religious identities.Footnote 137 Moreover, evangelical and Catholic activists tend to have different social backgrounds, with the former coming from lower and emerging middle classes. Class differences can translate into different roles in the movement, with evangelicals doing more of the work on the streets and as online activists, while leadership has a stronger presence of elite Catholic women.
The differences in the social profiles of women who organise may in turn have political implications in terms of voter mobilisation and representation. The strategies parties employ to attract these constituencies may impact the party system, as the formation of an evangelical party (PCC and then PSC) in Chile indicates. Similarly, conservative women’s mobilisation can affect debates on specific policies, as evangelicals tend to be more strongly opposed to issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage than Catholics.Footnote 138 Future research should consider these aspects of the region’s changing religious landscape.
Acknowledgements
Isabel Castillo acknowledges funding from the Millenium Nucleus on Political Crises (ANID NCS2024_065), and from the Faculty of Government at Universidad de Chile. Camilla Reuterswärd acknowledges fieldwork funding provided by the Global Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as well as the Twin Cities Women’s Philanthropy Council Award. We are very grateful for comments on previous versions from Rodrigo Barrenechea, Adrián del Río, Katie Gaddini, Maryhen Jiménez and Catherine Reyes-Housholder. We also thank participants in presentations of this paper in the 2020 European Consortium for Political Research conference, the 2023 Chilean Political Science Association congress and the Uppsala Gender and Politics seminar.
Open access
