Patricia Harms's project to “recover ladina histories in Guatemala City . . . shrouded in silence” concludes that urban women engaged with “every aspect of sociopolitical life, even during the most difficult of political circumstances” (7–11), from 1871 and Guatemala's Liberal dictatorships through the overthrow of two dictators, a decade of democracy, and the 1954 coup. She argues that women activists developed an enduring “maternal feminist” consciousness and well-connected community and multi-class alliances to challenge the Liberal patriarchy, using the state's own rhetoric to “point out its failings . . . for poor and indigenous women in particular” (11). But her pages contain more interesting and complicated non-linear histories.
The latter two-thirds of the book focuses on the Ten Years of Spring. Chapters 1 and 2 address seven decades of Liberal authoritarianism, opening with the well-known Laparra sisters setting the cornerstone of “maternal feminism”: mother-citizen-teacher. Conservative women took maternalism in one ideological direction with the Sociedad Gabriela Mistral and Sociedad Protectora del Niño, which created childcare and nutrition centers, while women journalists and the working-class Partido Unionista lost 1921's close campaign for women's suffrage (one vote short!).
Chapters 3 through 7 delineate a further Cold War polarizing. Many urban women united to overthrow Jorge Ubico, but then splintered for and against the revolution. Childcare and nutrition centers continued under the patronage of first ladies Elisa Martínez de Arévalo (with some working-class women) and María Vilanova de Árbenz. With 1945's incomplete suffrage (literate women only), newly enfranchised women trended conservative and joined Archbishop Rossell y Arellano to turn 1948's municipal elections against the revolution (Chapter 4).
Guatemalan women hosted the First Inter-American Congress of Women in 1947, which was nearly canceled due to anticommunist opposition (Chapter 5). The Alianza Femenina Guatemalteca continued the congress's anti-imperialist work, maternal and child welfare reform, and advocacy for full suffrage, women's landownership, unionizing, and labor rights for domestic workers. It built a majority membership of poor, rural, and working-class women through affiliates reaching over half the country and organized an all-women's brigade during the coup (Chapter 6).
Equally militant city market women rioted for two days in 1951 against Árbenz, their livelihoods undermined by price fluctuations and their loyalties to the archbishop strengthened (Chapter 7). Harms concludes that the decade's most active women were those helping overthrow the revolution, and (wrongly) that feminist movements re-emerged only in the 1980s. She recounts the wife of coup-installed Castillo Armas sponsoring childcare centers, wildly welcomed by market women and praising women's work as mothers and teachers, “permanently alienating those women who had fused structural critique in their maternal feminism” (291).
Surely the murderous coup dissuaded more progressive women than the coup's first lady, who seems no less maternalistic than her predecessors. An important query: When is maternalism feminist and when, not? For example, when were Guatemalan women protecting racial and class privilege, and when the end of their patriarchal bargain? When were the activists inclusive and multi-class (the Alianza), and when were their efforts top-down charity (the Sociedad childcare centers)?
The query also applies to Harms's frequent phrase, “muted feminism,” about the challenge of silent or missing sources, which I appreciate as a scholar of Cold War Guatemalan anthropologists. Women activists self-censored under dictatorships and then destroyed documents during the coup. When, though, are women's patriarchal affirmations made “through gritted teeth” (page 109), or “as strategic adoptions to support [dictator] Estrada Cabrera” (46)? And when are these whole-hearted affirmations?
Centering “urban,” here meaning the capital, works better than “ladina,” although scholarship on non-indigenous Guatemalans is much needed. “Ladina” is a category excluding key women (“white” elite women, the rioting market women?), and I doubt it was a “coherent communal identity” formed by activists, even in the small circles of the capital. But the capital brought all “together”: nomadic Vicenta Laparra, the Liberal era wave of women teachers leaving the countryside and working class, suffragists, market women, and Alianza affiliates. It is the crossroads of the book's conflicting, not always feminist, but important topographies of Guatemalan women-centered activisms.
