Nicaragua, the "land between lakes and volcanoes," is also a land of violent cultural contradictions. Male-female relations are not the least of these contradictions. More than 80 percent Catholic, its central religious feast is "La Purísima," the Immaculate Conception. It is one of the few countries in the world with a woman president, Violeta Chamorro, who played on this religious culture during her campaign in 1990. Always in a white dress, with Cardinal Obando y Bravo at her side, she was "la purísima," the pure and faithful widow of the martyred national hero, Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, assassinated by Somoza in 1978.
But this exaltation of chaste womanhood has as its underside a culture of brutal machismo in which male violence to women in the family has long been assumed to be an unassailable masculine prerogative. This family violence is accompanied by a pattern of family fragmentation, where fathers commonly abandon their wives and children. It is estimated that about 60 percent of the families of Nicaragua are headed by women. Women carry not only the responsibilities of parenting and domestic work, but most of the economic maintenance of the family as well. Male sexual and cultural prerogatives are fiercely asserted almost in inverse proportion to actual paternal responsibility.
This pattern of family fragmentation is not new. It goes back to the coffee and cotton plantation economy of the late 19th century, when men left the family for several months a year to work in the fields of the landowners. Women were left not only to care for the children and household, but also to till the tiny family plot of land and scrape together the daily necessities of life. The poor pay in the fields, and the high rate of alcoholism often meant that the men returned with little to show for their labors and reasserted their male prerogatives with their fists.
Women, with uncertain support from husbands, often looked to their growing sons to help support the family. But the struggle against Somoza, and then the nine-year war against the counter-revolutionaries funded by the United States, took a terrible toll on the male youth of Nicaragua. When Somoza fled the country in 1979, with most of the national treasury in his pockets, he left a society with 35,000 dead, 110,000 injured, and 40,000 orphans. Most of the dead were 15 to 25 years of age. The war fought to defend the revolution against the U.S.-funded contras took an even larger toll of dead and wounded, again largely young men; this in a country of 3.5 million people.
When the Sandinistas lost the election by 59 percent of the vote in 1990, it is estimated that more than 60 percent of those who voted against them were women. The women of Nicaragua heard loud and clear the message of George Bush that the war and the economic blockade would continue unless the Sandinistas were replaced by the UNO party responsive to American economic hegemony. They voted, not to continue to be "Mothers of Heroes and Martyrs," but for what they hoped would be a return to "normal life."
WHAT WOMEN, ESPECIALLY among the poor, have received instead is a new economic regime of "structural adjustment," in which 70 percent of the population is reduced to unemployment and desperate poverty, not knowing where the next meal is coming from. The government-supported centers of popular education for adults, the free health clinics, the infant centers where the small children of working mothers were cared for and fed, the Casas de Mujer where the Sandinista women's organization AMNLAE offered services of family planning, legal advice, and support groups for women--all these kinds of "revolutionary" institutions put in place by the Sandinistas have been cut from the government budget. Thirty-two of these groups continue, but as non-governmental initiatives without official standing.
Although violence to women and children in the family existed before, it is generally agreed that it has increased drastically in the last three years of the new government. Rape also seems to have greatly increased, at least according to police reports. Large numbers of young women and even boys are turning to prostitution to survive, but often have difficulties finding "clients" who can pay.
It is again the women of the poor who scurry about from dawn to dusk with a myriad of activities in the "informal" economy: washing and ironing, sewing, cooking food in their homes to sell in the streets. A horde of ragged children assaults one at every stoplight, seeking small change for the unwanted service of washing one's windshield.
During the Sandinista years, prostitution was illegal (prostitution had been a monopoly of the National Guard under Somoza). In the first years of the revolution, the government, police, and Christian centers collaborated on programs to retrain and integrate prostitutes into the regular economy. It was also illegal to use women's bodies commercially. Now, in the "free" economy of "neo-liberalism," semi-pornographic displays of women's bodies, selling everything from beer to jeans, assault one's eyes in the new shopping centers and glossy magazines.
DESPITE THESE TERRIBLE reverses, Nicaragua remains the country with the most developed feminist movement in Central America, a result of the opening to revolutionary thought and action promoted by the Sandinistas. The relationship of feminism and Sandinismo was complex. Sandinista men had a hard time getting their heads around the idea that the emancipation of women had to do also with gender oppression and not just "integrating working-class women into production," the old-fashioned Marxist view.
But they did try to understand what the feminists in the FSLN (Sandinista Front, or Frente) were telling them. Moreover, virtually all of the women who emerged as the leading feminists of the mid-'80s, as "gender analysis" took center stage in the debates of the Frente, were themselves Sandinistas, many of them having "won their spurs" as combatants against Somoza.
The Sandinistas had made the emancipation of women a central part of their program from the beginning. Already in 1969, in their Programa Histórica, they declared that "the Sandinista Popular Revolution will abolish the odious discrimination which the woman has suffered in relation to the man, and will establish equality between women and men, economically, politically and culturally." When the party came to power in 1979, the women's group AMPRONAC (Association of Women and the National Problem), which had mobilized women in the struggle against Somoza, was reorganized as AMNLAE (Association of Nicaraguan Women Luisa Amanda Espinoza--named for one of the first women urban guerrillas killed by the National Guard in 1970), as the mass organization of Sandinista women.
The FSLN created a series of new laws to establish the legal rights of women: the right of women to equal pay for equal work, unilateral divorce, the abolition of the laws of patria potesta that made wives and children the property of fathers and husbands, the right of women to receive support from the fathers of their children, and many others. They also established a legal office of women that was intended to provide legal counseling so women could avail themselves of these new rights. But as the U.S.-backed contra war worsened, the men of the Frente prioritized the struggle to "defend the revolution," conceiving of AMNLAE primarily as mobilizing the Mothers of Heroes and Martyrs to support the military service of their sons and to shoulder the civil defense work of the barrios.
By the mid-'80s, women in the Frente were becoming restive with this restrictive role for AMNLAE women. Many of the workers' organizations, for farmers, laborers, students, and professionals, were developing "secretariats" of women of their groups. Women leaders in these organizations were demanding a recognition by the Frente that women have a gender problem, and not just a class problem. Rape, sexual harassment, battering, lack of birth control and legal abortion, and the culture of machismo were raised as realities preventing women from realizing equality in society and in work.
After considerable debate, the FSLN made an official declaration in 1987 that the revolutionary struggle must confront not only economic inequality, but also unequal power between men and women in the family and society. The FSLN committed itself to the struggle against machismo, as this was reproduced in the relationships of the family, and by church, school, and commercial propaganda.
This meant attention to sex education and abuse in the family, as well as maternity leave and day care centers for working mothers. Toward the end of the '80s, AMNLAE reorganized itself with popular Casas de Mujer throughout the country to provide these basic services of sex education and counseling.
But by 1987 the Nicaraguan economy was in desperate straits. Most of the gains of the first few years of the revolution had been eroded as the war took most of the government budget and the U.S. economic blockade prevented both trade and international aid. When the Sandinistas lost in 1990, it was clear that all government support for the kinds of laws and programs favoring women of the previous decade would lose official support. Nevertheless, several of the leading Sandinista women continue to hold some of the 39 National Assembly seats (out of 92) held by the FSLN in the legislature.
AT THE END OF February, after four weeks of research in Managua, I traveled through the León and Chinandega regions of northern Nicaragua, visiting women's and grassroots community projects. In these travels it became more than evident that women are carrying the basic survival labor of the poorer two-thirds of Nicaraguan society.
In Chacara Seca, an impoverished village outside of León with more than 80 percent unemployment, the pastoral leaders, mostly women, gathered in the church building to discuss strategies for survival. With little paid work, with drought making farming difficult, and with no money for health care and education, the picture is grim. The women discussed gardens for vegetables and natural medicines and how to use solar energy for cooking and pumping water.
Several of the women were interested in joining a chicken-raising project that is being promoted by the Casas de Mujer, with help from the European Economic Community. In this project 10 women receive 10 hens and a rooster, together with a workshop on chicken raising. They are committed to pass on 10 hens and a rooster to another 10 women after six months.
The Casa de Mujer in the rural town of Achuapa has a large range of women's projects: chicken and pig raising, vegetable and natural medicines gardens, and workshops on family planning, self-esteem, and leadership training. I attended the workshop on family planning in which the full range of methods of contraception were discussed, together with the social and psychological problems of obtaining and using each method. Nicaraguan men often resist letting their wives use contraceptives because they think this will allow their wives to "stray." Condoms are regarded as an affront to male virility.
The Casa de Mujer was also conducting a week-long workshop for rural women on problems of poverty and family violence. The women were led through a process of analyzing the basic problems facing their lives: unemployment, drought, hunger, landlessness, lack of available education, and health care. They then examined the causes of these problems in the economic structure of the country, the specific effects on women's lives, and how they could begin to address each issue with local resources.
Wife battering was discussed at some length as the most immediate problem for women in the household, but no one could suggest a way of controlling it. One woman suggested killing the man, which caused the others to laugh uproariously. (The one man attending the workshop bolted to the door at that point!)
A number of other grassroots survival projects were also in evidence in the Achuapa area. A small group of Danes is assisting the farmers in reforestation to help curb the drought affecting the region. A base community network called El Bloque has an alternative agriculture training center where it teaches natural medicines, organic farming, construction of wells, and use of wind and solar energy. The major health care in the town is an acupuncture and natural medicine clinic run by a local woman who was trained by a Japanese medical team in León. She charges the equivalent of $2 a visit, but often waives the fee.
WOMEN'S WORK FOR WOMEN is the most evident form of grassroots survival projects through Nicaragua today. It is aided by a distinguished network of research and documentation centers that support the action groups. These continue to bring to national attention what is happening to women in the new economy.
There is also a strong and conscious feminist culture that expresses itself, not only in research and popular action groups, but also in art and poetry. Nicaragua is a nation of poets, and many of its leading revolutionaries have been poets. This includes some of the leading Sandinista feminists, such as Gioconda Belli and Daisy Zamora.
In February I attended a poetry reading by four Nicaraguan feminist poets--Michele Najilis, Vidaluz Meneses, Christian Santos, and Daisy Zamora, all Sandinista activists. It was held in the national theatre, Ruben Dario, in downtown Managua. The elite of Nicaraguan politics were in attendance, from Right to Left. This included the fiercely right-wing Minister of Education Humberto Belli and Cristiana Chamorro, the daughter of President Chamorro, and wife of the first government minister, Antonio Lacayo, as well as leading Sandinista political and intellectual figures. This is roughly equivalent to George Bush and Jesse Helms gathering with members of the Communist Party to hear a poetry reading by Adrienne Rich at the Kennedy Center.
What would be culturally and politically inconceivable in U.S. society is normal in Nicaragua. Nicaragua is a small society. Its tiny educated elite, who are the intelligentsia and the political leaders, all went to the same schools and many come from the same families. Humberto Belli's sister is feminist poet Gioconda Belli, while the Chamorro family ranges from Right to Center to Left. Especially when it is a question of poetry, all can gather together in apparent equanimity, embracing each other.
When one sees Daisy Zamora reading a militant feminist poem to the applause of Cristiana Chamorro and even Humberto Belli, it would be easy to imagine that national reconciliation is around the corner. But this is to forget the dead of the past and those dying of poverty today.
Art, as Alejandro Serrano Caldera, rector of the National University (and also present for the poetry reading) has written, is the "possible utopia." But the thousands of Nicaraguan poor, huddled in cardboard shacks in the still uncleared rubble of the ruins of the 1972 earthquake a block away from the Ruben Dario National Theatre, are the reality, a grim reality for three quarters of the women and children of this pauperized nation.
Rosemary Radford Ruether, a Sojourners contributing editor, was Georgia Harkness professor of applied theology at Garrett-Evangelical Seminary in Evanston, Illinois when this article appeared.
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