A Tour de Raison: Feminism Between France, Spain, and Latin America
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When James Brown belted out “This is a man’s world” in 1966, he voiced an intuition that the Gender Gap Report and countless statistics from the German Federal Statistical Office and all around the world really habitually confirm every year. The world remains stubbornly unequal. And yet, the twentieth century did more than expose the imbalance: it cracked open debates, movements, and theories that continue to shape how we think about gender today.
France After Le Deuxième Sexe
In France, the seismic shift began in 1949, when Simone de Beauvoir published Le Deuxième Sexe. She insisted that men and women are fundamentally equal—yet society relentlessly treats them otherwise. By the 1970s, French women were creating their own spaces—cafés, publishing houses, magazines—that redefined femininity in positive terms. For a time, these spaces radiated empowerment, but soon even these new labels felt like cages. By the 1980s, pessimism crept in: “woman” became a statistical identity again, reduced to menstruation, flower-picking, and biological essentialism.
Into this climate stepped Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray, pioneers of what came to be known as écriture féminine. They argued not only that women had always resisted patriarchy, but that their very position on the margins—the “other,” the mirror of man, the supposed lack—was also their strength. For Cixous, the silent woman of history had in fact cultivated strategies of survival. What looked like absence could become power: the blind spot of history turned into the imaginative crack where resistance was born.
Writing as Resistance
Literary studies followed suit. No longer were women just figures on the page; they were authors demanding a place in literary history. German scholars Sigrid Weigel and Inge Stephan coined the metaphor of the “squinting gaze”: women writers, they argued, always look with one eye at the male tradition and with the other at female experience. In that split vision lay both a burden and a possibility: the chance to reinvent literature from within.
Butler and the Gender Earthquake
By the late 1980s, theory itself was shaken. Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) detonated like a philosophical bomb. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s discourse analysis and J. L. Austin’s idea of speech acts, Butler claimed that gender is not something we are but something we do. Gender, she argued, is performative. The phrase “It’s a boy” at birth is not a neutral description; it is the first in a lifelong chain of discursive acts that produce gendered identities. Toys, clothes, gestures, even the pitch of a voice—all reinforce the fiction of a binary system.
Spain: From Franco to Parliament
Across the Pyrenees, Spain’s story unfolded differently. After the suffocating patriarchy of Franco’s dictatorship, women surged into public life. By 2013, women held over 30 percent of seats in the Spanish Senate and European Parliament. Yet the higher the rank, the thinner their presence: only 22 percent of state secretaries were women, and in corporate boardrooms the numbers were even bleaker—barely 8 percent in supervisory roles. Education told a similar paradox: more women than men finished secondary school and entered university, but only a fraction became professors. And the wage gap persisted: in 2010 women earned about three-quarters of men’s salaries. Progress was real, but uneven.
Indigenous Feminisms in Latin America
Further west, feminism took forms unrecognizable to European eyes. In Chile, the Mapuche community—a society marked by patriarchy and polygamy—nonetheless elevated machi, or medicine women, to high social and spiritual status. Today, machi lead political protests against land dispossession, embodying a form of resistance born not from imported feminism but from indigenous tradition.
In Peru, women sit on the streets of Cuzco, breastfeeding as they sell goods—a visible reminder that they are providers as much as mothers. Their bowler hats, borrowed from men’s attire in the nineteenth century, have become emblems of this dual role. In Bolivia, the once-derogatory “Cholitas”—indigenous women traders—have redefined themselves as symbols of pride under President Evo Morales’s policy of vivir bien. At public festivals, women alone carry the indigenous flag of Bolivia, a striking reversal of colonial hierarchies.
The Long Shadow of Gender Difference
A century of emancipation movements and more than a decade of gender mainstreaming in policy have not erased inequality. The long nineteenth century still lingers in law, religion, literature, morality, politics, and economics. Gender difference is not just a social fact; it is discursively constructed, reinforced by other factors such as ethnicity, class, religion, and education. To understand gender today—whether in Parisian cafés, Spanish boardrooms, or Mapuche ceremonies—means seeing it as both historically layered and culturally plural.
What began as James Brown’s lament still echoes, but not without resistance. From de Beauvoir’s diagnosis to Butler’s provocation, from Madrid’s parliament to Cuzco’s markets, women have been rewriting the script, turning silence into language, absence into presence, and performance into power.
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