Brazzil
November 1998
Women
Woman
PowerSince its inception, the MMTR (Rural Women Workers' Movement) has undergone a major transformation in terms of its agenda and political perspective. While still firmly rooted in an analysis that stresses the place of the working class in global capitalism, the movement has come to work more specifically with the social and cultural aspects of gender inequality in Brazil.
Lynn Stephen
Political and cultural context can be extremely important in shaping the content of women's movements and ultimately encouraging their autonomy. One of the most impressive regional movements of rural women is found in southern Brazil in the state of Rio Grande do Sul. The Movimento de Mulheres Trabalhadoras Rurais (MMTR, Rural Women Workers' Movement), begun in 1989, grew out of women's activism in landrecovery movements, antidam movements, labor unions, and Churchbased organizations. By 1992 the movement had over thirty thousand members and was functioning in more than 110 counties. It has an active local leadership of about five hundred, making it one of the strongest regional women's movements in Brazil, and outstanding in the Americas. The movement's agenda has moved from procuring equal working conditions and benefits for rural women to reproductive health rights, domestic violence, representation of women in the political system, and general women's rights. Here we will try to understand the important factors that resulted in the MMTR having an agenda that ultimately challenged gender hierarchy and allowed issues such as abortion and women's sexuality to be taken up in a movement that was initially nourished by the Catholic Church.
Four key points will be explored to clarify the evolution of this organization and its varied meanings to its base members and leadership:
1. The MMTR of southern Brazil has its roots in a strong opposition organized in rural labor unions and in the landless movement with ties to the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT, Workers' Party). These movements share a strong ideology that emphasizes confronting the state and organizing the rural working class.
2. Leaders of the MMTR had significant and consistent contact with activists from similar movements throughout Brazil. They also worked consistently with staff from NGOs who were familiar with feminism and who encouraged them to broaden their organizational agenda to change oppressive gender roles.
3. During their involvement in other movements, leaders of the MMTR were marginalized. Having analyzed their experience, they have deliberately built an organizational model and structure that will not leave out the women they are trying to organize.
4. The MMTR emerged as an autonomous women's movement that related to but was no longer dictated to by other regional movements, including those of the landless, the rural labor unions, and the Church.
Before we discuss the specific history of the MMTR, its emergence will be related to the gendered political economy of southern Brazil.
Economic Development and the Gendered Division of Labor in Southern Brazil
After the 1964 military coup in Brazil, the agricultural sector was reoriented to serve as a market for agrochemicals and machinery produced in the prioritized industrial sector. It was also supposed to produce export crops that would help reduce Brazil's foreign debt (Spindel 1987: 5253). A largescale credit program provided subsidized credits and fiscal incentives to landed power holders while the military's national security program managed agrarian conflicts (Grzybowski 1990: 2021). Most assessments of Brazil's agricultural modernization program find that it has exacerbated socioeconomic inequalities. The subsidized credit was unequal and was used primarily by those who already had land to acquire still more land. Land prices rose 2,000 percent between 1971 and 1977 (Martine 1983, cited in Spindel 1987: 53). By 1985, the .09 percent of the agricultural enterprises in Brazil that had 1,000 hectares or more controlled 44 percent of the land. The 53 percent of the agricultural enterprises that had less than 10 hectares accounted for 2.7 percent of the total land (Grzybowski 1990: 21).
In the southern part of Brazil, the economy followed these same general trends, with the notable exception of the preservation of a small but significant group of peasant households, which have been able to become part of the capitalized smallholder sector. The remainder have become landless and/or migrated elsewhere, primarily to the Amazonian region. Beginning in the late 1950s, the agricultural economy of the state of Rio Grande do Sul changed significantly. As in much of the south, the rich, fertile landscape of the southern part of Rio Grande do Sul was gradually consolidated into larger farms; mechanized production of soybeans and wheat pushed out smallscale subsistence agriculture.
In Rio Grande do Sul, land fragmentation brought about by inheritance, continued colonization, and population growth has resulted in a significant landless population. It is estimated that in all of Brazil there are over 10 million landless or nearly landless people (Grzybowski 1990: 21). Other estimates place this figure as high as 24 million (McManus and Schlabach 1991: 174). By 1989, 26,466 peasants in Rio Grande do Sul were reported to be involved in land conflicts, more than in any of Brazil's other states (Quinzena 1990: 8; Brooke 1990). The state is home to one of the largest landless movements in the country, the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST, Landless Rural Workers' Movement).
In those parts of Rio Grande do Sul that were not suitable for large-scale, mechanized agriculture, smallholders were able to hang onto their land and some were even able to mechanize, purchasing small tractors and other machinery that allowed them to make the transition to capitalized agriculture. It was not in capital's interest to completely destroy the smallholder sector, which still provides 70 percent of basic foodstuff production in addition to raw materials for agroindustry. Smallholders have been integrated into the process of agroindustry, and although this allows smallholders to survive, it is highly exploitative of family labor and makes small producers dependent on agroindustry (Spindel 1987: 54). The hilly, northern part of the state has retained a significant population of smallholders. It also contains a young generation of landless people, some of whom have joined the MST in occupying former ranches and creating new communities in such locations as Anonni, Nova Ronda Alta, and Cruz Alta. These different landholding patterns and levels of political activism are associated with varying patterns of gender relations at home.
While little has been written on household decisionmaking among smallholders in rural Brazil, activists and feminists have a different assessment than that of some rural sociologists. In a discussion of family decisionmaking, the sociologist Mauro William Barbosa de Almeida states that the Brazilian peasant family is relatively democratic (1986: 71, 77) and that his findings support Santos' suggestion (1978: 32) that "`the fact that the peasant family is a collective enterprise implies many times that decisions about labor allocation are communal,' indicating that peasant women also participate in work decisions." Almeida states that it is illusory to look for social inequality within the peasant household; in his own experience, he says, the authoritarian declarations of male heads of household do not correspond to the practical reality (1986: 71). My research and the experience of MMTR activists suggests otherwise. Household decisionmaking is not necessarily democratic, and as women become politicized domestic conflict increases between men and women.
Smallholder women at various levels of the MMTR stated that household decisionmaking is generally dominated by men. Men usually hold the title to land as well. Literature from the MMTR as well as that from other rural women's unions in Brazil demand equal decisionmaking power in the household and the right to hold land titles. Discussions and roleplaying skits I observed in local meetings of the MMTR, however, revealed that gender roles in household decisionmaking and the titling of land, machinery, and houses to women varied by ethnic group. Women of Italian, Polish, and German descent stated that men dominated household decisionmaking and that only sons inherited land and agricultural machinery. Women of PortugueseBrazilian descent stated that they had received land from their parents and felt they had a more equal say in household decisionmaking.
The gendered division of labor within land occupations and settlements is different from that of smallholder households. In the case of land occupations which have turned into new settlements, the prolonged process of political struggle, the active physical presence of women in land occupations and confrontations with the police and army, and an emphasis on collective production have changed some aspects of the gendered division of labor. In many settlements, there is an emphasis on collective production, reciprocal work relations, and property sharing. Women work directly in agricultural production, and specific economic projects (e.g., milking coops, craft production, vegetable farming) have been created for women. Decisionmaking with respect to production is done by consensus among those who work together in the group. Production groups often include men and women. In some MST settlements, entire families (including children) attend community meetings where productive activities are discussed. In general, maledirected households no longer appear to be the norm. In some settlements, though, women are still struggling to be named with men as having use rights in collective land and to be included in community meetings.
The Gendered Politics
of Grassroots Movements
in Southern BrazilThe decade of the 1980s was an important one in the political history of Brazil. A resurgence of grassroots social movements resulted in significant challenges to the status quo of government. The depth and breadth of the change in Brazil via the creation of a network of social movement organizations, many aligned with the opposition Workers' Party, provided a base for the fomentation of new rural women's organizations.
In the state of Rio Grande do Sul, the late 1970s and 1980s saw the rise of a variety of grassroots social movements that openly confronted the state with demands for land, resources, and political recognition. The MST, founded in the early 1980s, occupied abandoned ranches and then pressured the government to legalize their claim to the land and legitimize their resettled communities. Rural workers who had belonged to official state unions began to join the rural branch of the CUT labor federation (Central Única dos Trabalhadores), formed in the mid1980s as part of Brazil's new unionism. An antidam movement mobilized those who were displaced by largescale flooding to lobby the government electricity commission (ELETROSUL), take over their buildings, and demand the right to participate in future regional planning (see Marcondes de Moraes 1994; Z. Navarro 1994). Finally, the liberation theology branch of the Catholic Church continued the work begun in the 1960s and 1970s, organizing people in rural communities into neighborhood committees that demanded economic justice and engaged in selfhelp projects. The previous work of the Church had provided foundations and support for many of the movements that took off in the 1980s. The emergence of these movements coincided with the rise of the Workers' Party in 1979, and the broadening discourse of that party appealed "to workers not only on the basis of their workplace and union experience, but also on the basis of their involvement in a broad spectrum of social organizations in poor neighborhoods" (Keck 1992: 25).
"New unionism" gained strength and unions such as the Central Workers' Organization (CUT) began recruiting programs to challenge statecontrolled labor unions. In Rio Grande do Sul, CUT was rather successful in broadening its membership in the agrarian sector during the mid1980s. Traditionally, in statecontrolled and opposition unions, women were not included as members on the principle that they were dependents of male heads of household. Because female agricultural wageworkers are uncommon among the smallholder and landless sectors organized by unions (both statecontrolled and opposition), women were simply not viewed as workers. This was reinforced by existing social welfare policy as well.
Wageworkers officially registered with FUNRURAL (Brazilian Rural Social Welfare System) receive a pension equal to 75 percent of the prevailing wage upon retirement for reasons of age or disability. Because only one household member is entitled to retire for old age, the only way that rural women can benefit from this provision is if they are official heads of household or registered as wage workers (Spindel 1987:57). Because female wage laborers are rare in the smallholder and landless sectors, women are effectively denied the right to a pension. Maternity leave is extended only to those who are registered as wageworkers, as are maternity benefits. National laws that were supposed to help rural female wageworkers who were active in the commercialized sector ended up discriminating against smallholder and landless women. Their productive work, critical to household income, was not counted as work. Changing these discriminatory laws was the basis for beginning to incorporate women into opposition rural unions. It also required making women's productive work visible.
At the base of these social movements in Rio Grande do Sul was an identification of the struggles for land, economic justice, and political recognition as workingclass struggles. These movements also presented themselves as clearly opposing the state and as forming part of a new political process that would open up the political system to the disenfranchised (see Z. Navarro 1992).
Political theorists have often noted the complexity of social movements with respect to how they may be differently perceived by movement leaders and the base membership (Fox and Hernández 1989). For example, as Zander Navarro (1992: 21) notes, differences in production in rural areas of Rio Grande do Sul created a wide array of interests and demands that opposition rural unions were not prepared for. There is no homogeneous class identity among the group of individuals that both the CUT and the MMTR call "rural workers." The membership of the MMTR includes smallholders, landless women, and a few women from households with larger holdings. Leaders of the MMTR include women from smallholder as well as landless families. This complexity supports the notion that global capitalism creates a broad spectrum of possible social identities (Hall 1995).
As part of their organizing strategies, movements such as the MST and the rural CUT deliberately recruited women and set up special committees and organizational structures for them within each movement. The rural department of CUT followed the example of FETAG (Federation of Agricultural Workers), a state branch of the official CONTAG (Confederation of Agricultural Workers). FETAG was the first group to mobilize women around a recognition of the economic contributions of rural women, procuring rights and services already available to urban women workers and demanding access to healthcare.
Women were also critical in the land occupations and organization of new settlements by the MST during the 1980s and in the antidam movement. Activists who recall early occupations such as at Encruzilhada Natalino in 1981 and 1982 constantly reiterate the important role of women. MST literature of the mid1980s also emphasized the role of women in the struggle for land. An MST document from 1986 reads: "We will fight for a just and equal society... reinforcing the fight for land, including the participation of all rural workers, and stimulating the participation of women at all levels" (cited and trans. in Z. Navarro 1992: 29).
This is not unlike the strategy of creating women's organizations within revolutionary parties, as in Cuba, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and elsewhere. Some of the political leaders of the MST worked in Cuba and received a political education that clearly emphasized including women in the political process. This is no guarantee, however, that women's demands will be taken seriously. The reason why formal attention to women's rights in Brazil resulted in some concrete changes is clearly linked to the presence of a strong women's movement. In Brazil, a wide variety of grassroots women's organizations emerged in the 1970s and 1980s as part of the largest, most diverse, and perhaps most successful women's movement in Latin America (see Alvarez 1990). The creation of many state entities devoted to women's issues (e.g., State Councils on the Status of Women) as well as a National Council on Women's Rights also raised the profile of women's oppression in Brazil, at least in the 1980s. Some of the stateorganized initiatives to address women's issues later stagnated and became lower priorities for subsequent governments. The existence of a strong and diverse women's movement and of state entities devoted to women's rights provided an important legitimating context for the MMTR and other rural women's organizations that sought to specifically address women's concerns in the late 1980s.
Perhaps the most important legacy of the women's movements of Brazil in the 1970s and 1980s was the creation of a national array of such nongovernmental organizations as Rede Mulher (Women's Network), which persisted through time and provided ongoing support and training to women in a variety of organizations and movements. Sônia Alvarez, Evelina Dagnino, and Arturo Escobar discuss the importance of networks and webs as a means of conveying the intricacy of the manifold connections "established among movement organizations, individual participants and other actors in civil and political society and the State" ( 1996: 25 ). In Brazil, women's movements as well as other movements are clearly linked through steadily growing networks which may not be visible to conventional students of social movements who rely on a large public presence to document the ongoing existence of movements and organizations.
The liberation theology branch of the Brazilian Catholic Church has emphasized some women's issues as well. The Pastoral Land Commission (CPT) of the Catholic Church, closely linked to the MST, organized women and young people into groups and encouraged their participation in resolving issues of landlessness, production, and family. While the Church's discourse on the participation of women in political and community activities was quite strong, it emphasized traditional roles for women. The following passage is from a book by the Pastoral Commission of Poor Women which was used in mothers' clubs in several communities of Rio Grande do Sul:
The pages of this book offer a small example of what poor women can do when they are united and organized in their communities.... Women who fight for land for crops and for housing. Women who build community ovens to guarantee bread for the unemployed. Women who build nurseries to confront the problem of abandoned children. Women who organize teams to sew quilts to keep the sick warm. These activities and others are coming from communities and are signs of the reign of god in action. A new woman is being born... She is a community woman. (Pastoral da Mulher Pobre 1988: 8)
Although the book also provides instructions for how to confront the police and set free those who have been jailed for illegal land occupations, a majority of the proposed activities for women work well within prescribed gender roles and do not question traditional family structures in which males are the primary decisionmakers. This ideology, coupled with the reluctance of the Church to deal with women's health (specifically, family planning and abortion), ultimately resulted in a major distancing of women activists from the Church.
The Rise of the MMTR
Rural women in Rio Grande do Sul were organized in a variety of movements during the mid1980s but continued to lack their own leadership within these movements. Many had participated in large mobilizations within their specific organizations, such as the largescale land occupations of the MST or the shortterm mobilizations of women coordinated by temporary coalitions. In 1985, ten thousand women gathered in Porto Alegre for the First State Meeting of Rural Women Workers, organized by FETAG and the CPT. In 1987, rural women from Rio Grande do Sul participated in a caravan to Brasília of twelve thousand strong in order to secure the constitutional rights of rural women workers. They joined a large number of grassroots organizations which were determined to have a say in revising the Constitution after the movement to hold direct presidential elections was defeated. Participating in the rewriting of the Constitution was seen as critical to the effort to democratize Brazil. The caravan was preceded by many local and regional preparatory meetings that drew as many as a thousand women, as did the preparatory meeting in Ronda Alta. It was thus evident that rural women could be mobilized by rural unions and the Church, but these mobilizations did not result in locally based organizing projects that specifically addressed the needs of rural women.
Some women who rose to leadership positions within the MST, the antidam movement, and the rural unions felt frustrated by their inability to have their genderspecific demands considered important. In interviews, they recalled being told that if they joined in the struggle for rural workers, then the problems of women would be solved as well. Some remembered realizing in the mid1980s that they were developing a different set of concerns from those within CUT, the Church, the MST, and the antidam movement. The MMTR leader Gessi Bonês reflects on this issue:
We started to talk about other issues like women's health, sexuality, and our bodies that were not taken up by these movements. There wasn't any room to discuss these issues.... [T]hey were always considered secondary: the price of agricultural products, occupying land, [and] the dams were more concrete things. They were economic demands that got people involved. These were seen as the important issues.
Others simply recalled feeling that it was hard to participate in meetings of any kind because of the limitations at home. Isabel, a thirtyfiveyear-old smallholder member of a local MMTR committee, remembers:
It was hard to go to meetings because I didn't have anyone to take care of my children. If my husband went to a meeting and I wanted to go too, then there was no one to be at home with the children.
In order to move forward with issues that were genderspecific, a group of women from a largely CPTbased organization called the Organização das Mulheres da Roça (Organization of Country Women) began a discussion with other women about the possibility of forming an autonomous movement for rural women workers. In 1988 a temporary council was formed by CPT women and others who had been active in the MST and CUT. They then engaged in a series of discussions and meetings with people from all the regional social movements of Rio Grande do Sul. There was significant resistance to the formation of an autonomous women's movement, including resistance from some of the regional leaders. Many people, men and women alike, felt that women should be organized as part of existing movements that were focused around labor and class issues. The faction that was arguing for an autonomous movement finally convinced the others, and in August 1989 the MMTR was created in a statewide meeting. The understanding of many men who agreed to the creation of the movement was that it was to be a training ground for preparing women to participate better in other movements.
Part of the initial organizing of the MMTR involved a distancing from the Church. Before 1989 they had been receiving technical assistance and advice from the Church, particularly in some regions. The MMTR leadership was also significantly influenced by training and support they received from two women activists from CAMP (Centro de Assessoria Multiprofissional, Center for Multiprofessional Advising), an NGO that supports regional social movements. It is based in the city of Porto Alegre. CAMP organizers urged the young leadership of the MMTR to deal openly with issues of women's health, sexuality, unequal work roles at home, and general discrimination. Fabiana, a twentyeightyearold CAMP organizer who has worked with the MMTR for several years, commented on the change in emphasis by the MMTR:
I remember when I first got the document that was the basis for their formation as an autonomous movement.... I felt that this document had a much bigger emphasis on questions of production, work, or economy than it did on discrimination against women. This was when the movement was really deciding if it was part of the labor movement, part of the Church, or a women's movement.... A lot of women in the leadership were listening to a critique of just focusing on production and felt that the movement should begin to pay attention to questions that no other movement looked at, such as questions of sexuality, women's bodies, and discrimination.... We distinctly felt that the movement should be autonomous and treat questions that were specific to women.
Ultimately, the leadership of the MMTR chose CAMP and their organizers to be their primary advisors and trainers. This move immediately put them into contact with other rural women's movements such as the fivestate coalition they belong to. Through their association with NGOs like CAMP and the fivestate coalition, the MMTR leadership quickly became linked to the wider Brazilian women's movement and readily exposed to the ideas of popular feminism associated with such organizations as Rede Mulher in São Paulo.
When it began in 1989, the MMTR was active in eighty counties; it had about fifteen thousand women participating in its activities and a leadership of about five hundred. Many of the local leaders had been active in their communities through the Catholic Church, CUT, the antidam movement, or the landless movement. About 80 percent of the participants were from smallholder households, and 19 percent were landless; a small minority of 1 percent were landless salaried workers in small businesses. The elected leadership represents about the same class proportions. The original focus of the movement was on women's health paid maternity and retirement benefits equal to those of urban workers, recognition of rural women's labor as work, and the integration of women into unions and cooperatives (MMTR 1992: 5).
Since its inception, the MMTR has undergone a major transformation in terms of its agenda and political perspective. While still firmly rooted in an analysis that stresses the place of the working class (even though it has a clear multiclass base) in global capitalism, the movement has come to work more specifically with the social and cultural aspects of gender inequality in Brazil. By 1992, MMTR literature envisioned:
an autonomous movement where women themselves propose, discuss, and decide their own course of action. This autonomy allows women to make the transformation of women's position a priority in their work and practical decisionmaking. We see ourselves as having a complementary relationship to other movements.... The advances we have made (since 1989) have resulted in... the examination of new questions such as the functioning of our bodies, sexuality, production and reproduction.... These themes led us to... a new ideology, equal socialization for men and women: enfin, new relationships between men and women. (MMTR 1992:5)
The 1992 platform discussed by the MMTR at their second statewide assembly directly questions gender inequality and calls for fundamental changes in gendered culture and social life. These more abstract themes were important, but difficult to operationalize. They also caused tension with male leaders in other movements who criticized the MMTR for not contributing to the economic struggles they were engaged in. At the same time, the MMTR became increasingly active in a fivestate coalition of rural women's movements, including movements from the states of Paraná, São Paulo, Santa Catarina, and Mato Grosso do Sul.
During 1993 and 1994, the MMTR concentrated heavily on women's health benefits, in part to have a concrete campaign to mobilize their base and in part because obtaining paid maternity leave for rural women (it already existed for urban women workers) had become the major project of the fivestate coalition they participated in. In August and September of 1993, 120 women from the MMTR went to Brasília and participated in a lobbying campaign to pressure federal representatives and senators to approve paid maternity leave (MMTR 1994a: 3). The campaign also included an effort to establish the Single Health System (SUS, Sistema Único de Saúde) which would provide general healthcare for rural women and make familyplanning methods available at the local level. In addition to occupying the Senate balconies as it debated the issue, women sent hundreds of telegrams and letters supporting paid maternity leave and urging that it be available to rural women workers (AIMTRSul 1994: 16). Legislation for implementing four months of paid maternity leave through the National Social Security Institute (INSS) was finally approved by the President in July 1994.
During 1994 the MMTR continued its broad program of obtaining further rights for rural women workers in the area of health and childcare, and held workshops on nonsexist education, abortion, sterilization, and violence against women. They also worked on issues of internal democratization and tried to strengthen their links with other rural movements such as the MST, CUT, and other women's movements. Finally, they identified the relationship between gender and class as an ongoing practical and theoretical puzzle that needed more work, specifically raising the question, "When does gender supersede class?" (MMTR 1994b).
In October 1995, the MMTR and the fivestate coalition took part in a national meeting that included rural women workers from seventeen states in Brazil. At the meeting, they formed a national coalition of rural women workers' movements to coordinate their work. They declared "the urgency of being conscious of the fundamental intersections of class and gender not only in relation to the construction of new gender relations, but also for the creation of a democratic society." Furthermore, they stated, an integrated gender and class consciousness can provide a countermodel to "the current authoritarian and macho practices of many workingclass organizations" (Carta às trabalhadoras rurais do Brasil 1995). They vowed to continue their struggle to recognize the full range of rights for rural working women and to intensify their action at all levels of society. On March 8, 1996, International Women's Day, they led a coordinated set of debates, presentations, protests, and public rallies throughout Brazil.
At the end of six years of organizing in 1995, the MMTR could point to several concrete victories they had helped win for rural women: guaranteed rights to retirement benefits, to disability leave and pay, and to paid maternity leave. They also connected their statewide movement to a national coalition and helped make the labor of rural women workers visible to the state. Making that labor visible to women themselves and to members of other rural social movements is the ongoing work of the MMTR.
In 1995, the movement could point to activities in over 110 counties in the state of Rio Grande do Sul and to a base membership of from thirty thousand to thirtyfive thousand women. They established a statewide leadership structure with ten regional councils—in Sananduva, Erechim, Três Passos, Cruz Alta, Dr. Maurício Cardoso, Roque Gonzalez, Sarandi, Cachoeira do Sul, Júlio de Castilhos, and Torres. They have a statewide office in Passo Fundo. Each regional council is in turn made up of local councils with ten to seventy women in each. Local councils elect leaders who then come together at the regional level to elect two or three regional leaders who represent their region in the statewide directorate. In 1995 twentythree regional leaders made up the statewide directorate. Thus, all leaders at local, regional, and state level are elected.
The statewide directorate is made up of women from a variety of class, ethnic, and educational backgrounds. Some are longtime activists, and others are women who first became active in their local councils. In relation to other social movements in the region, the MMTR is the only one that has continued to grow and strengthen into the 1990s (see Z. Navarro 1994).
Dueling Discourses:
Christ, Class, and GenderAs seen in the political history of the MMTR, women's organizing is tied to a specific set of political discourses and ideologies surrounding its inception and growth. These discourses have provided both constraints and resources for women as they fashioned their struggles at home and within their respective organizations. The competing discourses on class and feminism that the leadership of the MMTR were exposed to (as well as their own experience of marginalization within the leftist movements they were part of) resulted in overt ideological contradictions. The leaders of the MMTR confronted these contradictions and, in the process of organizing, created a new ideology that prioritized gender concerns as they related to a multiclass female population. This new ideology was also informed by the dailylife experiences of women in local communities.
An interview with MMTR participants about the document they created as the basis for organizing an autonomous women's movement reveals the source of their original ideological framework. Twentyfive-yearold Gessi Bonês states:
In the beginning, our companheiros imagined that the movement would depend on the unions and other existing organizations for its structure and that it would remain subordinate to these organizations. We didn't have any resources at the beginning and no new ideas to work with. As a matter of fact, the first document we created was simply copied from CUT documents.... This also helped to reassure the men that we were not going to break from existing movements.
Thus, the founding document of the MMTR was in fact just a reformulation of CUT documents that focused on how to organize women of the rural working class. Indeed, the importance of class as a category was built right into the name of the organization as a movement of trabalhadoras rurais, or rural workers. This was a deliberate and marked difference from one of the MMTR's predecessor groups, a group that designated mulheres da roça, or country women.
An examination of MMTR documents from 1989 through the present reveals a consistent concern with class as a category, but also a reworking of class to include gendered concerns and women's issues. The evolution of the organization reveals a consistent effort to look at the interconnections between class, gender, and culture. The 1989 document that formed the basis for the formal incorporation of the MMTR as a movement was loaded with references to the working class. Discussion questions included the following:
How should we be participating in the workers' struggle? How do we guarantee women's participation in other movements? (MMTR 1989: 8)
How do we organize our women's movement so that we won't be controlled by the bourgeoisie? (MMTR 1989: 12)
A working document one year later continues to identify women as part of the workingclass struggle, but focuses more specifically on questioning the power relations within some of the institutions women work in. Discussion questions include these:
What kinds of discrimination against women do we find in the family, in unions, and in political parties?
How do we overcome different kinds of discrimination? (MMTR 1990a: 11)
Discrimination against women in the left, in the Church, and at home was also the subject of a 1990 bulletin published by the movement. Says Mariza Scariot, a participant in a local council who is interviewed in the bulletin:
I think that a majority of women suffer from discrimination. One of the most concrete forms of discrimination can be seen in the different kinds of education found in the family, where women are taught only to cook and to take care of children. This kind of work doesn't earn money, so it isn't valued. (MMTR 1990b:6)
Interviews with movement participants in local councils revealed a similar perspective when women reflected on the socialization of many of the smallholder and landless women who make up the base of the movement. Elenice, a twenty sevenyearold smallholder states:
Women were socialized from the beginning with the idea that they are in charge of the children and the man has no responsibility.... It's a cultural question. It's hard for women to realize that we are discriminated against.... I know women who have had fifteen children and never knew what it meant to have a sexual relationship or to feel pleasure in a relationship. They get married with the idea that it is their duty to reproduce people... have children. The Church reinforces this idea, even today.
Domestic violence and issues of female sexuality have also become part of the MMTR's organizing agenda, categorized as issues of reproduction. According to the elected statewide leadership of the MMTR, a focus on issues of sexuality, domestic violence, and women's health was a threepart process.
First of all, through contact with sociologists, psychologists, and other instructorfacilitators in national meetings and local workshops, elected regional leaders of the MMTR began to consider the gendered relationships that men and women have both at home and in their organizations. Thus, in 1989, the MMTR joined a fivestate coalition that included rural women's movements from the states of Rio Grande do Sul, Mato Grosso, Paraná, São Paulo, and Santa Catarina. This coalition had annual workshops and meetings that included representatives of NGOs and women's organizations from other parts of Brazil. Activities of the coalition were the first training ground for the MMTR regional leaders.
Second, these regional leaders would educate local leaders, using videotapes, role playing, and discussion. The local leaders would in turn disseminate information and training through local councils. One particularly popular video, a tool for examining gender relations in the home, was titled Acorda, Raimundo [Wake Up, Raimundo]. In it, a workingclass couple wakes up one morning to find that they have switched roles. The wife goes off to work in a factory, stays out drinking, demands dinner, and ignores the husband. He stays at home all day with the children, washing, cooking, and waiting for the wife to return. In the end, the whole scenario turns out to be a dream, and life goes on as usual with husband and wife playing their traditional roles. The video was quite successful in generating discussion among women in a humorous manner.
Finally, local leaders would organize activities with women in their communities in order to discuss topics that women had expressed interest in, sometimes using tools like the Acorda, Raimundo video. Popular topics among local discussion groups were childbirth and pregnancy, problems between husbands and wives, and women's health.
Beginning in the 1990s, sexuality and reproductive and maternal health gained prominence in the movement's literature. The training manual from one workshop, done by a sexologist from Rio de Janeiro, included the following questions:
When are women unable to fulfill themselves sexually?
When is there sexual violence in a relationship?
Why do women have to stay home while their husbands leave to participate in political struggles? (AAMTRES 1990: 11)
At the same time, the training manual talked about sexuality in relation to four classes of women—dominant class (mulheres dos patrões), peasant women and rural workers (camponesas e trabalhadoras rurais), working class (operárias), and modern middle class (classe média moderna)—thus continuing to link gender issues with class (AAMTRES 1990).
These workshops and later meetings also included discussions of sterilization, birth control, and abortion. While Mulheres da Roça, one of the MMTR's parent groups associated with the Catholic Church's CPT had an explicit stance against abortion and divorce, beginning in 1990 and 1991 the MMTR began to deal more openly with these issues under the guise of maternal health. Abortion had been discussed openly, in relation to women's health, by the National Commission on the Question of Women Workers of CUT in 1988. Some women from the MMTR were present at that discussion. The 1992 working document for the second statewide meeting of the MMTR follows the CUT initiative, stating:
Within the question of women's health, we also see thousands of women searching for any form of contraception who are subjected to sterilization.... Today nationally, 27 percent of women of fertile age are sterilized.... Another issue of relevance to a lack of healthcare for women is the fact that Brazil has the seventhhighest level of deaths from clandestine abortions in the world. (MMTR 1992: 3)
A 1994 document from the fivestate coalition dodges the issue of abortion in a lengthy discussion of maternal health, focusing instead on the more flexible notion of "family planning." Specific recommendations about family planning are made cautiously, signaling the continued difficulties and divisions among women as to just what "reproductive control" means:
We understand that it is important, beginning now, to fight for the introduction of family planning that respects the cultural and economic differences of each region, always defending the preservation of life.
Public authorities are responsible for creating conditions so that men and women have access to contraceptive methods and information. (AIMTRSul 1994: 14)
Introducing "family planning" while "preserving life" leaves it ambiguous whose life is being preserved—that of the mother, the fetus, or both. The ambiguous language no doubt allows those with different positions on abortion to work together in a broader effort to support women's health.
While the MMTR's elected leaders are clear that they are not endorsing abortion, they see it as an important issue to discuss. Says Gessi Bonês:
Our discussion is just that. It's not a question of the movement saying that we are in favor of abortion. In our understanding, abortion is a question that should be discussed today as part of women's health. People should know the consequences and causes of abortion.
Activists such as Gessi take this position publicly while privately indicating that they do support a woman's right to abortion. Some other women within the MMTR, however, are strongly opposed to abortion. They are willing to talk about abortion because of their opposition to it, but they realize this is a point of disagreement among women within the movement.
Discussion and consideration of the abortion issue by the MMTR obviously reflects a major distancing from the Catholic Church by the movement's leadership and some members. It also reveals the continued influence of the Catholic Church's proscription of abortion in that it is such a divisive issue. While MMTR members acknowledge some of the positive results of working with the Church—such as a strong commitment to the participation of all base members of the organization in decisionmaking and discussion—they also blame the Church for some of the most difficult problems women face. Marlene, an elected regional representative from Erechim in 1990, reflects on this:
I can say openly that the Church has a great deal of responsibility for those years in which women were dominated.... Today we work in the area of family planning, which is a question the Church also dealt with.... The Church had a big effect on people that you can see when you work with women on religious questions, and there are people who grew up believing that you never question anything a priest or nun tells you.... [B]ut today, even at the base level, people are questioning what the Church taught.
Marlene and others acknowledge that their current organizing strategy is bound to result in conflict not only with the Church but also with political parties, unions, families, and society at large as they begin to seriously question inequalities in gender roles. A key ingredient in this questioning has been their ongoing contact with the ideas of "popular feminism" disseminated through NGOs.
The reception of popular feminism by MMTR participants varies significantly. Some women from local committees I interviewed were uncomfortable calling themselves feminists. A typical response to the question "What do you think of popular feminism?" was the following, from twentyfiveyearold Lucinha, a landless married mother of two who has participated in a local MMTR committee for two years:
I don't really know what that means. We are all working with men. In my community we are working to make women's lives better. Getting our husbands and children to help us more, learning about our bodies this is what we are working on.
Many MMTR leaders are also reluctant to call themselves feminists, yet because of their exposure to the language of feminism their speech is peppered with such terms as "gender," "production and reproduction," and "women's oppression." A 1994 document outlining the future work plans of the MMTR identified the interconnected relationships between "gender," "production," and "reproduction" as key. In the document there is a diagram with arrows connecting the three terms in a circular fashion. At the local level, such issues are discussed in terms of "how I get treated by my husband and children," "how I have more work responsibilities than my husband at home," and "feeling like things aren't fair for women." What seems to be working is that the issues the organization has focused on are very real in the lives of women in the communities. They are eager to talk about them and to make some changes in their daily lives.
Excerpted from Women and Social Movements in Latin America by Lynn Stephen, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1997, 332 pp.
