Unity in diversity and adversity: Venezuelan women's struggle for human rights.

Abstract

This article on the efforts of women in Venezuela to gain access to their human rights opens by noting that the most significant gains in this 80-year struggle have occurred in the past 20 years because activists 1) consistently framed women's issues as critical to attaining the goals of social justice and democracy, 2) built flexible coalitions among diverse groups of women, and 3) kept the issue before the public. The next section offers an historical perspective for these contemporary strategies by locating their origins in women's participation in political movements to end dictatorships and repression during the 1920s and tracing women's advancement from the gaining of the full right to vote in 1947 through the 1995 establishment of the National Council on Women. The article continues with a look at how the human rights agenda was reframed in the 1990s to include issues of violence against women and political participation and to increase public recognition of these issues. Consideration of new opportunities and continuing challenges focuses first on how spaces were created for new discourses by an erosion of confidence in public officials and a series of national protests and then on the related opportunity of a rapid rise in nontraditional presidential candidates. Next, the article details efforts to increase women's political participation as a human right and defense of democracy and to promote the idea that freedom from violence (poverty, sexual harassment, physical and emotional abuse, control over sexuality, rape and incest) is a human right. The article concludes by reemphasizing the importance of adopting a flexible style of networking and of recognizing that legislation merely provides the basis for action.

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