ABSTRACT
Paraguay is a small country sandwiched between Argentina and Brazil in the center of South America. It has experienced long periods of isolation, which have favored a nationalist culture with prolonged stages of authoritarian centralization. The periods of greater freedom for Paraguayan women coincided with historical stages of advance of feminism internationally. There was a large public campaign to win women’s vote at the beginning of the century, and campaign was finally won in the 1960s, under the dictatorship of General Alfredo Stroessner Matiauda. That government administration addressed women’s issues within the National Development Plan, and women’s organizations played an active role in the development of laws and the promotion of specific public policies. The Women’s Secretariat designed a project of equality of opportunities and results for women in education, emulating the Argentine Program of Equal Opportunities for Women. The project teams organized working plans around the educational reform implementation, to work with it and enrich it with gender support.
