ABSTRACT
This chapters shows that women's political participation is regionwide and extensive and that it is addressed to issues ranging from human rights and the environment to consumer movements and violence against women. Women's participation in national movements such as the revolution in Nicaragua or the oppositions to military rule in the Southern Cone and Peru has allowed women's groups to claim political space in the governments that they helped bring to power. The chapter addresses two areas of interest to both feminist theory and democratic practice. The first issue is the implications for feminist theory of the successful pattern of women's mobilization as mothers, both in human rights groups and in urban neighborhoods. The second issue is central not only to democratic theory but to the prospects for democratic consolidation in Latin America and in other regions such as the former Soviet Union and Eastern and Central Europe.
