ABSTRACT
In the mid-1990s a focus on women in Latin America reveals the profound changes that have occurred in the region in the past forty years. This chapter focuses on the history of women's activism as influenced by and exerting influence on contemporary social movements. The issues that women are identifying as central to their present and future circumstances are visible in the focus of the hundreds of women's organizations—local, national, transnational—that are a hallmark of contemporary Latin America. The emergence of women novelists, poets, journalists, and political activists and the development of a shared feminist consciousness in Latin America are directly linked to trends that combined to produce a process of modernization in certain nations. Prior to the early twentieth century, the legal and civil status of Latin American women was governed by a complex body of legislation rooted in Iberian and ecclesiastic law.
