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Women and Guerrilla Movements: Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chiapas, Cuba, by Karen Kampwirth. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002. $35.00 (cloth), $21.95 (paper).
In this comparative study of three late twentieth century revolutions in Latin America, Karen Kampwirth highlights the salience of gender for assessing both the aims of the revolutionary activists and the courses of the revolutions themselves. The dramatically higher participation of women in revolutions in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and the Mexican state of Chiapas, as compared to earlier periods, beckons explanation. Adopting a feminist approach, the author seeks to understand the female participants in these movements not as revolutionaries, but explicitly as women revolutionaries. The neglect of gender as a relevant factor in most general theories and many empirical studies of revolution justifies this approach.
Kampwirth discovers that a variety of interlinked factors set the stage for the greater participation of women by removing prior obstacles to their involvement....