Forging Feminisms under Dictatorship: Women's international ties and national feminist empowerment in Chile, 1973-1990

Focusing on the period of dictatorship, this analysis explores Chilean feminists' empowerment through international ties when feminism gained legitimacy as a vehicle for social change in the aftermath of the United Nations International Women's Year in 1975. Centering on three types of encounters that marked women's coalition-building and their international ties, both personal empowerment and institutional change in defense of women's rights are discussed. Chilean women participated in the United Nations International Women's Conferences that accompanied the Decade of Women between 1975 and 1985. They also joined regional feminist conferences called Encounters, Encuentros, which were explicitly aimed at convening women in the Americas. Chilean women's experience of international solidarity and exile encouraged many to reconsider their own roles in their native society. In the course of military rule and re-democratization, Chilean feminists connected these experiences to domestic feminist activism and set a path for empowerment that fitted their national historical trajectory.