Paradoxes of Gendered Political Opportunity in the Venezuelan Transition to Democracy

Abstract

On International Women's Day in March 1958, ten thousand women gathered in the largest stadium in Caracas to celebrate the fall of the dictatorship of Major Marcos Pérez Jiménez and to commemorate the many women who had taken an active role in opposing it. This gathering was the first mass meeting following the demise of authoritarian rule. Despite the array of political views represented in the audience and on the dais, unity was stressed by every speaker. Women had struggled against the dictatorship united, and united they would promote their own rights in the fledgling democracy. But within a year, the women's group that had sponsored the rally disbanded. Women did not hold another nonpartisan meeting for sixteen years, and then only when the United Nations' International Women's Year in 1974 galvanized the two thousand participants. During the first thirty years of democracy in Venezuela, women held no more than 5 percent of congressional seats and few of the decision-making positions in political parties.