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Revolution within the Revolution: Women and Gender Politics in Cuba, 1952-1962 (Envisioning Cuba) Kindle Edition

by Michelle Chase (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.8 8 ratings

Part of: Envisioning Cuba (36 books)

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A handful of celebrated photographs show armed female Cuban insurgents alongside their companeros in Cuba's remote mountains during the revolutionary struggle. However, the story of women's part in the struggle's success has only now received comprehensive consideration in Michelle Chase's history of women and gender politics in revolutionary Cuba. Restoring to history women's participation in the all-important urban insurrection, and resisting Fidel Castro's triumphant claim that women's emancipation was handed to them as a "revolution within the revolution," Chase's work demonstrates that women's activism and leadership was critical at every stage of the revolutionary process.

Tracing changes in political attitudes alongside evolving gender ideologies in the years leading up to the revolution, Chase describes how insurrectionists mobilized familiar gendered notions, such as masculine honor and maternal sacrifice, in ways that strengthened the coalition against Fulgencio Batista. But, after 1959, the mobilization of women and the societal transformations that brought more women and young people into the political process opened the revolutionary platform to increasingly urgent demands for women's rights. In many cases, Chase shows, the revolutionary government was simply formalizing popular initiatives already in motion on the ground thanks to women with a more radical vision of their rights.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Centering women's experiences and perspectives in a provocative reconsideration of the Cuban Revolution, Revolution within the Revolution disrupts official narratives that depict prerevolutionary Communists' rise to dominance within the Castro government as a harmonious and inevitable process, while demonstrating that revolutionary leaders' attention to women's issues after 1959 was reactive rather than proactive, a response to the vast but forgotten grassroots mobilization of women in Cuba's urban centers after the revolution's triumph.--Latin American Research Review

The research for this book is extensive, and Chase is evenhanded in her collection and interpretation of the materials.--American Historical Review

A work that should attract not only historians of the Cuban Revolution but anyone interested in gender and the history of women in Latin America.--Alfonso Salgado, Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos

An innovative and accessible text that underscores the possibility and malleability of early moments of revolution.--Hispanic American Historical Review

Chase's nuanced analysis of the centrality of gender politics to revolutionary struggle merits praise for opening up a promising new direction in the study of the Cuban Revolution, and for reinvigorating dialogue about the Revolution's social legacy in this momentous time in US-Cuban relations.--Choice

[A]n altogether excellent, informative, and essential book: an opening salvo in a conversation that, as Chase convincingly demonstrates, was long overdue.--Jennifer Lambe, Assistant Professor of History, Brown University, NACLA

Review

Engaging, well written, and well argued, this is an important intervention in debates about gender, sexuality, the family, and political struggle in the Cuban Revolutionary victory of 1959.--Carrie Hamilton, Roehampton University

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00W1VH2H0
Publisher ‏ : ‎ The University of North Carolina Press; 1st edition (November 30, 2015)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ November 30, 2015
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 5521 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 304 pages