Argentina, during the period from 1976-1983, was not a good place to look even remotely like a dissident. The era, known as the ‘Dirty War’, saw widespread violence carried out by Jorge Rafael Videla’s military junta against those it perceived as enemies of the state – students, journalists, trade unionists and Peronist guerillas (see the Night of the Pencils, Ezeiza Massacre, Margarita Belén Massacre and Luis Mendia’s death flights for examples). Assaults, assassinations and kidnappings were rife, and somewhere between 9,000 and 30,000 people were forcibly disappeared, leaving no official trace of their fates.

This set the stage for the formation of a group known as the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, named for the plaza in central Buenos Aires where they first gathered. The Mothers are one of the more interesting protest movements of the late 20th century, and also a bunch of remarkable badasses.

Formed in 1977, the Mothers set out to pressure the government into admitting the fates of their disappeared children, the Desaparecidos. On the 30th of April that year sixteen women gathered outside the presidential palace to stage a demonstration, demanding to know what had happened to theirs sons and daughters. Consider that this was right in the middle of the Dirty War, when state-sponsored death squads were meting out harsh discipline pretty much with impunity. How staggeringly brave and determined do you have to be, at a time like that, to march up to the presidential palace and demand answers? This isn’t a movement that formed years later, in safety under a civilian government – they stood up to the military junta right from the start, despite the risks.

A poster of the missing

In a time when the government sought to isolate individuals, to separate and control people through application of terror, the Mothers gave a unified voice. They acted publicly, sharing their stories, gathering others to their cause. It was by no means a safe or easy course of action (fully one quarter of the founding Mothers were also disappeared before the junta left power in 1983), but they managed to grow a movement that is still going.

The ongoing work of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo has not gone on unnoticed. It has earned them international awards from bodies such as UNESCO and the European Parliament. It has also been met with harassment and repression. Three of the organization’s founding members have joined the ranks of the disappeared since its work began.

– Bruce Allen

Since the fall of the junta and the return to civilian government, the pressure exerted by the Mothers has resulted in several hundred of the missing being identified, or their remains found. Many younger children turned out to have been given to adoptive loyalist families, and the Mothers have acted as intermediaries to help these children come to terms with their pasts and interact with both their adoptive and birth families.

Beyond just finding the missing, many of the Mothers have seen it as their duty to carry on the dreams of their children, to live for the causes that got them taken in the first place. To this end the group has grown to encompass other political causes, including the founding of a university, libraries and bookshops, and the provision of healthcare subsidies.

What makes the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo particularly interesting is the boundary-crossing nature of their protest. A lot of activist movements and protest campaigns become unfortunately mired in divisions, locking out valuable voices (see the refusal by key female American activists to accept the black suffrage movement in the early 20th century, or the frequent erasure of trans* and non-white issues among a lot of modern groups). The Mothers, by contrast, brought together several spheres of Argentinean culture.

One of the early demonstrations by the Mothers, outside the Presidential Palace.

Active in the central business areas of Buenos Aires, and by all accounts an urban movement, they nevertheless counted many rural Argentinians amongst their number. Age divides were crossed too, with a Grandmothers division of the group who continued the work of their kidnapped children, and looked after the offspring of disappeared Mothers.

Following the return to civilian government in 1983, and the Trial of the Juntas in ’85, the Mothers went international. Argentina hadn’t been the only South American country to disappear dissidents during that time (see: Operation Condor), and the Mothers sought to bring international pressure down on countries that still hadn’t come clean about their activities, particularly the Pinochet regime in Chile.

“One of the most beautiful things that came out of my work with the Grandmothers was learning that there was so much interest and solidarity from people in other parts of the world. It was an extraordinarily positive experience. We have had support from the women’s movement, from the CHA [Comité Homosexual Argentino], and from the transsexual groups.”

– Nélida de Navajas, quoted in Rita Arditti’s Searching for Life

The Mothers are still active today, still working for answers about the fates of the thousands who remain unaccounted for, and still promoting the ideals and social changes their children were kidnapped for. They still march through the Plaza de Mayo every Thursday, in addition to a larger annual March of Resistance.

For further reading:

• Searching For Life by Rita Arditti
• Circle of Love Over Death by Matilde Mellibovsky
• Revolutionizing Motherhood by Marguerite Bovard

(Note: This post is primarily concerned with the Founding Line branch of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. The Association faction, who split off in 1986, are more radical in their politics. They also do some very good work, but have publicly expressed some views that are difficult to endorse.)

Comemmorative dollar for the Little Rock Nine, six of whom were women

Often women’s involvement in protest has drawn on their gendered role within families and communities. Women played a significant part, for instance, in the riots over food supply, quality and price which swept Europe during its transition to a capitalist market economy from the 16th century to the 19th. Historians like Temma Kaplan, E P Thompson and Natalie Zemon Davis (and, er, me) have seen female participation in these protests as an extension of their role in the sexual division of labour, including food procurement and preparation, which lent legitimacy and authority to their involvement. The prominence of women in local networks of communication, and their presence in social centres like market squares as part of their daily routine, also allowed them to collectively mobilise and organise – the equivalent, under agrarian capitalism, of creating a Facebook Events page.

There is, however, a myriad of other movements and moments in which women have taken part as workers, students, trade union organisers, family members, and consumers, as well as on grounds of class, race, sexuality, and political principle. There’s even a Wikipedia list of female rebel leaders dating from the 9th century BC to this year’s uprising in Ivory Coast, which, even though this series is concerned less with individuals and more with women’s mass participation in protest, is still pretty cool.

Just as their presence is still being obscured in reports of current events in the Middle East, so women have historically been absent from many popular and academic accounts of protest. The advent of feminist-influenced social history from the mid-20th century sought to correct masculine bias within traditional narratives of labour history or liberal teleologies, both of which had marginalised or misrepresented the involvement of women. Conversely, strictly purist or doctrinaire feminist narratives of history have also tended to ignore popular movements which did not advance a specifically feminist programme, regardless of how heavily women may have been involved. Both of these approaches resulted in the omission, until recently, of women from the histories of protest movements like Chartism in which they played a significant part.

The place and properness of women in protest has long been a bone of contention, with discourse surrounding their involvement portraying them as hysterical, unwomanly, deviant, or deranged. Sheila Rowbotham, in her historical study of women and protest, notes that:

It is at the point where the revolution starts to move women out of their passivity into the conscious and active role of militants that the mockery, the caricatures, the laughter with strong sexual undertones begin.

The vicious alarmism and mockery drawn by female involvement in politics, with which suffragists and civil rights agitators found themselves contending, is already evident in several cartoons on female Jacobins and campaigners for constitutional reform. Political cartoons of the 18th and 19th century were rarely noted for their subtlety, and caricaturists tended to focus upon the disorderly nature of political females, as well as imputing to them an ‘unwomanly’ loose or aggressive sexuality. Cruikshanks depicted ‘The Female Reformers of Blackburn’ as vulgarly outspoken and blowsily dressed, distastefully dominating their political platform, and J L Marks’ ‘Much Wanted: A Reform Among Females!!!’ gives its female protagonists suggestively brandished rolled-up papers, poles clutched between their knees, and – oh yes – hands clasped in their laps to form a gaping dark hole, setting out their desire to usurp male power as well as their own wantonness. As, perhaps, does the presence of all those upthrust pikes, swords and cannons in depictions of the women’s march to Versailles. And of course Cath Elliot’s recent piece on online harassment, by which politically uppity women are impugned as frigid, or sluts, or lesbians, provides a piquant reminder of this glorious tradition.

Women in protest don’t merely have attacks from the right to worry about. Their involvement does not take place in a vacuum – women protest not only as women but for multiple reasons of sectional interest, and the gender identification of protestors has historically generated conflict and tension with identities based on race, class, sexuality, and ideology. To take just one example, the involvement of women in 20th century industrial conflict, acting in support of or solidarity with male industrial workers, has been criticised by some feminists who view such conflict as manifestations of an unhelpfully macho patriarchal culture from which women should separate themselves.

Nor can it be assumed that female involvement in social protest will naturally result in an outcome which is cognisant of, sympathetic to, or even comfortable for women. After the Women’s March to Versailles, women as revolutionaries became a potent symbol of the power of the French Revolution, and the young Republic was eventually personified in the figure of Marianne. But, as Joan Landes has argued, Marianne’s visual prominence did not mean that women obtained significant political, social, or economic advantages during the French Revolution; the new Republic’s politics was one of laws and texts in which Marianne’s image bore no concrete significance. Similar tensions are apparent in the complex relationship of Iranian women with the after-effects of the 1979 revolution, and the contention that the presence of women in the current ‘Arab spring’ uprisings, when acknowledged at all, is being appropriated and used symbolically.

In addition to the examples given in links above, this series will look in greater detail at case-studies of women’s involvement in social, political, and economic protest, their motivations and methods, their successes and setbacks. It’s been a long, hot summer of discontent and it shouldn’t be any surprise to see women as well as men taking their place in the sun.

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• Rhian Jones also blogs at Velvet Coalmine.