Engendering Revolution: Women, Unpaid Labor, and Maternalism in Bolivarian Venezuela

In 1999, Venezuela became the first country in the world to constitutionally recognize the socioeconomic value of housework and enshrine homemakers’ social security. This landmark provision was part of a larger project to transform the state and expand social inclusion during Hugo Chávez’s presidency. The Bolivarian revolution opened new opportunities for poor and working-class—or popular—women’s organizing. The state recognized their unpaid labor and maternal gender role as central to the revolution. Yet even as state recognition enabled some popular women to receive public assistance, it also made their unpaid labor and organizing vulnerable to state appropriation. Offering the first comprehensive analysis of this phenomenon, Engendering Revolution demonstrates that the Bolivarian revolution cannot be understood without comprehending the gendered nature of its state-society relations. Showcasing field research that comprises archival analysis, observation, and extensive interviews, these thought-provoking findings underscore the ways in which popular women sustained a movement purported to exalt them, even while many could not access social security and remained socially, economically, and politically vulnerable.
Review
"Rachel Elfenbein invites us to see Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela through a gender lens, drawing on feminist theory and a rich ethnography to provide a pathbreaking, critical, and original analysis of the policies and politics associated with Chavismo. Engendering Revolution deals with Chávez’s political mobilization of women and their later disillusionment, revealing the ways in which gender inequality was deeply imbricated in the laws, policies, and rhetoric of his revolutionary project. This book needed to be written, and in writing it, Elfenbein has made an outstanding contribution to the study of revolutionary states, as well as Latin American and gender studies." (Maxine Molyneux, University College London Institute of the Americas)
"This insightful book demonstrates that Venezuela’s Bolivarian revolution, which claimed to have a “woman’s face,” depended on poor women’s unpaid work. Deploying a wide-ranging ethnographic analysis, Rachel Elfenbein explores the reality behind Venezuela’s pathbreaking constitutional recognition of reproductive labor within a context of political and social polarization. She shows how the “revolutionary maternalism” of twenty-first-century socialism translated into a profound reliance on women to support their families, communities, and the polity itself. By centering the lives of poor homemakers, Elfenbein reveals the significance of gender relations to the revolution and its impact on some of its hardest-working citizens." (Elisabeth Jay Friedman, University of San Francisco)
About the Author
An independent scholar, Rachel Elfenbein holds a PhD in sociology from Simon Fraser University and was a Fulbright scholar to Venezuela. She was awarded the Latin American Studies Association’s 2018 Helen Safa Award for the research featured in Engendering Revolution. She works as an educator, researcher, facilitator, and counselor with civil society organizations in North America and southern Africa.
Tags: History, Latin America, South America, Social Science, Gender Studies, Business & Economics, Labor