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Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Temma Kaplan, Taking Back the Streets: Women, Youth, and Direct Democracy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press 2004)

IN THIS FASCINATING and compelling book, Temma Kaplan continues her ongoing project — undertaken most recently in Crazy for Democracy— of reclaiming the stories of those who, against extraordinary odds, attempt to call their governments to account and to make democracy a reality. Crazy for Democracy focused especially on individuals and groups in the US and South Africa in the 1980s and 1990s; Taking Back the Streets recounts the struggles of (mostly) women and young people against authoritarian regimes in Chile, Argentina, and Spain in the 1970s and 1980s. While the accounts are often chilling in their presentation of the details of repression and torture, they are also especially timely and inspirational.

The chapters examine five different movements, most of them movements of the Left, that "chose to make their arguments for democracy and justice by spectacular acts in front of an audience." These include opponents of the Chilean regime of Pinochet, including Mujeres Por La Vida [Women for Life] and Agrupación de Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos [Association of Family Members of Disappeared Detainees]; the Madres de Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, the group that led the resistance to the Argentinian Junta; women's and youth movements in both Chile and Argentina that struggled to keep alive the memory of repression and human rights violations even after formal democracy was restored; and groups that struggled for democracy in Spain, both during and after the rule of Francisco Franco. Significantly, however, she also includes the role of right-wing women's activism in bringing down the government of Salvador Allende in Chile. The book (which reads as a group of more-or-less independent, though interconnected, essays, rather than as a monograph with a single, sustained argument), explores a variety of related themes, including the relationships among solidarity, resistance, and recovery, the strategic uses of gender in public mobilizations, the dynamics of shaming and publicity in sustaining (and overcoming) repression, and the complicated ways in which activist women do or do not define themselves as "political."

In some ways, this book is an extended exploration and application of the notion of "female consciousness" that Kaplan introduced in a 1982 article, and which has been taken up by feminist historians of social movements in the years since. As Kaplan notes, "Frequently, groups of women speak out 'as women' about public issues, legitimating their activities by denying that they want to promote any overtly political goals ... they say they are only doing what they were raised to do as 'good women.'" (45–46) Particularly in situations of repression, the claim that one is only taking care of one's family or children can possibly provide a small zone of safety. Although it is clear that such claims did not always protect either Mujeres por la Vida in Chile, or members of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo in Argentina (members of both groups were "disappeared," killed, and/or tortured by those regimes), their claiming an identity as women or mothers did help them carve out some space for action in contexts where public spaces were largely shut down.

Indeed, the place of the "public" is a key feature of this analysis. Kaplan's detailed discussion of the nature and effects of torture makes clear that one of its central purposes/consequences is to shame, humiliate, and isolate its victims. (Recent photographs from Abu Ghraib, and the discussions that have followed from their release, highlight similar forms of sexual humiliation and shaming). The survivors whose stories she tells have "gone public" with their experiences — not only to expose the horrors perpetrated by the various military-led regimes, but also to exorcise their own shame and isolation, and to reclaim their place as fully-human citizens. In fact, her argument is that it is only through solidarity, and the overcoming of isolation and humiliation, that the survivors were able to survive. Her analysis of the relationship among repression, solidarity, and resistance is strong and compelling. Indeed, Kaplan's descriptions of the tortures they endured is, to my mind, unusually graphic, and painful to read. But it seems clear that the presentation of the details is, for Kaplan, too, a political act: if the women (and men) who experienced these horrors could live through them and tell them to others, then the least we can do is to read about them and express our solidarity by not closing our eyes.

But the book focuses on the strategic role of "the public" in two other senses, as well. First, in most Western societies, the public arena has traditionally been denoted as "political" and a male domain, while women were relegated to the "private" or domestic arena, supposedly protected from the corrupt and violent world of politics. In recent years, feminist scholars and activists have challenged that dichotomization, noting the ways that the supposed separation of public and private spheres has limited the reach of democracy for everyone, and particularly constrained women's roles. Kaplan highlights the ways virtually all the activists she studied deliberately played with the public/private divide. They often explicitly denied that their activism was "political" in nature, while using the cover of the claim to non-political status to protect them from repression. She explores the uses of this strategy not only among women on the Left, in Chile, Argentina, and Spain but also among right-wing women in Chile. Nevertheless, in the Chilean case, Kaplan portrays the right-wing women as the foils, if not the dupes, of right-wing, male-led organizations, rather than as having developed this strategy on their own, to forward their own purposes.

Kaplan also explores the uses of the "public" as a space for spectacle. Many of these chapters explain, in considerable detail, the ways these women and young people took to the streets almost as a form of guerrilla theater. In a world where formal political action was not only forbidden, but often violently and viciously punished, resisters proved extraordinarily creative in presenting their positions. The weekly walks around the plaza of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo are, perhaps, among the best-known example: those women carried pictures of their disappeared loved ones on strings hanging from their necks, and wore baby diapers, embroidered with the names of the disappeared children, as kerchiefs on their heads. Even without saying a word, they communicated a great deal about the loss of their (and others') children, and the goal of discovering their whereabouts. As the political context changed in each country, demonstrators could take slightly greater risks. Thus, Kaplan notes that, in the case of Chile, women's protests "amounted to civic rituals in which they reclaimed the city of Santiago and then the entire country from Pinochet and the military.... Mujeres por la Vida presumed that playing the part of citizens living in a democratic society might help develop people's capacity for living a democratic life." (82–3) For those women, claiming public space — and using it in their own ways — was an important dimension of the politics of creating a more democratic society. Similarly, she recounts the ways that, in the closing years of the Franco regime, women in Spain used creative strategies to protect themselves against repression while, at the same time, demonstrating against the unfairness of laws governing adultery and rape.

At a time when millions of people demonstrating in cities around the world have been unable to stop US military intervention in Iraq, and when citizens in the US are finding their civil liberties steadily eroded, it is especially valuable to learn about the efforts of those who ultimately succeeded in their struggles against seemingly implacable governmental foes. Kaplan's book stands as a fine example of engaged, and informed, scholarship, that attempts not only to clarify historical events but also, in so doing, to change the range of possibilities for the future.


Martha Ackelsberg Smith College, Northampton, MA

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