Sandino's Daughters Revisited: Feminism in Nicaragua / Edition 1

by Margaret Randall

Overview

Sandino's Daughters, Margaret Randall's conversations with Nicaraguan women in their struggle against the dictator Somoza in 1979, brought the lives of a group of extraordinary female revolutionaries to the American and world public. The book remains a landmark. Now, a decade later, Randall returns to interview many of the same women and others. In Sandino's Daughters Revisited, they speak of their lives during and since the Sandinista administration, the ways in which the revolution made them strong  — and also held them back. Ironically, the 1990 defeat of the Sandinistas at the ballot box has given Sandinista women greater freedom to express their feelings and ideas.

Randall interviewed these outspoken women from all walks of life: working-class Diana Espinoza, head bookkeeper of a employee-owned factory; Daisy Zamora, a vice minister of culture under the Sandinistas; and Vidaluz Meneses, daughter of a Somozan official, who ties her revolutionary ideals to her Catholicism. The voices of these women, along with nine others, lead us to recognize both the failed promises and continuing attraction of the Sandinista movement for women. This is a moving account of the relationship between feminism and revolution as it is expressed in the daily lives of Nicaraguan women.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813520254
Publisher:	Rutgers University Press
Publication date:	02/01/1994
Edition description:	None ed.
Pages:	334
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Margaret Randall is the author of more than fifty books, including four others about Nicaragua. She was born and raised in the U.S., but lived for twenty-three years in Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua. Having relinquished her citizenship when she married a Mexican, she was denied U.S. residency when she returned to the United States in 1984. After a five-year fight, she regained her citizenship in 1989. She lives in New Mexico and teaches at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, in the spring.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. "Women's Solidarity Has Given Our Lives a New Dimension: Laughter" / Michele Najlis
3. "I Was a Woman, a Miskito Woman, a Woman from the Coco River" / Mirna Cunningham
4. "The Only Way for Women to Fight for Their Rights Is If They Get Together and Do It" / Diana Espinoza
5. "I Am Looking for the Women of My House" / Daisy Zamora
6. "Our Experience in the FSLN Is What Gives Us This Strength" / Milu Vargas
7. "As a Woman, I Think It Was Worth Living the Revolutionary Process" / Vidaluz Meneses
8. "We Were the Knights of the Round Table" / Gioconda Belli
9. "It Doesn't Matter What Kind of Uniform You Wear" / Aminta Granera
10. "It's True: We Can't Live on Consciousness Alone, But We Can't Live Without It" / Doris Tijerino
11. "Nicaragua Is a Surprising Country" / Dora Maria Tellez
12. "Coming Out as a Lesbian Is What Brought Me to Social Consciousness" / Rita Arauz
13. "Who Was Going to Trust a Montenegro?" / Sofia Montenegro

Editorial Reviews

Randall ( Sandino's Daughters ) lived for more than three years in Nicaragua and supported the Sandinistas. Returning there in 1991 after the Sandinista defeat, she concluded that the party's inability to confront feminism was a major failure, and resolved to explore the state of Nicaraguan feminism. What emerged are deeply textured interviews with 12 women, a worthy contribution to the literature concerning both Nicaragua and the role of women in social change. Poet Michele Najlis recalls Daniel Ortega dismissing abortion and family planning as exotic ideas important only to intellectuals. Doctor Mirna Cunningham, raped by contras in a notorious incident, says that ethnically diverse women from the Atlantic Coast face ``an inordinate degree of violence.'' Daisy Zamora, the former vice-minister of culture, reflects that the few women in power should have protested in louder voices. Lawyer Milu Vargas makes the central point that a revolution means both external and internal change. Despite their detailed and thoughtful criticisms, these women remain proud of the progress of their country and retain many of their revolutionary ideals. Illustrations not seen by PW. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Born in 1936 and raised in the United States, poet, journalist, and photographer Randall lived for many years in Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua. Her 50-plus books were deemed too political to allow her to remain in America. Randall, who argues that feminism and socialism need each other, interviewed women opposing the Somoza regime for Sandino's Daughters (1981), one of her books about Nicaragua. Here she has interviewed some of the same women (e.g., poet Daisy Zamora and politician Dora Maria Tellez) and others (e.g., Diana Espinoza, head bookkeeper of an employee-owned factory), providing translations, editing, photography, and a lengthy background introduction. There are few comparable booklength works in English. Useful for most libraries, including collections serving Latin American areas and women studies.-- Helen Rippier Wheeler, formerly with Univ. of California at Berkeley, SLIS

Library Journal

If it were not for writers like Margaret, how would women around the world find each other when there is such an institutional effort to keep us apart and silent? Here Margaret brings us the voice of Sandino's daughters, honoring his hat and wearing their own, wiser now, having been part of political and personal revolution.

Holly Near

"A completely new and different book from her earlier Sandino's Daughters. The core is a dozen lengthy interviews with feminist women (all but one), hence not randomly drawn from Nicaraguan society. Randall opens the volume with a useful, wide-ranging interpretative survey of history, politics, and the social situation of women. One observation that sticks: women who most resembled men in their conduct rose highest under Sandinista rule."

Handbook of Latin American Studies

A collection of varied and amazing lives, all bent on shaping history. Together, these experienced, undeterred Nicaraguan women offer powerful clues about a truly revolutionary and democratizing feminism.

Adrienne Rich

Since the defeat of the Sandinistas at the Nicaraguan polls in 1990, which surprised winners and losers alike as well as their supporters and most observers, much ink has been spilled in attempts to determine the causes. And while Nicaragua has faded from the front pages of U.S. newspapers, some are still interested in what road Nicaragua would then follow. Sandino's Daughters Revisited, Margaret Randall's collection of twelve oral histories with women involved in the Sandinista revolution, adds insights into these and other questions. This book is useful for the specialist and non-specialist alike and has much to offer the historian, the teacher, the student, and anyone interested in learning more about the Sandinista Party and the women of Nicaragua.
With Sandino's Daughters Revisited: Feminism in Nicaragua Margaret Randall adds both to her oral history work with women in the Sandinista revolution and to a thesis elaborated in Gathering Rage: The Failure of 20th Century Revolutions to Develop a Feminist Agenda (Monthly Review Press, 1992). This thesis was that the failure to develop a feminist agenda contributed to the failure of revolutionary movements in Latin America in the 20th century, in this case particularly to the Sandinistas' loss of power in the elections of 1990.

History Net, H-LatAm - Dennis Kortheuer (University of California