Conservative Women's Mobilization and Gender Equality in Latin America

Gender and politics scholarship has significantly advanced our understanding of women’s movements’ organization, strategies, and influence in processes leading to gender equality policy reforms. The bulk of existing studies attribute the liberalization of a variety of policies such as divorce, domestic violence, and abortion to the strength of feminist movements. Much less is known about conservative women and their abilities to impact policymaking. Yet recent years have witnessed a growing mobilization against gender equality policy globally, and specifically in Latin America, in which women often appear as leaders. This paper comparatively analyzes the impact of conservative women’s mobilization on gender equality legislation in Latin America. It uses two cases from different countries and historical periods to highlight a common mechanism through which conservative women’s mobilization impacts gender quality policy. We ask two central questions: when do women mobilize in defense of religious doctrine, and what are the consequences for gender equality policy? We argue that conservative women mobilize when secularization or liberal social movements threaten religious principles. As census and survey data reflect, women are more likely than men to mobilize for such purposes because they identify more strongly as religious. This is especially true in the case of the Catholic Church, which continues to dominate Latin America’s religious landscape. In contexts of threats to religious doctrine, the religious cleavage becomes politicized, making mobilized women an attractive constituency for political parties. Conservative women that defend religious principles can provide not only electoral support but also help parties forge links to religious institutions. We argue that this mechanism applies across time and space in the region and has primarily shaped party strategies vis-á-vis gender policy during periods of threat to the Catholic Church’s domination. Moreover, we find that the potential for conservative women’s mobilization impedes gender policy. This effect can be direct, by signaling to parties that a real or potential electoral constituency opposes such legislation, or indirect, when parties make policies that appeal to the gender roles that conservative women’s mobilization reflect (but not on the specific issue they mobilize around). We illustrate this argument by analyzing conservative mobilization in relation to suffrage in Chile in the mid-1900s and abortion in contemporary Mexico. Theoretically, the argument contributes to literature on women’s movements, religion and politics, and gender policy. The focus on conservative rather than liberal mobilization sheds light on an understudied category of mobilized women, yet one that historically impacted politics and has gained political influence in recent years. By emphasizing the links between women’s mobilization, religious institutions, and political parties, the paper builds on religion and politics scholarship that has only marginally assessed conservative womens’ impact. Finally, it contributes to gender policy research by showing that the potential of conservative women’s collective mobilization impedes liberal legislation on both doctrinal and non-doctrinal issues. The comparative examination of two distinct policies highlights the common mechanism at work, which helps us understand the effects of both current and historical anti-gender equality mobilization.