Counting Women, Women Who Count: Measures of the Revolution within the Revolution

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Author(s)
Riess, Barbara D.
Date Issued
January 1, 2011
Abstract
In his 1966 speech celebrating advances toward women's equality as the "revolution within the Revolution," Fidel Castro declared the need for a statistical measure of how many women had found work since the beginning of the revolution. The present study explores the consequences of creating an aggregate via the conflation of sex and gender. It argues that doing so ignores women's participation in the creation of "revolutionary" cultural meaning, the study of which can help illustrate broader changes in constructions of gender in Cuban society. Quantitative and qualitative analysis of the Gaceta de Cuba and a comparative examination of textual strategies through which two writers approach the mass mobilizations of the early 1960s—Mirta Yáñez in Todos los negros tomamos café (1976) and Rafael Soler in Noche de fósforos (1976)—are provided as evidence of the need to include the study of the work of Cuban feminist literary critics and writers of narrative fiction as equally important measures of revolutionary efforts at achieving gender equality.
Journal
Cuban Studies
Department
Modern and Classical Languages
Citation
Barbara Riess. "Counting Women, Women Who Count: Measures of the Revolution within the Revolution." Cuban Studies 42 (2011): 115-135.
Publisher
University of Pittsburgh Press
ISSN
0361-4441
1548-2464
Subjects

Gender in Cuban socie...

Gaceta de Cuba

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