Miners Wives

Yesterday I spoke with Domitila Barrios De Chugara. You may of heard of her book ¨"Let me Speak" http://www.akpress.org/2006/items/letmespeak. She and some friends formed a group of miners wives in 1961. It was the first women´s group in Bolivia. They organized at first to support the miners struggle. When rapant inflation hit in the 70s, they realized that just shopping for food was taking 70 percent of their income so they started a protest and won a reduction in food costs. They went on to a variety of fights around education and other issues. She is most famous for starting a hunger strike against the dictator Banzer that spread across Bolivia and ultimately brought down the government.

She is delighted with the advances women are making in Bolivia today and is a strong supporter of the MAS but don´t call her a feminist. Her experience of feminism was at the UN conference on Women in Mexico in 1975 when western feminists tried to make her understand that it was men who were the enemy, she says. They tried to divide us, she explains. Despite the fact that the men gave them a really hard time at the beginning, they always knew that their battle was side by side with the miners against the government and the bosses.

Too bad she didn´t meet any socialist feminists from the West in those days.

The photo is in Oruro honouring the miners.