When I opened a seminar I was giving last year in the United States by asking participants to what sexual, racial, class, ethnic, and national groups they generally claimed to belong, the audience became engaged for an hour, almost preventing me from giving my paper. Apart from self-fascination, what was interesting about what people revealed is how verbal they are about problematic identities and how silent about those that place them in a dominant social group. So women, but not men, are likely to mention gender; Blacks, but not whites, race; and working-class people, but not the elite, class. No one mentions motherhood.

Gender identity, consciousness of what any given culture and historical period expect from men and from women as mothers, may be the most veiled identity of all. In all cultures and historical periods, elders teach children appropriate behavior, and while the content of that behavior varies enormously, girls and boys grow up knowing what their society expects from them because of their gender. Most people accept the division of labor by sex and expect the privileges emerging from their gendered obligations. So if in many cultures, women learn to view themselves as mothers feeding, clothing, sheltering, and protecting their families and communities, they will try to perform those activities even in times of shortages or war--or when their government calls their children subversives. The most conservative women--the "good girls"--will sometimes confront police or soldiers, affirming their roles as mothers and housewives, submerging all other identities. Authorities facing women claiming not to be politically but maternally motivated come up against issues of the sanctity of motherhood.¹

Authorities who appear to be attacking "innocent" and "defenseless" women risk losing face because public perception of the masculine identity of authorities diminishes when antagonists appear to be "mere" housewives and mothers. If we question why men can be mown down with impunity when it is so embarrassing for police or soldiers to attack women calling themselves mothers; and why, therefore, such women, regardless of race and class, sometimes wield greater power than women or men calling themselves citizens or workers; we uncover popular notions of the relationship between masculine identity, maternity, and social order frequently overlooked. Focusing on the gender identities projected by conservative women who opposed the Socialist regime of President Salvador Allende in Chile between 1970 and 1973; by the Madres of the Plaza de Mayo in their struggle to regain their kidnaped children after 1977 in Argentina; and by the women of Crossroads in South Africa in their attempts to retain squatter housing outside Cape Town between 1978 and 1986, it becomes clear that, under certain circumstances, women can use gender identity as a strategy to arrogate powers to themselves, challenging authority gendered according to masculine identity.

Chile, 1970-73

Those who read newspapers or watched television between 1970 and 1973 will not have forgotten masses of Chilean women, banging empty pots with lids and spoons, shouting for increased food supplies and urging the military to take power. The emblematic march of the "cacerolas" or empty pots, on December 1, 1971, repeated in 1973 after numerous other women's mobilizations, contributed to the sense that President Salvador Allende's Popular Unity government was both incompetent and undemocratic. As if challenging the masculinity of authorities by asserting their own traditional roles as housekeepers, even wealthy women, who never lifted a lid on other occasions, assumed political identities as mothers who had the rights and responsibility to establish order.²

Women acting wildly out of control in Allende's Chile seemingly helped destablize the country leading to the bloody coup that took place on September 11, 1973. Decades later, questions persist about why the allegory of housewives and mothers fighting deprivation legitimated the activities of anti-government protesters.

In December 1971, a women's march, gathering from ten to forty-thousand women, beating pots with lids and waving empty shopping bags, marched through the downtown area of Santiago. Surrounded by their right-wing male student backers, who were wearing helmets and armed with chains, women protesters claimed that they were innocent victims who had been attacked with chains and straight razors wielded by left-wing students.³ Attempting to maintain public order, the police sprayed teargas and brandished clubs. According to the conservative women, authorities were cowards and bullies who, took too long to appear on the scene, and then, when they did, joined leftist students in attacking defenseless women victims. A conservative women recalls taunting the police as "maricones" (fairies, literally butterflies) because they insufficiently protected the anti-government demonstrators.⁴ Challenging the heterosexual identity of the police contributed to undermining the masculinity hence the authority of the government as a whole.

A conservative woman journalist who had participated in the demonstration explained why she thought the women's action was legitimate and the government's was not. She claimed that women and mothers, without distinctions of age, class, or political affiliation, had organized to protest "the shortages of articles necessary to the life of a civilized people: food, transportation, cloth, clothing, thread, medicines and other goods."⁵ Not only did conservative women justify their anti-government mobilizations because necessities were in short supply, but they presented their actions as efforts to achieve democracy. How had these women created a populist movement based on a common identity as women created a populist identity despite class differences?⁶ Maria Crummet, an American who interviewed ten leaders of the right-wing women's movement known as Poder Feminino (Feminine Power) just after the coup, explained that "by defining women on the basis of natural rather than historical attributes, by proclaiming the universality of the condition of womanhood, EPF [El Poder Femenino] attempted to establish a fundamental unity of interests between all women, over and beyond any social, economic or ideological differences. This concept of "women" implicitly yielded a conception that presented the women's opposition movement as a democratic movement acting in the name of `the women of Chile that constitute more than half of the population of this country.'"⁷

By the end of August 1973, when social services and food supplies in Chile had declined to such a degree that many groups spoke about being threatened with starvation largely because of destabilization efforts, a million workers were on strike.⁸ On August 23, one-hundred officer's wives, buttressed by three-hundred members of Poder Femenino, demanded the resignation of General Carlos Prats, Commander in Chief of the armed forces and Allende's chief supporter, in a letter they presented to his wife. The demonstration surrounding the presentation grew violent, and the police, undoubtedly frustrated and angry at the militant right-wing women, exerted force wounding several women demonstrators while trying to subdue them.⁹

Taking matters into their own hands, masses of women, led by self-consciously right-wing activists, attempted to overthrow the government. No demonstration of women in the contemporary period has been emblazoned on people's minds as that of the women's march of the empty pots on September 5, 1973 in Santiago.¹⁰ Under the leadership of Poder Femenino and the women employees, the opposition to Allende led tens-of-thousands of women in a huge demonstration one day after the government's third anniversary.¹¹ Ordinary women as well as dedicated right-wingers passed out flyers claiming that " Mr. Allende has led the country into a catastrophe. We don't have bread for our children! We don't have medicine for those who are sick! We don't have clothes to wear! We don't have a roof to put over our heads!"¹² Affirming their need to act in order to be good mothers, the women set out to end the shortages by any means necessary.

Fanning the flame of such sentiments, Poder Feminino actively sought military intervention to overthrow Allende. They even marched on the army barracks in August 1973, challenging the army's masculinity by throwing grain at the soldiers they called "chicken" for not seizing power.¹³ General Gustavo Leign later complained self-righteously, "They said that we were chickens. They left corn at the doors of our houses. They said we were cowards. Whoever had been in my position on that day would have acted. There was no other way out."¹⁴ On September 10 in Santiago, the day before the army coup, women paraded in front of the Defense Ministry again demanding that the armed forces seize power.¹⁵

What is odd about all the arguments describing right-wing women's role in Allende's downfall is how much power critics attributed to the women to draw the military toward a coup, as if reluctantly, and, elsewhere, how the women are viewed as pawns of the conservative and right-wing parties. No doubt, certain women were associated with these groups, but the numbers of demonstrators indicate that even apolitical women mobilized in street demonstrations to overthrow the Popular Unity government. The history of Chile raises profound questions over when gender identity galvanizes women to act, why women are so effective when they claim to be protesting as mothers rather than as citizens, and what a government trying to carry out social reforms while undergoing attacks from an organized opposition can do to overcome shortages and allay the fears of ordinary housewives. The Chilean case underscores the profound impact gender identity can have on politics.

The Madres of the Plaza de Mayo, Argentina

Under exactly opposite political circumstances, mothers in Argentina succeeded in undermining the free exercise of an authoritarian regime though their maternal identity never wielded the power against the Junta that the Chilean women threw against Allende. In March 1976, the armed forces of Argentina carried out a coup overthrowing civilian rule and replacing it with three military Juntas which ruled in succession until the end of 1983.¹⁶ The new military government, carrying out what they called a "Process of National Reorganization," declared war on those they considered subversives, including opposition leaders, labor lawyers, socially conscious doctors, union activists, journalists, Jews, and students, challenging the national loyalty of those who claimed a maternal identity by defending the disappeared.¹⁷

Since many of those abducted, held without charges, tortured, and frequently assassinated were under thirty, and because their mothers set out to find them in increasingly public ways, the Argentine case has become emblematic of the actions of "mothers of the disappeared." At the end of April 1977, fourteen mothers who had been thrown out of government offices where they were seeking their children gathered at Buenos Aires' central square. Lying in the financial district of Buenos Aires, at the center of the downtown shopping district, the Plaza de Mayo is the symbolic capital of Argentina, its sacred secular space. A bit off center in the plaza is the pyramidal shaped monument commemorating the 1810 May revolution against Spanish domination.¹⁸ Recounting their troubles to one another, the fourteen mothers decided to meet again the following week on Thursday at 3:30 PM. Since the police would not let them sit together, regarding any gathering as a prohibited political meeting, the women strolled around the pyramid in the Plaza.

At first, the mothers were quite naive about whether government officials would help them find their children, but experience taught them to take matters into their own hands. In June 1977, two months after the women had begun their marches, three of the mothers visited the Minister of Interior while sixty other mothers waited outside. The Minister, insulting their maternal pride, asked whether their sons had not simply run off on some sexual escapade while their daughters became prostitutes.¹⁹ The women responded forcefully to allegations that they were bad mothers, a motif that further turned the Madres against the regime.

With state terror desecrating life in the mid-seventies, the women whom officials called "Las Locas" (the crazy women), marched to break the silence and to re-establish some sense of collective identity united in the pursuit of justice. Just when the Madres consciously realized their need for a collective maternal identity remains a mystery, but within seven months of the first demonstrations, they took out an ad in La Prensa, the leading newspaper in Buenos Aires, listing the names and identification numbers of 237 mothers of the detained-and-disappeared. The audacity of the Madres in printing their names when other members of civil rights organizations remained circumspect is one measure of their desperation to make the plight of their children public. But it also resulted from a strategy that pitted their maternal identity against the military's authority.

They developed a system of symbols to express their own changing sense of identity and their need to highlight their role as good mothers simply carrying out the jobs they were trained to do. One of the first symbols to work were white kerchiefs. According to one account, on the march to Lujan, organized by a variety of human rights organizations in 1977, María del Rosario, one of the Madres, suggested that they buy white fabric to make head scarves so that they could recognize one another. Since the human rights march was moved up and there was no time for the purchases, they wound up wearing white diapers on their heads, marking themselves as mothers. By Aída Suárez' account, Azucena Villaflor, one of the leaders of the Madres, suggested the scarves to make the Madres noticeable; Suarez says, "Azucena's idea was to wear as a kerchief one of our children's nappies, because every mother keeps something like this, which belonged to [her] child as a baby."²⁰

During the period from 1977, when three of the mothers disappeared, to the World Cup games, when foreign journalists flooded the city and helped the Madres gain international publicity, the Madres had to turn to other methods to preserve their identity and remain in the public eye--their only recourse against the Junta. International press attention certainly aided the Madres. After nearly forty years of attempting to bring the World Cup soccer games to Argentina, the games were scheduled to take place in Buenos Aires in June 1978. While the games opened at the Monumental Stadium of the River Plate on 1 June 1978 with more than eighty thousand spectators in attendance, at the Plaza de Mayo "one hundred women who had been dispersed around on the benches, gathered quickly around the pyramid having covered their heads with the white kerchiefs and begun their slow procession." Before television cameras in the Plaza, Madres began telling their stories.

It would be nice to say that the Madres had won the conscience of their country people and forced the overthrow the military government, but, in fact, the 1982 Malvinas or Falkland War did that by demonstrating the weakness of the armed forces. Only the Madres had refused to march to the drum of nationalism. The Falklands war, which lasted from April to June 1982, effectively discredited the military Junta and revealed the Madres maternal identity as an alternative source of national identity to that of the Junta.

Shrewd and increasingly sophisticated, the Madres transformed their initial sense of victimhood into a strategy. Over the course of their development, the Madres' identity had radically changed. They played on the contradiction that lies between sentimentalized views of mothers and the state. For example, they felt and projected the idea that they would have been bad mothers if they failed to seek their children. Only by hunting for their lost children would they be defending their identity as mothers.

Crossroads, South Africa

Though ostensibly a democracy, South Africa, ruled by the white Nationalist Party, excluded Blacks and coloreds from citizenship through the system of apartheid. Few realize the role women's identity as mothers played in helping to undermine apartheid, which not only separated the races but denied Black women the privileges that accompanied their obligations as mothers.

Nothing shaped apartheid more than the Black Urban Areas Act of 1945. This law effectively prohibited the mobility of Black people, including mothers. "Influx control" regulations, replaced by so-called "orderly urbanization" rules in July 1986, permitted the South African government to monitor the movement of Black labor. The emblem of influx control was the passbook, an internal passport, that forced people of color, especially women, to negotiate almost every move they made with some official of the state: As if they were out on parole, they had to check in every few months and plead with some unsympathetic bureaucrat that special conditions, such as a child's illness or their own pregnancy, required them to remain in the city. Women's constant negotiations to preserve their passes turned maternal identity into a public rather than a private issue for African women.

The Orderly Urbanization law restricted older Africans, those without steady employment, and married Black women with children to poor rural areas, known as "Homelands" or "Bantustans," which lacked schools, hospitals, and job opportunities in industry or agriculture. By withholding from African mothers the right to settle in the cities with their children, the South African government effectively prohibited Black women from forming a maternal urban identity.

Despite being a native, Mrs. Regina Ntongana, having married a worker who came from the rural areas, was not entitled to live in Cape Town. As Mrs. Ntongana explained to Josette Cole, a field worker for the Western Province Council of Churches, "We as women, we had a feeling because we were the people who really felt the pain. We were the ones who were staying in the Transkei and Ciskei. We were the ones with nowhere to go." When two of her children died for lack of medical care in Ciskei, she illegally moved to Cape Town with her other three children in 1975 and settled in the emergency camp called Cross Roads.

Beginning with no more than twenty shacks in February 1975, by April, Crossroads comprised about four thousand people, living in approximately one-thousand shanties. By 1978, about twenty-thousand inhabitants in three-thousand hand-made dwellings, some of which were painted bright colors, filled an area of approximately two square miles.²¹ A month after the founding of the settlement in February 1975, the first eviction notices came. Crossroads was raided and the first attack ended with thirty-four arrests. Mrs. B explained how surprised she and the other women were "because [they] had been told that this area was for Africans." She went on to say that "we could not take these notices seriously, because we had been told by some other inspectors to come here. When these notices expired the inspectors arrived and ...[said] they would proceed with demolition. This happened to three women. And after that we came together and decided to take up the issue with Bantu affairs [the Bantu Administration Board] in the Observatory. We were a group of 58 women and made our plea to Mr. [Fanie] Botha [the local Bantu Affairs Commissioner]...." Having acted upon their collective identity as African mothers in the city, they refused to leave. "From then on we were arrested, would appear in court, be arrested again, several times, until 1976 ...."²²

A representative of the Black Sash Advice Office remarked on the new found militancy of the women from Crossroads: "[T]he one thing we noticed was that these women were very independent....When we told them that they were illegally in the area, they told us that in spite of that they were determined to stay. There was no question that they would obey the law. Now that was the first time that we had heard of that. Until 1975 when you did everything you could to get permission for a woman to stay, and you failed, she went. But the women of Crossroads were the first women to sit in our office and say...`We are not going'".²³ In the short time when the women believed they would gain the right to stay at Crossroads legitimately, they had bonded with one another and formed a collective identity associated with the community they had built.

Despite hardships, women in the squatter communities had frequently been able to create what one person called "strong spirit" and a "good feeling"-- a sense of collective identity.²⁴ One woman remarked that "What brings us together the most, though, is our desire to stay here.... Life would be harder if all of the new people were just scattered around. What matters to us is not so much the condition of our houses, but the help you get from people around here," one woman remarked.²⁵

The South African government found that when they sent their own armed forces against the women, the women humiliated them. When one group of police backed by attack dogs tried to drive women away from their homes, the women formed a circle around them and sang humiliating songs, as reporters snapped pictures. The women, portraying themselves as defenseless mothers, marched on public offices with the press in attendance when possible. Exploiting the women's independence from the men of their groups, South African authorities promoted one of the men's committees at Crossroads, making deals, enhancing the authority of some local men, and ultimately supporting them as they burnt down the homes of their fellow squatters in 1985. Nevertheless, many, Mrs. Ntongana among them, moved down the road, kept the memory of Crossroads alive, and led activists of all colors in forming permanent organizations such as the Surplus People's Project to work on housing and land use in the new South Africa.

Conclusion

The juxtaposition of women's identity with their roles as mothers is common among members of women's grass-roots movements today. Yet, formulating gendered identities that create categories such as "women" and "mothers" present enormous problems. Muting differences among women and mothers, especially those of class and race, bloats identities so much that they lose their meanings. Yet strategically, the notion of motherhood or a maternal identity operating in the public realm against male authority provides enormous resources for women able to use them. Governments of the left and the right have learned this to their own disadvantage.

Since there is nothing biological about the identity of motherhood, the contents of which are so historically and culturally variable as to discount any unified self-representation, it remains to explain why mothers acting in public wielded so much power in Chile against Allende, in Argentina against the Junta, and in South Africa against apartheid. Of course, the power lies in the contradictions between idealized notions of motherhood that buttress many conservative governments; and projections of masculinity that undergird authority especially in authoritarian governments.

Without assuring mothers' gendered role as distributors of resources, the Popular Unity government of Chile increasingly lost support even of working-class mothers. In Argentina, despite the Junta's claims that the Madres were crazy, seditious, bad mothers who had raised terrorist children, the military could not simply assassinate all the Madres so long as they retained a public identity as mothers--one increasingly visible on television news screens throughout the world. The South African government could pass law upon law restricting citizenship for Blacks, and the world stood by. But mothers protecting their children's homes presented a different face of apartheid to the outside world, one the government was loath to broadcast.

Whatever the ideological underpinnings of a government, it cannot appear to oppose maternal obligations and the privileges that go with them. Social order has heretofore rested on various circumscribed notions of citizenship that underestimated gender by forging justifications in terms of universal rights. But in modern states, at least, where social order rests as much on consumption as production, on appearances of brutality as much as on the acts themselves, the place of maternal identity in challenging masculine authority has, if anything, actually increased. Women in grass-roots movements throughout the world have increasingly employed their collective identities as mothers and housewives to legitimate their struggles to control more of society's resources. Whether using maternal identity as a strategy--as the conservative women leaders in Chile appear to have done--or as a justification for acting in public--as the Madres and the women at Crossroads seem to have done at first--many women have been finding that they have greater rights as mothers than as citizens.

1. I first presented this idea in "Female Consciousness and Collective Action: The Barcelona Case, 1910-1918," Signs, Vol. 7, no. 3 (Spring 1982), pp. 545-566.

2. For a discussion of the shortages, see Gabriela Videla de Plankey, "Las mujeres pobladores de Chile en el proceso revolutionario," in María del Carmen Elu de Leñero, Perspectivas femeninas (México, D.F.: Dirección general de Divulgación SepSetentas, 1976), pp. 194-209; 206.

3. For a description of the march and its aftermath from the point of view of a conservative chronicler, read María Correa Morande, La Guerra de las Mujeres (Santiago, Chile: Universidad Técnica del Estado, 1974), pp. 32-39; for a discussion of how well protected the women were, see Michele Mattelart, "Chile: The Feminine Version of the Coup D'Etat," in Sex and Class in Latin America, Ed. by June Nash and Helen Icken Safa (New York: Praeger Publisher, 1976), pp. 279-301; 282.

4. Correa Morande, La Guerra, p. 37.

5. Nina Donoso, "Las Mujeres Protestamos!," El Mercurio, December 5, 1971, p. 41.

6. Mattelart, "Chile," pp. 289-290.

7. María de los Angeles Crummet, "El Poder Feminino," Latin American Perspectives, Fall 1977, Vol. IV, no. 4, pp. 103-113; 110.

8. Washington Post, August 14, 1973 cited in Edy Kaufman, Crisis in Allende's Chile: New Perspectives (Westport, Conn: Praeger, 1988), p. 67.

9. Crummet, "El Poder Femenino," p. 107; El Mercurio, August 19, 26, 23, 1973.

10. "Millares de Mujeres Democráticas se Reunieron en la Alameda: Repudio Femenino al Gobierno," El Mercurio, September 6, 1973, pp. 1; 10.

11. "Impresionante Demostración de las Mujeres en Provincias," El Mercurio, September 7, 1973, p. 23.

12. Mattelart, "Chile," p. 179.

13. Crummett, "El Poder Feminino," pp. 104; 107.

14. Quoted in Tomas G. Sanders, "Military government in Chile," in Brian Loveman and Thomas M. Davies, Jr. (eds.), The Politics of Anti-politics (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1978), p. 272, cited in Kaufman, The Crisis in Allende's Chile, p. 68.

15. "Manifestación Femenina Frente a Ministerio de Defensa," El Mercurio, September 11, 1973, p. 10.

16. 16. Jo Fisher, Mothers of the Disappeared (London and Boston: ZED and South End Press, 1989), p. 11.

17. "Argentina Nunca Más," Index on Censorship, March 1986, pp. 9-13; p. 12 gives the following breakdown by percentage:

18. Matilde Mellibovsky, Circulo de la Amor Sobre la Muerte (Buenos Aires: Ediciones del Pensamiento Nacional, 1990), p. 40.

19. Fisher, Mothers of the Disappeared, p. 29.

20. Piera Paola Oria, de la casa a la plaza (Buenos Aires: Editorial Nueva América,nd), p. 113; see another account in Historia de las Madres de Plaza de Mayo (Buenos Aires: Asociación Madres de Plaza de Mayo, 1989), p. 5; translated quotation found in Fisher, Mothers of the Disappeared, p. 54.

21. Reynolds, Childhood in Crossroads, pp. 16; 97; Andrew Silk, A Shanty Town in South Africa: The Story of Modderdam (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1981), p. 83; Josette Cole, "When Your Life is Bitter You Do Something," South African Research Papers. Edited by Dave Kaplan (Cape Town: Department of Economic History, The University of Cape Town, 1986), p.19.

22. Mrs. B. in "We will not move", pp. 24-25.

23. N. Robb of the Advice office, in an interview with Josette Cole (Cape Town, 1984) quoted in Cole, Crossroads, pp. 13-14. She continued by saying "We had to have a special meeting because up to then we'd only defended those who were legally here and help them to get their rights. Now we were being asked to defend people with no rights and this was quite a policy decision (for us). Cited in Cole, "When Your Life is Bitter You Do Something," p. 42.

24. Quoted in Silk, A Shanty Town, p. 31.

25. Quoted in Silk, A Shanty Town, pp. 31-32.