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In the 1960s and 1970s, military governments in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile launched efforts to modernize the civil law. In several cases, special commissions of experts debated and submitted proposals for reform on married women's civil status and property rights. Based on these expert recommendations, Argentina enacted major changes to women's civil and property rights under the military government of General Juan Carlos Onganía in 1968. Brazil, also under military rule, modified marital property law when a divorce law was approved in 1977. In Chile, experts working under the military government of Augusto Pinochet proposed similar changes, but the regime endorsed only a symbolic reform in 1989. By the late 1990s, Chile still had not implemented changes to the marital property regime introduced by the other two countries in 1968 and 1977. How could Latin American military governments, widely alleged to be patriarchal and conservative, make moves toward gender equality and democracy in the family? Why were many reforms achieved without pressure from feminist movements, the most conspicuous advocates of women's rights? Why has reform been so delayed in Chile, a country where women's literacy, incorporation into the labor force, and education levels have historically been the highest, or among the highest, in all of Latin America? This chapter shows that the modernizing aspirations of military rulers opened a window of opportunity for small commissions of legal experts to craft liberal policy changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policy makers in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile faced tough choices on abortion, divorce, and gender equality in the family. The results were often surprising. Conservative military rulers adopted liberalizing reforms on family equality, sometimes more easily than democratic governments. In spite of their moral authority and strength in civil society, Roman Catholic bishops could be defeated, paving the way for the legalization of divorce. In an era when the majority of Western countries introduced elective abortion, Argentina and Brazil kept abortion a crime and Chile banned abortion under all circumstances. Chile modernized its economy and consolidated its democracy, but held on to the most conservative and restrictive laws on gender in Latin America. Propositions What propositions can be gleaned from these puzzling experiences? In the first place, transitions to democracy will not necessarily lead to the liberalization of laws on gender and may in fact lead to the opposite. The democracies of North America and Western Europe have developed some of the most liberal laws on gender in the world. Abortion and divorce are permitted, and women enjoy equal rights. Western laws have long served as models for legal reform in the rest of the world, particularly Latin America. It thus seemed safe to assume that when Latin American countries made the transition from authoritarian military regimes to democracy in the 1980s, they would seek to emulate the West's gender regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Divorce's legal status is profoundly consequential for private lives and relationships. Divorce provokes intense conflicts within public institutions. These dual aspects of divorce were acutely evident in late twentieth-century Latin America, when the struggle to legalize divorce threatened to unravel the historic bargains forged between Church and state over the terms of marriage and its dissolution. Insisting that the social problems created by lack of divorce demanded resolution and that Roman Catholic ethics should be absent from public decision making, the partisans of divorce mobilized throughout political and civil society. In defense of Catholic doctrine, bishops and principled believers dug in their heels to defend the sanctity of the institution of marriage. Debates between the partisans and opponents of divorce centered not just on evolving social practices, such as rates of separation, consensual union, and illegitimacy, but also on the public status of the Roman Catholic Church. Family values figured prominently in deliberations on divorce, but so did competing claims about the civil or divine nature of marriage, the separation between Church and state, and the origins and purposes of the civil law. This chapter's comparative historical analysis of Brazil, Argentina, and Chile illustrates the personal and ethical dilemmas provoked by the issue of divorce and theorizes the political conditions that make legal divorce possible. The three countries faced similar social problems created by growing rates of marital breakdown and illegitimacy, but patterns of policy change on divorce were dramatically different. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abortion is one of the most thorny policy problems faced by modern democracies. Few other issues provoke comparable moral outrage and political polarization. Feminist and liberals see abortion as a question of individual liberty, privacy, and public health; social conservatives maintain that prohibitions on abortion are necessary to protect human life, defend human rights, and uphold moral and family values. Abortion thus involves a “clash of absolutes” (Tribe 1992) between which there is seemingly little ground for compromise. Beneath the rhetoric and the ideology, however, serious public health questions surround the problem of abortion. In countries where abortion is illegal, many women undergo the procedure in clandestine circumstances at great risk to their health. Complications from botched abortions are a leading cause of maternal mortality in many countries and produce a major drain on the public health system. The black market in illegal abortions contributes to corruption and a lack of respect for the rule of law. The problem of abortion demands urgent resolution, yet there is little political will to entertain serious debates about decriminalization. In Latin America, with the exception of Cuba, the legal status of abortion has changed very little since the promulgation of modern criminal codes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These codes criminalized abortion in general, but most did not punish people for performing abortions when the pregnancy threatened the mother's life (“therapeutic” reasons). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the more contentious developments of modern politics is the claim of the state to regulate family life and gender relations. How and on what grounds should states organize the rights of parents over children, allocate property within marriage, offer the possibility of and grounds for divorce, and allow women the choice to terminate a pregnancy? In most countries around the world, laws on these issues historically conformed to religious and patriarchal models. State policy granted men almost complete power in the family and limited citizen discretion over decisions about marriage and reproduction. Between the 1960s and the 1990s, the rise of the feminist movement brought new ideas about women's roles, while changes in social practices and the consolidation of democratic politics put pressure on old laws. Lawyers, feminist activists, and liberal and socialist politicians organized to demand reform of laws on family equality and divorce; many also favored decriminalizing abortion. Some states introduced major liberalizing changes in what Glendon has called “the most fundamental shift since family law had begun to be secularized at the time of the Protestant Reformation” (1987: 63). Other countries continued to uphold restrictive laws, often stressing the importance of traditional gender norms to cultural integrity and national identity. This book studies the experiences of Argentina, Brazil, and Chile during the last third of the twentieth century to understand how and why states make decisions about policy on gender issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1980s and early 1990s, civilian governments in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile assumed power and pledged to consolidate democracy in state and society. At the time, all three countries had laws on the books that granted fathers full parental rights over children, denying mothers the ability to make decisions about their children's welfare. Chilean law invested men with rights to administer common marital property, and Brazilian law still recognized the husband as the head of the household. Motivated by egalitarian ideals, changes in other countries, and feminist principles, networks of activists mobilized in all three countries to demand legal reform. Their successes varied. Argentina's civil law was reformed to grant women equal parental rights and erase distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate children. Brazil's new democratic Constitution advanced women's rights, but discrimination in the civil code continued through 2001. In Chile, conservative opposition delayed and derailed the government's plans to promulgate legal reforms to expand women's parental and property rights. Why were family equality reforms advanced in some countries but delayed and prevented in others? The transition to democracy permitted issue networks of feminists, lawyers, and sympathetic government officials advocating family equality to organize and advance proposals for change. Like their predecessors who worked to expand women's rights under military dictatorships, these “specialized subcultures of highly knowledgeable policy watchers” (Heclo 1978) were inspired by international agreements and changes in other countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Struggles over state policy on divorce, abortion, and family equality revolve around competing ideas of how state institutions should regulate citizen's intimate lives and relationships. Should the law uphold the husband's authority in marriage, or recognize equality between the sexes? Ought the family be protected through prohibitions on divorce, or does this violate the separation of Church and state? Must the law protect life at the moment of conception by forbidding abortion, or grant women the freedom to choose? These conflicting positions are not of recent vintage, but rooted in decades- and even centuries-old normative traditions offering distinct models of men and women's roles, reproduction and the family, and the appropriate use of state power. The normative traditions of gender and the state found in Roman Catholicism, liberalism, feminism, and socialism contextualize the political struggles depicted in this book. The agreements and disagreements among Catholicism, liberalism, feminism, and socialism helped frame gender policy debates and opposition to proposals for change. This chapter sketches the evolution of ideas about gender policy issues in four normative traditions of gender and the state and describes the historical development of Latin American civil and criminal codes. In many ways, these normative traditions resemble the “policy paradigms” described by Peter Hall in his analysis of competing approaches to economic management (1992, 1993). A policy paradigm consists of an overarching set of ideas about how problems are to be perceived, policy goals, and techniques to achieve these goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]