Chapter 6 ‘Women, the key to liberation?’: A feminist theology of liberation at the Catholic women’s conference at Puebla¹

Introduction

‘It is our conviction that the church, once conscious of the profound roots of its domination of women … will be able to convert itself into the strongest support of those in search of their liberation and of our whole continent’, spoke activist Itziar Lozano Urbieta in Puebla, Mexico, in 1979 at the little-known Mujeres para el Diálogo (MPD) conference (Espino Armendáriz 2022, 1749; Lozano Urbieta 1979).² A former woman religious of Basque origin, Lozano Urbieta’s words were directed at the Roman Catholic Church at large, and specifically, the meeting of bishops and theologians that was happening at the same time: the Third Conference of Latin American Bishops (Consejo Episcopal Latinoamericano y Caribeño, CELAM III). As her words indicate, Lozano Urbieta believed that if she and the other Catholic women at the MPD conference could make those bishops aware of how the Church participated in the ‘domination of women’, the Church could become the biggest supporters of those seeking the liberation of the Latin American continent (Lozano Urbieta 1979, 53). As Catholic women and as adherents of liberation theology, the MPD conference attendees believed that the bishops were failing to address the obstacles they faced as women.

To ensure that what was discussed at the MPD conference would reach inside the Seminario Palafoxiano, where CELAM III was held, the MPD conference participants passed copies of Lozano Urbieta’s piece ‘Women, The Key to Liberation?’ to allied bishops and theologians (Ruether 1979, 182). As Lozano argued, a true liberation of the continent meant addressing the exploitation of Latin American women. These few bishops and theologians read Lozano’s compelling analysis of the obstacles Latin American women faced in labour, education, family, the Church and the economy. A controversial topic included in Lozano’s pamphlet that was at the intersection of many of these issues – Church, economy, family and education – was the question of the birth control pill and family planning. As Catholics, as women and as liberationists, how did Lozano and other MPD conference attendees view the pill? To answer this question, I offer a close reading of one of the only sources that gives insight into the MPD conference, an English-language publication produced by American attendees who decided to publish the conference proceedings for audiences in the United States.³

Because the MPD conference participants imagined a theology of liberation that placed Latin American women at the centre, I argue that they had imagined a feminist theology of liberation. This is most evident in the question of the birth control pill. Unlike male liberationists before them, these Catholic women rejected the pill as a simple solution to poverty. Instead of focusing on the right to abortion, as did many feminists in and outside of Mexico, the MPD conference participants wanted Catholic women to make informed choices about their body, outside of Church and state pressures. Their multi-pronged critique of economic, cultural and religious structures – as exemplified in Lozano’s excerpt – made their feminism.

To make such an argument is an opportunity to revisit Saba Mahmood’s famous thesis and to reconsider the assumptions about what makes a feminist subject. The MPD conference provides a window into the emergence of a new feminist subject who placed women at the centre of their vision of liberation. By placing the under-studied MPD conference at the centre of my study, I merge scholarship on liberation theology and feminist activism. In this revised narrative, the CELAM III conference at Puebla becomes a catalyst for Catholic women’s organising, the further development of feminist liberation theology, as well as the birth of a feminist subject invested in critiquing Church and state structures.

Literature review

‘There is a scarcity of historical (rather than theological) studies of the affinities among these three [black, Latin American, and feminist] streams of liberation theology’, writes scholar Lilian Calles Barger (2018, 9) in her intellectual history of the development of liberation theology in the Americas. As Calles Barger articulates so well in her work, Latin American liberation theology is primarily associated with male liberationists. In this paper, I place the contents of this under-studied MPD conference at the centre of my study and argue that these women imagined a feminist theology of liberation. To make this argument, I ask: what makes these women feminist subjects and their theology of liberation feminist?

My work builds on recent scholarship that considers questions of gender and sexuality in the study of liberation theology. Specifically, I build on the work of historians who have considered the role of Catholicism, including liberation theology, in family planning, notably the work of Raúl Necochea López.⁴ In his analysis of Jesuit priests who justified the pill in Peru, Necochea López argues that the decision can be explained due to their ‘double commitment’ to the Vatican and to ‘denouncing injustice’, which he credits to the influence of liberation theology (Necochea López 2008, 54). I expand upon Necochea López’s study by asking: what happens when we consider these conference participants as liberationists and when we consider their commitment to gender? I follow in the footsteps of Calles Barger (2018), whose work decentres Latin American male liberationists and traces the development of diverse liberation theologies across the Americas.⁵ My study suggests that the MPD conference was a success, a catalyst for feminist liberation theology, thus revising how scholarship of liberation theology has portrayed CELAM III at Puebla.⁶

While scholars of liberation theology have omitted the MPD conference, scholars of feminist activism, on the other hand, have at least included it (Jaiven 2011, 168; Peña 2007; Sánchez Olvera 2002). Historian Saúl Espino Armendáriz’s recent work offers a corrective to scholars’ brief treatment of Catholics in feminist activism. His brilliant research moves beyond focusing solely on the MPD conference, and traces the development of transnational and heterogenous feminist dissent inside the Latin American Catholic Church.⁷ To borrow his words, by analysing the MPD conference along with other ‘previously ignored individual and collective actors’, his work offers a ‘new narrative about Catholicism and feminism in Latin America’, bridging literatures that have otherwise been separate (Espino Armendáriz 2022, 1725).⁸ I expand on Espino Armendáriz’s research – that the MPD conference and subsequent meetings were an ‘articulation of a dissidence’ (2019, 176–7) – and argue that the MPD conference reveals the emergence of a new feminist subject.⁹ Scholars have well documented Catholic women’s activism in Mexico throughout the twentieth century, showing how, for example, anti-state Catholic Action members tried to make their country, their lives and their families Catholic.¹⁰ Unlike her predecessors, this new feminist subject, as a Catholic and as a woman, called on the state and her Church to abandon its patriarchal norms so that liberation could be achieved for all. Saba Mahmood’s work on feminist subject formation reminds us that agency cannot be conflated with resisting patriarchal norms. In her ethnographic study of the Egyptian mosque movement, Mahmood argues that agency can be found in the ‘multiple ways in which one inhabits norms’ even if it would appear to be ‘deplorable passivity and docility from a progressivist point of view’ (2005, 15).¹¹ Therefore, I argue that these women are feminist subjects in light of their commitment to the Catholic faith and their omission of abortion, a central concern of second-wave feminists in Mexico at the time.

Background

When the Preparatory Document for CELAM III was released in 1977 (consisting of a schema of what was to be discussed), Catholic women, among them activist Betsie Hollants, of Belgian origin and US-educated, were disappointed by how little it addressed women’s concerns. To remedy this, Hollants began organising the MPD conference. As the leader of CIDHAL (Comunicación, Intercambio y Desarrollo Humano en América Latina), an organisation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, based just outside of Mexico City, Hollants had been networking and mobilising Catholic women throughout the 1970s. For instance, Itziar Lozano Urbieta had been working as a Psychology professor in Mexico City when she became involved with CIDHAL (Espino Armendáriz 2022, 1729–30 and 1744–8).¹² CIDHAL members – Hollants included – had attended and organised discussions during the 1975 United Nations Conference on Women and even organised their own preliminary meeting (Espino Armendáriz 2019, 130–38). To build contacts, Hollants even attended the US Women’s Ordination Conference (WOC) in Baltimore in 1978 (Espino Armendáriz 2019, 169–72).¹³ The work of CIDHAL throughout the 1970s in Cuernavaca, Mexico, had set the stage for the MPD conference in 1979. As much as this was a cosmopolitan meeting of women from across the Americas and Europe, it was also very much a Mexican project.

Hollants organised the conference in two parts. First, about a dozen of North American women and Latin American women met in Cuernavaca and began to discuss and prep for the conference (Espino Armendáriz 2019, 177–82). Then, they drove over to Puebla in a ‘bus’ to hold the second half of conferences (Fitzpatrick 1979, iii). Anywhere from thirty to 100 participants attended five public seminars (Isasi-Díaz 1979, 297). According to the few published statements by participants, the MPD seminars covered the following topics: ‘exploitation of women within their homes’, ‘family planning and sexual ethics’, women religious, women as ‘subject of theology’ and women as part of theology of liberation (Isasi-Díaz 1979, 297–9). While the official CELAM conference was held at the Seminario Palafoxiano, MPD initially held their conferences at the Museo de Antropología downtown (Espino Armendáriz 2019, 179; 2022, 1745–6; Isasi-Díaz 1979, 298; Ruether 1979, 177). Then, MPD became one of the many conferences organised by José Álvarez Icaza and his organisation, CENCOS (Centro Nacional de Comunicación Social), which had provided a forum for voices (Espino Armendáriz 2019, 178).

The Latin American woman as subject

As evident in the title of her piece, ‘Women, The Key to Liberation?’, Itziar Lozano Urbieta, and the other MPD conference participants, placed ‘women’ at the centre of their vision of liberation. Although these speakers did not use the term ‘feminist’ when problematising the exploitation and inequalities of women in Latin America, their critiques overlapped with existing feminist discourses. The absence of the term ‘feminist’ from the publication suggests an ambiguous relationship to feminism.

Throughout the 1970s, as second-wave feminist movements emerged in Mexico and other parts of the world, the term ‘feminist’ was contested and scrutinised. The term ‘feminist’ quickly became associated with a set of white, middle-class feminists based in the Global North. For instance, at the 1975 United Nations’ International Women’s Year Conference, the ‘feminists’ were the ‘white, North American women’ according to Peggy Antrobus, then-director for the Women’s Bureau of the Jamaican Prime Minister (Olcott 2017, 244). At this time, Mexican liberal and socialist feminists organised around a cluster of issues: abortion, rape and domestic labour (Aceves Sepúlveda 2019, 44; Sánchez Olvera 2002, 113–31). The absence of the term ‘feminist’ in the MPD publication is noteworthy.

Unsurprisingly, the only time ‘feminist’ appears in the text is by one of the American editors. In her foreword, Ruth Fitzpatrick, who had coordinated the translation of the pieces from Spanish into English, uses the term ‘feminist’ to describe their mission. Specifically, Fitzpatrick (1979, iii) asks two questions she believes readers in North America must hear. First, ‘What does Liberation Theology have to say to the Church in North America?’ She adds: ‘What does that feminist perspective have to say?’ For Fitzpatrick, this publication offered a ‘feminist perspective’ of liberation theology. This usage contrasts with the other pieces.

Of Peruvian origin, MPD conference participant Carmen Laure de Amesz directly inserted women into liberation theology. She engaged the works of preeminent Peruvian liberation theologian, Gustavo Gutiérrez.¹⁴ Citing Gutiérrez’s works, such as the famous 1971 The Theology of Liberation and the 1978 The Power of the Poor in History, de Amesz (1979, 1) explains theology of liberation as ‘an effort of reflection and comprehension of a living faith personified in a concrete historic form, like faith is always lived’. While de Amesz draws on Gutiérrez’s ideas of praxis, or how to live out faith, where she diverges from Gutiérrez is by reflecting explicitly on women. To argue that woman ‘has affected and is affecting liberating praxis of the people’, de Amesz points to the precedents set by the Bible. The Bible established women as ‘participant(s) in the story of Salvation’, as sexually differentiated persons, as members of the Christian community, and as participants in the history of the Church (de Amesz 1979, 2–5). Liberation hinged upon a poor woman’s ‘totality as a human being’, her belonging to a collective experience, and her feminine identity (de Amesz 1979, 6). de Amesz’s highlighting of women as ‘sexually differentiated’ and their particular ‘feminine identity’ suggests she was distancing herself from what has been called ‘feminism of equity’.¹⁵ She even explicitly shares: ‘The women of our continent are not fighting for “equal rights”’ (de Amesz 1979, 6). Feminism of equity called for the equality of men and women, whereas feminism of difference underscored how differences between men and women were a source of inequality (Aceves Sepúlveda 2019, 44). These differences between men and women were ‘not limitations, on the contrary they are put to the service of the liberation of the people of God’ (de Amesz 1979, 4). In other words, what set women apart from men was what made them special and essential to the liberation of the continent.

Although many speakers reflected on how economic, familial and Church structures exploited and oppressed women, only Sister Aída Concha, a nun from Mexico, addressed how these structures affected Indigenous women. She affirmed that ‘liberation cannot be understood outside the general context of the oppression which the Indigenous groups suffer – their men, their women, their children’ (Concha 1979, 12). In her analysis of the family and labour relations among Indigenous communities, Concha points out how ‘the greater participation in work does not bring greater liberation for the individual woman, as it does for the woman in the city whose work makes her more independent and more capable of making decisions’ (Concha 1979, 9). In other words, more work did not promise liberation for the Indigenous woman, something that was perhaps true for women in the city. Concha includes extreme examples of the working and living conditions among Indigenous women of Venezuela and Mexico to shatter the romantic image anthropologists have built of Indigenous life, ‘as the model to which humankind should return’ (Concha 1979, 11). Ultimately, Concha argues that the liberation of ‘our people’ rests in the ‘Indian woman’ (Concha 1979, 12).

In her compelling analysis, Itziar Lozano Urbieta spends the most time on women’s work, the labour of women inside and outside of the home. Citing data from a range of countries (including El Salvador, Venezuela, Guatemala, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia and Mexico), Lozano Urbieta problematised the issue of wages. These critiques echo the patriarchal critiques of Marxist feminists. For example, since 1972, the Wages for Housework collective had been organising globally to advocate for the recognition of women’s unpaid labour inside the household. In Mexico, activist Marta Acevedo had organised a Wages for Housework chapter in Mexico City (Toupin 2018, 96).¹⁶ Even when women did not sympathise with the Wages for Housework initiative, what many of these women identified – like Urbieta – was that women’s work was not recognised.¹⁷ Ultimately, Urbieta asks: ‘If the economic system, by reason of its vested interests is not going to change to meet the demands concerning the family and the exploitation of women – from where will change be able to come?’ (1979, 62). The answer was educating women and raising their consciousness.

These pieces exemplify how the MPD conference imagined ‘woman’ as a subject of history, therefore making the Latin American woman key to liberation. And despite the many intersections with feminist discourses, these women chose not to identify with the contested terrain of feminism. This woman, a historical subject, had many attributes: poor, human, laborious, Indigenous and sexually distinct. Most importantly, she was an agent – a participant in history – who, if aware of her condition, could effect change.

Population politics, the pill and the future of liberation

The MPD conference placed Latin American women at the centre of its theology of liberation and, therefore, interrogated the pill and its accompanying population politics.¹⁸ They critically interrogated how various actors – states and the Roman Catholic Church included – had used these population politics to further oppress poor Latin American women. Together, these women argued that liberation of the Latin American continent could be achieved if women were aware of their conditions and the obstacles they faced.

One of the ways that the Roman Catholic Church had participated in population politics was by upholding its prohibition of contraception, including the newly invented birth control pill. In 1968, Pope Paul VI released his encyclical, or letter to the people, Humanae vitae, after evaluating the Birth Control Commission’s reports. The Majority Report, which reflected a majority of the commission, argued for the acceptance of the birth control pill for married Catholics. On the other hand, the Minority Report rejected it. In late July 1968, Pope Paul VI sided with the Minority Report and rejected the pill in Humanae vitae. Because both Majority and Minority Reports had already been published in the press, many Catholics thought the Pope would align with the Majority Report.¹⁹ The final document encouraged couples to practice ‘responsible parenthood’ by avoiding sex when a woman was fertile according to her monthly cycle, otherwise known as the rhythm method (Paul VI 1968). Unsurprisingly, eleven years after the release of the document, MPD participant Marina Lessa was troubled by Humanae vitae and its lofty expectations.

Brazilian contributor for Concilium magazine and advocate for women’s rights in the Church, Marina Lessa (1976, 103) explicitly critiqued Humanae vitae.²⁰ Lessa called on the Church to consider the fragility of human relationships (1979, 50). Research indicated that ‘couples are indifferent or defiant’ of this teaching and how priests in confessions, when advising people, ‘search for other ways of escape, when confronting impossibilities’ (Lessa 1979, 50). In other words, Lessa suggested that couples struggled to implement Humanae vitae and priests struggled to advise these struggling couples. Lessa was also concerned with how this was affecting the faith of Catholics. In an uncertain world, Catholics needed a faith that acknowledged their lived realities, one that was ‘compatible’ with the modern world in which they lived. Ultimately, Lessa urged the Church to ‘adopt an attitude in touch with reality on human problems’ (Lessa 1979, 46).

The Church was not the only actor participating in these population politics. Martha Sanchez Gonzalez, an expert on family planning who gave a similar speech at the symposium in Tijuana just the year before, laid out the terms of the debate (Sanchez Gonzalez 1980, 55–62). The ideas of ‘family planning’ and ‘responsible parenthood’ had taken the world by storm, and varied in meaning depending on who employed these concepts (Sanchez Gonzalez 1979, 110). For Gonzalez, ‘family planning’ entailed having the full information to make informed decisions about family, while ‘responsible parenthood’ was that and more – ‘committing themselves [meaning parents] to raise them under the best possible material, educational and health conditions’ (Sanchez Gonzalez 1979, 110). The distinction was that responsible parenthood ensured that children were born into the best conditions possible. Gonzalez writes that policies have been created in the world with ‘these concepts in mind’, and that ‘even constitutional rights have been modified in some third world countries’ (Sanchez Gonzalez 1979, 110). Although Gonzalez does not explicitly cite the Mexican state, she is likely referring to it.

One of the first countries in the world to add family planning into its constitution was Mexico. This decision overturned the pronatalist policy that had characterised the state’s approach for most of the twentieth century. In 1974, President Echeverría created CONAPO (Consejo Nacional de Población), or the National Population Council. President Echeverría even added an amendment that guaranteed that ‘every person had the right to decide in a free, responsible and informed manner on the number and spacing of their children’.²¹ According to feminists, President Echeverría had strategically used this amendment to make Mexico suitable to host the UN International Women’s Year Conference in 1975 (Olcott 2017, 54–9). By the late 1980s, Mexico’s state-sanctioned family planning campaign even served as a model for other countries to follow (Soto Laveaga 2007, 27).

Central to the critique of these population politics were the concerns of poor women. In Mexico and across the rest of Latin America, many people had migrated from the countryside to the cities between the 1940s and the 1960s. The populations of cities increased and so did the visibility of poverty (Necochea López 2014; Soto Laveaga 2007, 20). According to Sanchez Gonzalez (1979, 111), the women who most often participated in debates regarding family planning were middle class. Yet, poor women were harmed at the expense of these interests. These middle-class women ‘have within their reach the possibility of reducing the size of their families, and among men of wealth, power with class interests which are opposed to those of the women affected’ (Sanchez Gonzalez 1979, 111). In other words, the interests of middle-class women disregarded poor women.

Lozano Urbieta and Sanchez Gonzalez identified the conditions of poor women that made them vulnerable to harm. Lozano Urbieta describes how poor women across the Americas faced ‘numerous health problems’, and ‘inadequate birth control methods’ (1979, 59). Most likely, ‘inadequate birth control methods’ refer to insufficient knowledge about preventing pregnancy or even rudimentary forms of birth control. Sanchez Gonzalez describes how poor Mexican women had ‘more children than’ their income allowed (1979, 110). Their bodies suffered from bearing multiple children. Most importantly, they both highlighted the violence that often accompanied these family planning policies and how poor women were disproportionately targeted.

Although in name the concepts ‘family planning’ and ‘responsible parenthood’ might connote ideal and lofty goals, in practice, these initiatives involved violence. Sanchez Gonzalez argues that policies of family planning and responsible parenthood ‘hide an enforced policy of birth control’ (1979, 110). Furthermore, Lozano Urbieta describes how poor women had been the victims of ‘involuntary sterilizations’ (1979, 59). Lozano Urbieta highlights how medical trials to test the birth control pill had been imposed upon women in not only Puerto Rico but also Guatemala and in the United States, among Chicana and Native American populations (1979, 59). Lozano Urbieta shares an alarming statistic: ‘more than 35% of all the women of puberty age in Puerto Rico have been sterilized, the majority of them without their consent’ (1979, 59). To execute her outline of the violence conducted against women of Puerto Rico, Sanchez Gonzalez cited the research of anti-imperial feminist Bonnie Mass.

Like Bonnie Mass, Lozano Urbieta located imperialism in the global project of managing population growth. For Lozano Urbieta, family planning was a project enforced by advanced capitalist countries upon Third-World countries and the ‘lucrative projects’ conducted by international pharmaceutical companies (1979, 60). Similarly, Bonnie Mass’s Population Target (1976) outlined how First World countries implemented these campaigns, an imperialist endeavor to prevent the births of Brown and Black bodies. The case of Puerto Rico in particular was of grave concern. American doctors and scientists had used Puerto Rico as a ‘laboratory’, conducting trials of the pill on women and, in some cases, even sterilised women against their will, as indicated in Mass’s work (Briggs 2002, 110).²² This was very much a global story as well, which went beyond Puerto Rico.²³

Part of the problem was also the ‘unequal distribution of resources’ (Sanchez Gonzalez 1979, 112).²⁴ Employing a critique that echoed dependency theory, a lens of analysis used by liberation theologians like Gustavo Gutiérrez, Martha Sanchez Gonzalez acknowledges the history of extraction of the region’s resources by ‘foreign powers’ (likely referring to former colonial powers, Spain, Portugal, the UK and, in more recent history, the United States). In a sense, this had made Latin America dependent upon countries of the First World, where also ‘coincidentally are those that are most interested in imposing family planning’ (1979, 112). Controlling demographic growth was not going to change these systems in place.

Nor was it going to solve poverty or hunger. Marina Lessa argued that ‘world hunger’ had a more profound origin (1979, 52). Martha Sanchez Gonzalez rejected population control initiatives as the solution. She shares that the ‘answer to the problem of hunger is found not in introducing global policies controlling demographic growth in poor countries, but distributing wealth in a more equal way’ (Sanchez Gonzalez 1979, 112). Sanchez Gonzalez did note the relief contraception might offer to the ‘situation of individual families, but it has no influence upon the equal distribution of richness, land, employment, income, health and benefits of education’ (1979, 114). Ultimately, population control treated the symptoms of the disease, instead of eradicating it from the entire body, or system.

The question of whether the pill could help alleviate poverty or ‘the problem of hunger’ was a question taken up by Catholic actors previously. When the Pope rejected the pill in Humanae vitae, some asked whether this was dismissive of issues like poverty and global hunger. For example, the Jesuits working in Peru, under the influence of liberation theology, had administered the pill to married couples in the name of justice (Necochea López 2008; 2014). In the early 1970s, contributor Joaquín Herrera Díaz published an article in Juventud, a monthly published by the Association of Young Mexican Women Catholics (Juventud Católica Femenina Mexicana, or JCFM), where he asks: ‘could family planning be a response to the problem of hunger?’ (Herrera Díaz 1970).²⁵ While he echoes the arguments of the Jesuits in the article, however, he never answers the question he posed. Because the MPD participants placed women at the centre of their theology of liberation, they rejected the pill as a way to alleviate poverty and hunger.

The MPD conference participants imagined solutions and proposals for the liberation of the American continent. Sanchez Gonzalez ‘denounce[d] official family planning programs’ and accepted the pill as a ‘limited solution insofar as the medical assistance that it may offer to millions of needy women, and we must devote ourselves to clarify the real causes of the misery of our people’ (Sanchez Gonzalez 1979, 114).²⁶ The pill alone was not the answer. Sanchez Gonzalez called on others to work together to address the ‘real causes’ of poverty (1979, 114). On the other hand, Marina Lessa (1979, 51) argued a true responsible parenthood meant an informed choice by the couple, despite any pressures exerted by the government, and as people responsible to each other, their family and their community. Lozano Urbieta’s proposition was even more ambitious.

Lozano Urbieta declared: ‘it is also necessary to de-ideologize the woman’s body’ (1979, 60). Specifically, Lozano Urbieta explained that ‘[a woman’s] body does not belong to the family, not to the husband, nor to the state. It belongs to the woman herself’ (1979, 60). Lozano Urbieta argued that women should have control over their own bodies, not the states, husbands and pharmaceutical companies that tried to make decisions for them. Urbieta explains that a woman ‘must be her own owner’ regarding decisions ‘to use or not to use the methods of birth control, to be sterilized or not, to have or not to have sexual relations’ (1979, 60). Lozano Urbieta’s call for the de-ideologization of the woman’s body in many ways echoed what feminists were advocating for in Mexico and the rest of the Americas.

Lozano Urbieta wanted to de-ideologise the woman’s body but did not explicitly cite the right to abortion. The right to abortion had become one of the demands of feminists in Mexico. By the mid-1970s, the Coalición de Mujeres Feministas (Coalition of Women Feminists) had formed. This group called for ‘maternidad voluntaria’, or voluntary motherhood and the elimination of sexual violence (Lamas 2011, 183). Voluntary motherhood placed women at the centre of reproductive decision-making. It gave women the right to use contraception (controlling when someone decided to get pregnant) and the right to abortion.²⁷ In 1976, the Coalición de Mujeres Feministas submitted a bill by the name of ‘Voluntary Motherhood’ for the Cámara de Diputados in Mexico City to consider (Lamas 2011, 183). That same year, CONAPO organized a group of more than eighty experts to study the problem of abortion (Lamas 2011, 184). The commission’s recommendation was to make abortion legal when it was a woman’s voluntary decision. However, President Echeverría ignored this advice and prohibited the group from disclosing their findings. Still, feminist groups continued to organise conferences about abortion and protests into the late 1970s (Lamas 2001; 2011, 184).

Yet, abortion was absent in the MPD publication. Martha Sanchez Gonzalez mentioned abortion only once and in the context of birth control.²⁸ Throughout the 1970s, the organisation CIDHAL and its leader, Betsie Hollants – a key organiser of the MPD conference – saw abortion more as a tragedy rather than a right (Espino Armendáriz 2019, 214). This is reflected in the MPD publication. Their distance to the term ‘abortion’ perhaps explains why they did not necessarily use the term feminist to describe themselves. Or, perhaps, they were thinking of their audience – the bishops inside the Seminario Palafoxiano – and suspected abortion would be too isolating. It is even possible that when it came to abortion, they believed in the Catholic position, and, therefore, that is why they reflected more broadly on a woman’s freedom to make decisions about her reproductive life. Regardless of the reason for this ambiguous relationship to abortion, this was what composed their feminist theology of liberation.

To successfully de-ideologise the woman’s body, or achieve these other goals, many of the MPD conference attendees reflected on what was most important – raising consciousness. In the words of Lozano Urbieta, for instance, ‘de-ideologization [of the woman’s body] is intimately linked with the active promotion of the consciousness of her rights’ (1979, 50). Martha Sanchez Gonzalez reflected on how ‘ignorance’ kept women away from their liberation (1979, 114). When discussing the condition of the Indigenous woman, scholar Leonor Aida Concha echoed the same (1979, 12). And indeed, when considering the impact of the conference, a few attendees reflected on its effectiveness, primarily because it raised the consciousness of women.

Theologian Ada María Isasi-Díaz reflected on how there was an ‘effective feminine presence’ at Puebla, citing how the final document of CELAM III had borrowed concepts and language from their own documents (1979, 296). Professor and theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether reflects on the ‘consciousness-raising work’ that Puebla accomplished (1979). In the feminist, Mexico City-based, Fem magazine, Lozano Urbieta commented on how women refused to be silent and made their voices heard (1978).²⁹ These few recollections – including the ones shared by the collaborators of the publication – indicate that this conference was productive for these women. The work had begun.

Conclusion

At the next MPD meeting in October of 1979, Sister Leonor Aída Concha reflected on the impact of the Puebla meeting earlier that year (Espino Armendáriz 2019, 183–4; 2022, 1752). At that meeting, she shared that the MPD conference was ‘the first occasion in which Christian women … offer a space in the struggle, recognizing the historic role they can play’ (Mujeres para el Diálogo 1981, 78).³⁰ Decades later, Sister Concha echoed the same. In an interview for historian Milagros Peña, Sister Concha argued that the 1979 MPD Conference was a key turning point and shared: ‘We gave the [Christian feminist] women’s movement a political character which did not exist at the same time’ (Peña 2007, 110). That is, Sister Concha saw that the MPD conference had helped make, in her words, a Christian feminism visible and political. She relayed to the interviewer that ‘the first thing that happened [at the Puebla meeting] … was developing a gender consciousness’ (Peña 2007, 110). And, indeed, these women of MPD and other Catholic feminists continued to organise. They participated in the regional feminist meetings of the Encuentro Feminista Latinoamericano y del Caribe (EFLAC), which had begun in 1981, and even in the parallel conference that emerged in 1985, centring on feminist theology (Espino Armendáriz 2019, 185–6; 2022, 1754). It was in this flourishing landscape of exchange that a Catholic feminism emerged invested in the right to abortion. Among these women was Itziar Lozano Urbieta.

Once Itziar Lozano Urbieta became head of CIDHAL in the 1980s, CIDHAL began publishing explicitly on the right to abortion (Espino Armendáriz 2019, 214–15 and 294). According to historian Saúl Espino Armendáriz (2019, 212 and 214), a generational gap existed among CIDHAL collaborators. Betsie Hollants, the key organiser behind MPD, exemplified an older generation of Catholic women who emphasised birth control to prevent the tragedy of abortion. On the other hand, Lozano Urbieta represented a younger generation of Catholic women who saw abortion as a right (Espino Armendáriz 2019, 221). This helps explain the ambiguous relationship to abortion at MPD – the women themselves likely varied in opinion. More importantly, where the beliefs of MPD participants converged was their vision of liberation. They wanted a world where women could make informed decisions about having children, which meant dismantling the systems in place that exacerbated the harms done to the poor women of Latin America. By the time Lozano Urbieta stepped down from serving as the head of CIDHAL in 1992, Católicas por el Derecho a Decidir (Catholics for Choice), a Catholic organisation dedicated to reproductive rights, opened their first office in Mexico City (Espino Armendáriz 2019, 227).

And so, the women that had emerged from the MPD conference continued to organise as women, Catholics and liberationists. She may not have identified as ‘feminist’, but deeply cared about the conditions of her fellow women in Latin America. Some, like Lozano Urbieta, helped develop a Catholic feminism devoted to the right to abortion. This paper has begun to explore the role of the MPD conference in forming this new Catholic feminist subject. Still, more research is necessary to learn and understand feminist subject formation in this diverse, flourishing landscape of feminisms and liberation theologies in the 1980s.

Notes

1. 1. With ‘Women, The Key to Liberation?’, I use the title that appears In Lozano Urbieta (1979, 53), which is closer to the Spanish translation. See Espino Armendáriz (2019, 215). Special thanks to historian Saúl Espino Armendáriz, whose ground-breaking work directed me to the MPD conference. Thank you to Pablo Bradbury and Niall Geraghty for inviting me to join this volume, and for organising the November 2020 conference from which this project began. Thank you to the archivists of the Ada María Isasi-Díaz Papers, 1966–2007, Archives of Women in Theological Scholarship, The Burke Library at Union Theological Seminary, Columbia University Libraries (hereafter AMIDP) for digitally sharing materials with me during the pandemic, and to the reviewers of this volume. Thank you to the participants of the February 2021 Duke Gender, Sexuality, Feminist Studies Colloquium, as well as my discussant, Espino Armendáriz, for sharing such thoughtful, rich comments on an earlier version of this paper. I also presented a version of this paper at the 2022 CLAH meeting. I am especially grateful to my advisor, Jocelyn Olcott, as well as Martha Espinosa, Avrati Bhatnagar and Travis Knoll.

2. 2. See also Espino Armendáriz (2019, 178, 214 and 294).

3. 3. This team collected and translated speeches into English. The editors intentionally excluded any speeches given by North American women, in particular, the seminar given by theologian and professor Rosemary Radford Ruether in English. See Women in Dialogue (1979, 53).

4. 4. See chapter 6 in Necochea López (2015) and Necochea López (2008). For other works in family planning that consider the complexity of Church actors see Lopera López (2016), Felitti (2012) and Mooney (2009).

5. 5. See also the upcoming work of historian Mariana Gómez Villanueva, who explores the role of women liberationists in Mexico.

6. 6. Scholars and historical actors alike have debated the role of CELAM III in the wider development of liberation theology, and to what extent it affirmed/rejected it. See a range of works, including Dussel (1981), Cleary (1985), Smith (1991) and Blancarte (1992). More recently, see Espino Armendáriz (2019).

7. 7. Espino Armendáriz (2022) explores the exchanges between activists in the US and Mexico, and the role of the women’s ordination movement in the development of this feminist dissent inside the Catholic Church. His ‘Feminismo católico en México’ (2019) offers a broader account of the transnational development of Catholic feminism.

8. 8. Translation my own.

9. 9. I am influenced by scholar Jocelyn Olcott’s (2017) use of Alain Badiou to think through the birth of a subject.

10. 10. Some notable examples include Boylan (2006) and Andes (2019). Recently, Sanders (2020) has argued that the Catholic Action’s moralisation campaign in the mid-twentieth century embraced modernity, challenging, for example, the role of women as envisioned by Soledad Loaeza (2005).

11. 11. Italics appears in original text.

12. 12. For a fuller account, see Espino Armendáriz (2019, 178, 214 and 294).

13. 13. For more on the exchange between US and Latin American Catholic activists, regarding feminism and women’s ordination, see Espino Armendáriz (2022).

14. 14. Gutiérrez’s 1971 publication of The Theology of Liberation launched liberation theology on the continent.

15. 15. See Aceves Sepúlveda (2019, 44).

16. 16. Acevedo is often credited for initiating the second-wave feminist movement in Mexico at the start of the 1970s.

17. 17. For example, historian Jocelyn Olcott describes how some Mexican feminists actually ‘paid someone else to perform this labor’ (2017, 58 and 143).

18. 18. I loosely define ‘population politics’ in the words of Connelly (2008, 152).

19. 19. For accounts of the Birth Control Commission, see Kaiser (1987) and McClory (1995).

20. 20. Thank you to Travis Knoll for finding this article.

21. 21. Found in Soto Laveaga (2007, 23).

22. 22. See chapter 5 of Briggs (2002). See Connelly (2008, 175).

23. 23. For a global account of population control, see Connelly (2008).

24. 24. Marina Lessa (1979, 52) describes this as ‘an unequal distribution of income’ and Lozano Urbieta (1979, 60) shares ‘the poor are not poor because there are so many of them, but because riches are badly distributed’.

25. 25. Translation my own.

26. 26. Italics my own.

27. 27. For more on Mexican second-wave feminism and the right to abortion, Espino Armendáriz (2019), Nelson (2022), Nelson (2019), Jaiven (2011), Ortiz-Ortega and Barquet (2010), Sánchez Olvera (2002) and Lamas (2001). For more on abortion politics broadly, see, for example, Ortiz-Ortega (2005).

28. 28. The potential of abortion, as she puts it, is limited in a ‘capitalist country’. Demanding birth control and the legalisation of abortion must be part of the ‘struggle of women towards a more just society’. See Martha Sanchez (1979, 113).

29. 29. See also Espino Armendáriz (2022, 181).

30. 30. Translation my own.

References