Abstract
Within elite-led projects of ideological transformation, how do leaders encourage practices that reflect and reinforce the ideas, attitudes, and beliefs they are trying to make hegemonic? This article investigates how political elites use different mechanisms of subject formation as they attempt to replace one hegemonic ideology with another and to shape new subjects to match. Whereas leaders of the Mexican and Nicaraguan revolutions often approached creating “new women” through legislation and campaigns, the Cuban revolutionary elites leveraged their swift and broad control over mass media to complement institutional means of subject formation with discursive ones. I draw on careful qualitative analysis of 112 issues of the state-run women’s magazine Mujeres (Women) to show how leaders combined both linguistic and visual discourse to promote the development of the socialist “new woman” by encouraging women to participate in a wide range of labor outside of the home and by assisting them as they adjusted to the new material realities of the immediate post-revolutionary period. Bringing mass media swiftly and fully under state control allows leaders to communicate the ideological attitudes and behaviors they wish to promote among the people, while limiting alternate conceptions of revolutionary subjecthood.
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Notes
Bayard de Volo’s formulation parallels Gramsci’s classic distinction between the “war of maneuver” and the “war of position” (1999, 225–230).
Negative, value-laden discussions surrounding ideology as a concept stem in no small part from Marx’s conceptualization of ideologies as superstructural elements that reflect, reinforce, and reproduce a society’s economic base to the advantage of political and economic elites (and, therefore, to the detriment of non-elites) (Marx 1978, 154).
Here, I am referring to ideology as a general analytic concept. I do not mean to say that specific ideologies, whether racism, fascism, or capitalism, should not be the subject of moral critiques.
However, by the time that Nicaraguan revolutionaries took power in 1979, the expectation that women work outside the home was not as “revolutionary” as it had been in 1960s Cuba. In addition to global shifts in norms related to women and paid employment, Nicaragua’s high percentage of single mothers meant that many women already worked outside of the home prior to the revolution (Montoya 2003, 72).
Conversely, as many scholars have pointed out, even legislation that explicitly promoted women’s rights also served unrelated goals, like policies in Mexico surrounding reproduction that scholars have argued were more about population control than women’s autonomy or laws related to domestic violence that papered a façade of promoting women’s wellbeing over concern about alcohol’s deleterious effects on national production (Vaughan 2000, 201).
The literature on political elites’ use of linguistic discourse for a variety of political projects, including ideological ones, is voluminous. Polletta and colleagues (Polletta et al. 2011) focus on narrative as a subtype of discourse, paying attention to “the use of storytelling by already constituted political actors such as officials, agencies, states, and movements” (118). Campbell (2002), on the other hand, draws attention to how different types of ideas (cognitive paradigms, world views, and normative frameworks, for example) are transmitted through discourse to ultimately affect policy making processes. Finally, in her analytic synthesis of the literature uniting political and cultural sociology, Berezin (1997) highlights scholarship that investigates the role of ideological discourse in revolutions, citing Moaddel (1995), Sewell (1994), and Burns (1996) as exemplars.
The “visual turn” refers to both analyzing existing visuals and creating visuals, like photographs, as part of the methods of inquiry. The latter covers a broad array of methods, including shooting scripts (Suchar 1997), aerial photography (Harper 1997; Zuev and Bratchford 2020), and photo elicitation (Collier Jr. 1967; Schwartz 1989). In this article, I focus on the former.
Informal education stands in contrast to both formal and nonformal education. Nonformal education, championed perhaps most famously by Brazilian educator and author Paulo Freire (1976, 2014), consists of “any organized, systematic, educational activity carried on outside the framework of the formal system to provide selected types of learning to particular subgroups in the population, adults as well as children” (Coombs and Ahmed 1974). Further, La Belle helpfully distinguishes informal from nonformal education by noting that, “A major difference between these two processes rests with the deliberate instructional and programmatic emphases present in nonformal education but absent in informal education” (La Belle 1982, 162). I do not suggest, however, that informal education is indeliberate from the perspective of elites. For example, based on these definitions, propaganda—discourse intentionally designed “to govern people through the management of perception and behavior” (Florian 2019, 331)—would fall into the category of informal education.
Owing to Mexico’s size, relatively underdeveloped transportation infrastructure, and high rates of illiteracy, leaders tended to favor radio over print media (Hayes 2006, 245). Roughly fourteen percent of Mexicans could read around 1920 (Smith 2018, 14), which would have made radio crucial for reaching, for example, rural women (Knight 1994, 395).
Historian Justin J. Castro suggests that the reach of this program was quite limited, noting that, in 1929, “officials bragged that the station reached over three thousand housewives daily” (Castro 2016, 171).
In the early post-revolutionary years, the protracted process of political consolidation was at least partly responsible for a lack of centralization or nationalization efforts. Newspaper ownership reflects this trend. As political scientist Chappell H. Lawson has pointed out, “different factions of the political elite founded or purchased their own newspapers to advance personal and policy agendas” (Lawson 2002, 25). Even when President Carranza (1917–1920) managed to codify “state monopolization of wireless technology” in the 1917 Constitution, his work was quickly undone by his successor, Obregón (1920–1924), who “abandoned the idea of having the state monopolize radio” (Castro 2016, 10).
For a brief discussion of Somos, including some of the feminist themes that appeared in it, see Bayard de Volo’s book on gender identity politics in revolutionary Nicaragua (de Volo Bayard 2001, 87).
It is important to note, however, that no media outlet—state-run or otherwise—operated completely of their own free will at this time. Sandinista leaders frequently resorted to censorship, including of Barricada, “often justifying it as necessary during war time” (Kodrich 2008, 76).
Castro established the FMC under the leadership of Vilma Espín (wife of Raúl Castro), who remained the president of the organization until her death in 2007. This state-sanctioned mass organization was designed to unite (and replace) all pre-existing women’s organizations, including those that emerged as part of the anti-Batista movement during the 1950s. The FMC has been the subject of extensive scholarly attention, most of which assesses the extent to which the organization served an emancipatory function for Cuban women (Azicri 1988; Bengelsdorf 1985; Bengelsdorf and Hageman 1978; Casal 1980; Cole and Reed 1986; Daniel 2012; Evenson 1986; Fernandes 2005). While the question remains open, there is a fair amount of consensus that there was little divergence between the FMC’s goals, policies, and daily activities and the general agenda of the state, particularly in the immediate post-revolutionary period.
Emphasis added. Mujeres (November 15, 1961, 68). All Spanish translations are the author’s own.
Writing on Cuban media in the 1980s, Lent put Mujeres’s circulation at 273,000, the largest of any magazine at that time (Lent 1985, 613).
The editors mentioned this statistic noting, “Due to delays in paper shipments, there has been a momentary shortage that has forced us to reduce the circulation to 125,000 copies, and the number of pages of the magazine, from 130 to 100, which in turn has motivated the suspension of some sections and removal of fashion pages.” The excerpt does not state what the circulation had been prior to the supply issues. Mujeres (October 1, 1963, 3).
Mujeres (November 1, 1968, 14).
Mujeres (November 1, 1968, 15).
Of the 112 issues I analyzed for this study (November 1961–December 1969), 78 were available on microfilm from US libraries. I collected the remaining 34 issues from various sites in Havana—including the Instituto de Historia, Biblioteca José Martí, and Editorial de la Mujer—by photographing each page of each issue.
Mujeres (November 15, 1962, 3). As the editors explained at the end of 1962, “Mujeres will go out to the streets once a month starting next January, thereby facilitating raising the quality of our publication and making it reach the most remote corners of our country, which now, due to distribution problems, it cannot reach.”
A table of contents, divided into these five sections, began to appear regularly in each issue in March of 1963. Even before, however, the magazine included content in these same categories.
The “children” category included both content geared toward children (poems, drawings, stories, and games) and information for parents about raising children. “Fashion and beauty” highlighted seasonally appropriate clothing trends, as well as hair and makeup advice.
“Women and education” included, for example, students, literacy, Literacy Campaign, Ana Betancourt School for Peasant Women, and study circles. “Women and the military” included, for example, capability of women, involvement of women, Mariana Grajales Platoon, and feminine militias.
Because I did not approach these texts via traditional content analysis (for example, the codes I developed are not mutually exclusive or independent, nor are the units of analysis uniform), these numbers should be interpreted as suggestive, not absolute. Rather than reflect exact proportions of content represented by my codes, these counts instead offer approximations of the relationships among the different types of material present in the magazines.
These three categories are not mutually exclusive. In fact, one of my key arguments is that women’s productive and reproductive labor was reframed by revolutionary elites as essential political work in furtherance of the regime’s ideological consolidation. Nevertheless, it was a relatively straightforward process to categorize the magazine codes into these four groups based on the surface-level content of each magazine segment.
The codes appearing in quotation marks are titles of recurring magazine segments. “Women and work” is a code group consisting of codes related to both volunteer labor (agricultural and industrial) and paid labor, disaggregated by occupation types (including architect, director, gastronomist, hairdresser, revolutionary instructor, nurse, and others). “Practical knowledge” is a code group that included household advice appearing outside of recurring sections. Examples include making a purse using old picture frames, packing suitcases effectively, and treating minor injuries with first aid. “Childcare” encompassed all sections of the magazine dealing with childhood education, development, and health (such as “School for Mothers” and “Our Children”). “Women’s health” were small articles focused on women’s physical, reproductive, and mental health. “Family_mothers” reflects each time the word “mother” appeared.
Mujeres (November 1, 1962, 72–73).
Mujeres (March 1, 1963, 78–81).
Due to “an intentional disinformation campaign that claimed that the government would abrogate parents’ custodial rights to their own children” (Chase 2015, 13), many mothers hesitated to utilize the state-run daycare centers.
As was the case in communal laundries, all the staff depicted in this article’s photos were women, referred to using the Spanish feminine plural of “assistant” (asistentas).
Mujeres (August 1, 1963, 2).
Mujeres (January 1, 1965, 2).
Mujeres (March 1, 1965, 2).
Mujeres (May 15, 1962, 64–67).
This strategy of politicizing women through their household labor and reproductive functions was not unique to the Cuban case. For example, as Nichole Sanders (2008, 174) has pointed out, the Mexican state leveraged “health and welfare programs to incorporate women politically” (see also Vaughan 2000, 196).
Mujeres (January 1, 1963, 128). Unsurprisingly, the editorial makes no mention of Cuban leaders’ economic miscalculations that exacerbated conditions of scarcity, instead shifting the blame solely to the unscrupulous actions of the United States. As Maria Cabrera Arús explains, shortages in Cuba in the early 1960s also stemmed from “a decline in production, coupled with an increase in the purchasing power resulting from redistributive policies implemented after the revolutionary victory” (Cabrera Arús 2019, 139).
Mujeres (May 15, 1962, 114).
A 1962 report published by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) noted that a milk shortage had developed in Cuba in 1960 and that milk rationing began in Havana in 1961 (Mears 1962, 21). While the USDA certainly may have had a strategic motive to overstate food scarcities in Cuba in the early 1960s, Castro acknowledged them as well. In addressing criticisms that people were better off before the revolution because they had milk when Batista was governing, Castro did not deny the charge. Rather, he discussed what was being done to increase milk production (Castro 1962a).
Mujeres (April 1, 1964, 122–123).
In the original Spanish text, the English word “cake” is used, seemingly mocking the lingering legacies of US neocolonial influence.
Mujeres (February 1, 1963, 5).
Mujeres (August 1, 1964, 126–129).
Examples of such materials that elites have historically deployed for their ideological projects include comics and cartoons (Gastón-Greenberg 2021; Regalado Someillan 2009), posters (González de Armas 2020; Evans and Donald 1999), magazines (Chuang 2022; Reed 2016), and even money (Cabrera Arús 2020), all of which tend to pair visuals (a drawing, photo, or art) with texts (dialogue, captions, articles, and so on).
Leaders’ characterizations of women as champions of conservativism are not wholly without empirical basis. To name just one example, Chile’s Feminine Power (a conservative women’s group) rallied cross-class solidarity against Allende’s leftist government, which members saw as “attacking women’s roles as wives and mothers” (Franceschet et al. 2016, 8).
Compared to the cases of Mexico and Nicaragua, the Catholic Church of Cuba was decidedly less powerful and influential, even if most of the population identified as Catholic at least nominally, prior to the revolution. As Chomsky explains, “the relative weakness of the Church and its rootedness among white elites made it easier for the revolution to directly attack its dominance” (Chomsky 2020, 146).
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Acknowledgements
For their helpful comments and suggestions on this work, I am grateful to Robert Jansen, Jacob Caponi, Davis Daumler, Luciana de Souza Leão, Berenike Firestone, Simeon J. Newman, I-Lun Shih, Jonah Stuart Brundage, and the Qualitative Sociology editors and anonymous reviewers. For his assistance in preparing and formatting the article’s visual content, I thank Lonier Torres Medero. I also appreciate the many participants of the 2023 Professional Writing Seminar and the 2021 Cuban Diaspora Interdisciplinary Working Group at the University of Michigan who offered comments on earlier drafts.
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The author received funding support from the University of Michigan’s Rackham Student Research Grant.
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Triplett, J. Ideological Consolidation, Subject Formation, and the Discursive Creation of the “New Woman” in Revolutionary Cuba. Qual Sociol (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-024-09560-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-024-09560-2