7 Introduction

Economic autonomy is defined by Dan Sarooshi as: “the capacity of an entity to make independent decisions about one’s economic future” (2004:656). Economic autonomy is essential to success for individuals in capitalist societies, as it is the key to making decisions for oneself. This section will explore this major pillar of women’s overall equality in various contexts throughout Latin America. These subtopics include: domestic workers, the Pink Tide, women’s access to education, and femicide in Honduras.

The first subtopic explores the trajectory of domestic workers in their fight for their workers’ rights in brazil. As is the case for many countries in Latin America that suffer from extreme inequality, domestic work is an extremely common form of employment in Brazil. This form of labor is characterized by low wages, poor working conditions, and little societal respect. The problem arises, however, when recognizing who are the people employed in this form of labor… low-income women of color. Due to lack of opportunities, poor black women in Brazil very often find themselves working as domestic workers in other people’s homes with little protection and, many times, no formal work license. However, things are starting to change. Since mid 1900s, domestic workers began forming alliances with the black, feminist and workers’ movements in order to acquire a political voice that could give them rights. Therefore, these workers took advantage of their marginalized place in society through their race, gender, and class to unite and strengthen their demands in the face of adversity. They have been fighting for decades and along this time they have been recognized as real workers, gained legal protection, and increased their wages significantly. Their trajectory reveals the power of recognizing intersectionality and using it as a tool for social change, and should serve as an example for the thousands of marginalized communities across the globe.

The Pink Tide sparked hope in the hearts and minds of many as leftist leaders began to take power across Latin America on platforms of major social and economic change, condemning the many inequalities that women had faced up to then. Unfortunately, “ideology and party politics do not determine how gender and sexual rights are or are not addressed in Pink Tide contexts” (Wilkinson 2019:x). While many women saw impairments to their economic autonomy resolved, many did not, especially poor women. Although Pink Tide nations achieved overwhelming decreases in overall poverty, the femininity index of poverty (ECLAC’s measurement for the proportion of women among the poor and indigent as opposed to men) increased significantly in Bolivia, Venezuela, Paraguay, Uruguay, Chile, El Salvador, Brazil, Ecuador, and Nicaragua during their Pink Tide years. Furthermore, women’s labor force participation rates, which had been increasing prior to the Pink Tide, practically stagnated. Why were women becoming increasingly more poor in Pink Tide nations? What was blocking them from getting jobs in the formal economy? Why couldn’t they experience the other broad gains of Leftist administrations? This chapter seeks to answer those questions and explain why the continental lefitst movement of the early 2000s failed in promoting women’s economic autonomy.

The third subtopic, Women’s educational access, is inexorably tied to economic autonomy. Increased educational attainment generally leads to more access to jobs and the labor market more broadly. However, in Latin America, women’s access to education does not necessarily correlate with economic autonomy and access to the labor market. To use the Dominican Republic as a case study, only 40.8% (World Bank 2019) of women are included in the labor market despite their involvement in higher education, with about 63.8% (OEI 2019) of women participating. This gap is surprising as it is typically assumed that the pursuit of higher education will correlatively increase economic autonomy for women. Furthermore, there are minimal statistics that include intersectional identities; a seemingly huge factor in educational access and economic autonomy. Thus, the answer to achieving economic autonomy for women lies in the questions of: what is the quality of education? What other cultural factors contribute to low-female participation in the labor market? What improvements can be made to ensure economic autonomy for women?

The final subtopic, femicide in Honduras, is a phenomenon that has been plaguing this Central American country for years, and the number of reported cases are only on the rise. Plagued by a male chauvinistic, or machinso, culture that is ingrained into how the country functions, violence has steadily become a normalized aspect of daily life for women. Honduras is often characterized not only by its large number of femicides, but also by its high concentrations of poverty, which should be noted increased significantly since a militarized coup d’etat in 2009 that removed left-leaning president Manuel Zelaya from power. Particularly, in the first three years after the 2009 coup poverty and extreme poverty levels increased by 13.2 percent and 26.3 percent, respectively (Johnston and Lefebvre 2013). In more recent times, poverty in Honduras has been especially affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, and two devastating hurricanes, Eta and Iota in 2020. In 2021 alone, 314 women have been murdered in the country (El Tiempo 2021). The prevalence of gender-based violence raises the question of what exactly is responsible for these occurrences, and creates the connection between economic instability and violence. In this section, femicide in Honduras is analyzed through an economic lens, exploring how poverty serves as an impetus for violence.