Sustaining Activism

In 1986, a group of young Brazilian women started a movement to secure economic rights for rural women, demand access to education and jobs, and transform women's roles in their homes and communities. Together with activists across the country, they built a new democracy in the wake of a military dictatorship. In Sustaining Activism, Jeffrey W. Rubin and Emma Sokoloff-Rubin tell the behind-the-scenes story of this remarkable movement. As a father-daughter team, they describe the challenges of ethnographic research and the way their shifting roles gave them a unique window into the tensions at the heart of a fiery protest movement. Starting in 2001, Rubin and Sokoloff-Rubin made numerous trips together to southern Brazil, where they interviewed activists over the course of ten years. Their vivid descriptions of the women's lives reveal the hard work of sustaining a social movement in the years after initial victories, when the political way forward was no longer clear and the goal of remaking gender roles proved more difficult than they had ever imagined. Highlighting the tensions within the movement about how best to effect change, Sustaining Activismultimately shows that democracies need social movements in order to improve people's lives and create a more just society.