During the late Empire in Brazil, Rio de Janeiro society felt the stirrings of a new process, one which would seriously alter—and threaten—the traditional way of life in the city. In imitation of Europe, well-to-do citizens began forming voluntary associations for mutual aid and protection. The trend soon reached the middle and upper levels of the proletariat, whose organizations became labor unions. Most sectors of the urban society gradually organized around interest groups, and as the city surged into the new century with over a half-million people, occasional conflict marred the society of “conciliation and reform.” By the 1920s, with the sobering experiences of Europe, Russia, and Mexico in mind, thoughtful Brazilians called for conservative social policy to contain class conflict. Many blamed the excessive liberalism of republican government since 1889 and harked back to medieval institutions for bringing social peace.

Colombian women have only recently entered the political arena on a formal basis—they first exercised the right to vote in 1957. Their activity as voters, party workers, and public officials is a by-product of the National Front governing agreement to alternate Conservative and Liberal presidents and to maintain party parity in public office. Since the April 1974 election initiated the official demise of the National Front, we propose to examine the role of women in the political life of this period.

Colombia is well suited for such a study. Appealing to women to exercise their voting rights, the principal political parties established internal organizations to mobilize their electoral support. Public discussion of the inferior status of women in Colombian society encouraged two of the three presidential candidates to orient themselves to women voters in the 1974 campaign. One candidate was a woman, while another promised reform of divorce and discriminatory laws.

Urban morphology and growth have been studied by sociologists and others in the United States for half a century. A question raised in some recent studies is: To what extent are urban forms and growth processes universal? Sargent (1972) has proposed a universal model of urban dynamics intended “to relate processes to the spatial development,” particularly residential development, of the city. Sargent uses Buenos Aires between 1870 and 1930 as a case study. This article applies his model to another Latin American capital, Caracas, during approximately the same time period in order to demonstrate imperfections in the model as it relates to the way in which transportation systems expand, the forces which influence their expansion, and the manner in which they affect city growth.

In this concluding paragraph of a paper on Brazilian women, Blachman (1972) charts two major areas of significance to those interested in the study of women—the ideological dimension and the institutional reality. At the same time we are reminded that the link between the two, a dialectic of structures and values, may still be the most confounding and frustrating obstacle to an analysis of women in society and, for our interests here, women in politics. (For an excellent overview of the material on women in Latin America, see Pescatello, 1972.)

Brazilian women have never been foreign to work. Prior to the beginning of the industrialization process, women were very active. The activities performed by women vary so much between different societies that it is not possible to assign or categorize any one activity as exclusively feminine. One of the principal characteristics of the development process of a society is the progressive isolation of those activities which are necessary for the production of goods and services from other activities. This is a consequence of the introduction of technological changes which make inevitable a separation in space and time of activities related to special production. The activity identified as work starts to develop more and more at specific places, in specific time intervals, and under specific contractual conditions. As the growing technical specialization made it necessary to make a separation between house and work, women were assigned house activities. In this sense it can be said that the introduction of the machine came to reinforce the concept that women's principal function was the administration of the house and the education of the children.

The recent literature on women in Latin America as yet forms a minute part of a necessary revision aimed at achieving a balanced and multidimensional view of the Ibero-American reality, past and present. Men, as the traditional transmitters of culture in society, have conveyed what they knew, understood, and judged to be important. Since women's activities differed considerably from those of men, they were regarded as insignificant and unworthy of mention. Scholars have further perpetuated the patriarchal and sexist assumptions of their own societies or those they have studied. As a fesult, more than four and a half centuries of history and all of the important ongoing processes of modernization, urbanization, professionalization, and even propagation seem to have occurred without the participation or even the presence of women. It was simply assumed that what was said of men held equally true for women. Hence the conception of reality perpetrated by social scientists and historians was that perceived by a dominant male group, who represented a partial construct as if it were a more complex whole.