Sandino's Daughters Revisited: Feminism in Nicaragua

"A collection of varied and amazing lives, all bent on shaping history. Together, these experienced, undeterred Nicaraguan women offer powerful clues about a truly revolutionary and democratizing feminism." --Adrienne Rich "Powerful, moving, and challenging. Everyone interested in decency and justice will want to read Sandino's Daughters Revisited." --Blanche Wiesen Cook "If it were not for writers like Margaret, how would women around the world find each other when there is such an institutional effort to keep us apart and silent? Here Margaret brings us the voice of Sandino's daughters, honoring his hat and wearing their own, wiser now, having been part of political and personal revolution." --Holly Near Sandino's Daughters, Margaret Randall's conversations with Nicaraguan women in their struggle against the dictator Somoza in 1979, brought the lives of a group of extraordinary female revolutionaries to the American and world public. The book remains a landmark. A decade later, Randall returned to interview many of the same women and others. In Sandino's Daughters Revisited, they speak of their lives during the Sandinista adminstration, the ways in which the revolution made them strong--and also held them back. Ironically, the 1990 defeat of the Sandinistas at the ballot box has given Sandinista women greater freedom to express their feelings and ideas. Randall interviewed outspoken women from all walks of life. The voices of these women lead us to recognize both the failed promises and continuing attraction of the Sandinista movement for women. This is a moving account of the relationship between feminism and revolution as it is expressed in the daily lives of Nicaraguan women. Margaret Randall is the author of more than fifty books, including four others about Nicaragua. She was born and raised in the U.S., but lived for twenty-three years in Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua. Having relinquished her citizenship when she married a Mexican, she was denied U.S. residency when she returned to the United States in 1984. After a five-year fight, she regained her citizenship in 1989. She lives in New Mexico and teaches at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, in the spring.