This volume assesses one of the most important developments in contemporary Latin American women's movements: the engagement with rights-based discourses. Organised women have played a central role in the continued struggle for democracy in the region and with it gender justice. The foregrounding of human rights, and within them the recognition of women's rights, has offered women a strategic advantage in pursuing their goals of an inclusive citizenship. The country-based chapters analyse specific bodies of rights: rights and representation, domestic violence, labour rights, reproductive rights, legal advocacy, socio-economic rights, rights and ethnicity, and rights, the state and autonomy.

List of Tables Abbreviations Acknowledgements Notes on the Contributors The Local, the Regional and the Global: Transforming the Politics of Rights; M.Molyneux & N.Craske Engendering the Right to Participate in Decision-making: Electoral Quotas and Women's Leadership in Latin America; M.N.Htun & M.P.Jones Getting Rights for those without Representation: The Success of Conjunctural Coalition-building in Venezuela; E.J.Friedman Taking the Law into their Own Hands: Women, Legal Reform and Legal Literary in Brazil; F.Macaulay In Pursuit of the Right to be Free from Violence: The Women's Movements and State Accountability in Uruguay; N.Johnson Constructing Citizenship in the Poblaciónes of Santiago, Chile: The Role of Reproductive and Sexual Rights; C.Willmott Indigenous Women, Rights and the Nation-State in the Andes; S.A.Radcliffe Economic and Social Rights: Exploring Gender Differences in a Central American Context; J.Gideon The Struggle by Latin America Feminists for Rights and Autonomy; V.Vargas Index