This article argues that a gender perspective enables us to better understand the emerging basis for collective organization in the world capitalist crisis. Since women and their children are most threatened by inroads on the subsistence economy, and since welfare provisions are the first budgetary cuts made by governments faced with increasing debt burdens, women are forced to engage in collective action to ensure survival. In Latin American countries, this new political arena is even more dynamic than the workplace as a site for engaging in struggle. This situation contrasts with core industrial countries, where the encounter with bureaucratic agencies in redressing human welfare issues tends to fragment individual actions rather than weld together collective consciousness.
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