Daughter and Citizen

This morning, NPR's Morning Edition had a segment on the Ladies in White, a group of women in Cuba who have organized to protest their spouse's arrest.

I was surprise that the segment did not mention the Mothers of the Plazo de Mayo in Argentina. The Madres official website is in Spanish, but I did find a related (or possibly the same?) organization, Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo. There is also a documentary about the Madres (which, is btw, listed on the excellent site, Women Make Movies.)

In these cases, the women have organized themselves around their status as mothers, grandmothers, and wives. They make their demands based on the authority granted to them as mothers and wives, rather than relying on the authority granted to them as citizens. In each case, I suspect, this is based in part on the idea that their government, in arresting/disappearing their husbands and children, has demonstrated that it no longer respects citizenship, so an effective protest must be rooted in some other identity category. It's an interesting method, I think.