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Who Are We? What Do We Want? What Do We Do? *

Accion para la Liberacion de la Mujer Peruana

We are a group of women who have orga-
nized to study, work and fight for our liberation,
and especially to work with and for our sisters
who suffer a double oppression: in being wom-
en and in belonging to a social sector which has
been historically dominated and exploited.

The struggle of women is integrally bound to
the struggle of working-class women.

No! to Mother’s Day.

Yes! to Peruvian Woman'’s Day.

Less homage, more rights.

Why are we named Action for the Liberation
of Peruvian Women?

Because we want to carry out our work with-
out euphemisms or timidity—in short, without
masks or half-measures. It is correct to call
actions which are destined to radically change
our condition by their rightful name: liberation.

Ours is simultaneously a study-group and an
action-group. We are by no means a political
party. We do not aspire to be an institution with
traditional hierarchic structure. We reject ver-
ticalism, dogmatism and leadership positions.
Ideologically, we align ourselves within free
Humanist Socialism and adopt the best of its
tenets conducive to female emancipation.

Without national liberation, there can be no
women’s liberation. Fight!

Only reactionary men are our enemies!

Sisters, Unite with us!

Liberation is action!

Because we cannot separate our specific
problems from our socio-economic context, all
our work strategies are adapted to the actual
conditions of our country. We do not copy
foreign movements because we are aware of
living in a Third-World Society where imperjal-
ism is our most powerful enemy. Therefore we
express solidarity with other liberation struggles
on this continent, as well as with other women
and men fighting for national liberation in their
respective countries.

To analyze the historic and social origins of our
condition is to revolutionize our understanding
of the world!

We believe our liberation is inseparable from
that of other oppressed groups—workers and
peasants. The liberation of our brothers will
never be realized while their women—workers
and peasants too—are second-class citizens,
and while prostitution is seen as a “necessary
and insuperable evil.”

Consequently we do not believe in individual
liberation. The fact that some of our sisters are
being promoted to important public positions
or are gaining access to professional and tech-
nical careers in increasingly greater numbers
has nothing to do with liberation. We believe
that only structural change will produce real
“women’s liberation.”

So our position, our actions, are aimed at
contributing to the process of transformation
taking place in our country, at helping it
strengthen and advance without obstacles. We
support this Revolution because it is anti-
imperialist and anti-oligarchic, and because it
makes possible our own liberation.

What do we call Cultural Revolution?

The process by which the old system is entire-
ly questioned and revised: its values, behavior,
habits, customs, institutions and forms of com-
munication. A Cultural Revolution must reject
all individualism, engendering a collective way
of life harmonious with group ideals, while re-
sistant to group egoism. A Cultural Revolution
must combat stereotypical attitudes like “male-
ism” (machismo) and “femaleism” (hembrismo)
—brute maleness and coy femaleness. A Cul-
tural Revolution must change patriarchal insti-
tutions like bourgeois marriage and the nuclear
family —two characteristic expressions of capi-
talism and the division of labor. Finally, a
Cultural Revolution’s ultimate goal must be to
change life, to culminate in a free and humane
socialism.

Wanting to shape your own destiny is wanting
to transform injustice.
Wanting to transform injustice is being political.

What do we want to be liberated from?

From the social, economic, political, cultural
and moral conditions imposed by a patriarchal
capitalist society which assigns us secondary
roles, condemning us to live as marginal beings
passively supporting and “servicing” men.

From reformist paternalism which perpetually
treats us as legal minors, because it reduces

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