By the 1980s in Latin America, as elsewhere, there were emergent women’s movements and popular feminisms on the one hand and self-identified, often middle-class, feminists of various political stripes on the other. Frameworks of analysis that had already emerged were further refined, among them a good number that embraced Western dualisms such as private/public, traditional/modern, informal/formal, and production/reproduction—all of which influenced Babb’s thinking and that of many others in both the global North and the global South as a result of the geopolitics of knowledge and its circulation. During this period, there was increased attention to race and ethnicity, as well as to gender as a social relation rather than a fixed category. In her commentary, the author traces some of these currents in feminist thought and politics during that period as a backdrop for discussion of her work presented here from that time. The chapters that follow in this section were based on research on Andean market women of Huaraz, Peru.
