From: SCIENCE@MITVMA
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: New York Times assails Shining Path women
Date: 9 Oct 92 15:48:29 GMT

New York Times assails Shining Path women
by mc5

The capture of a number of women leaders of the Shining Path
with Comrade Gonzalo has the bourgeoisie reaching for its
usual weapons to keep women away from radical politics--
psychiatry and other emotional smears. According to the
bourgeois media there is just no way that women could
rationally decide to take up revolution.

Acknowledging that 40 percent or more of the Shining Path is
women, the New York Times nonetheless found it necessary to
label these women as crazy. Dr. Matilde Ureta de Caplansky is
a psychoanalyst and major source for the New York Times
article.

This psychiatrist "noted a seeming division in their
personalities" in reference to Sendero women. "When discussing
concepts that had to do with the teaching of Mr. Guzman, 'they
suddenly become almost like robots,' Dr. Ureta said. 'They
give back to you ideas they are programmed with. But when you
switch to other subjects, they return to becoming mostly
normal people.'"         As usual the bourgeoisie wishes to
imply that women could not possibly be revolutionaries and
hence they must be brainwashed if they are part of Sendero.

Another Sendero detractor says that Sendero women "'can be
quite coquettish at times.'"         "This leads many to
conclude that though the women play a dominant role, the
overriding presence of the patriarchal figure of Mr. Guzman
and his ever-present teaching still keep them submissive."

What the New York Times is trying to say is that these women
cannot be truly independent until they break free of Comrade
Gonzalo. It's a well-disguised effort to split the Peruvian
Communist Party along gender lines. MIM believes that such a
strategy might work in the United States where a majority of
people are middle-class, but not in Peru where the situation
of women is more serious than the New York Times can
comprehend.

The New York Times is so steeped in individualism and its form
of pseudo-feminism that it expects such smears to work as a
matter of course. At the end of the article, the New York
Times thinks it has scored big points by quoting the
psychiatrist as follows: "The role of the male has been one of
a drunk who is lazy and dominates the woman by beating her up.
It is not that much different in Shining Path."         In
other words, "those who have studied the role of women in
Shining Path say that such statistics do not necessarily mean
they are better treated than women in the rest of Peruvian
society, or that Latin machismo has been superseded by a
sexless Shining Path." (Ibid.)

How impossible it is for the bourgeois mouthpiece to
comprehend revolution! So impossible that the mouthpiece
unwittingly makes the best argument for revolution possible:
it was not the Senderos who ever said that women could change
society by changing the attitudes of their men and reforming
them now under a rotten system of capitalist patriarchy. If it
were true that Sendero men were no better than other men, they
have only proved once again how impossible reform is!

MIM believes the New York Times should keep its mouth shut
while the United States has a Senate and Congress less than
10% women, never mind 40%. Whatever the failings of Sendero
men, at least they  work with women who appear to dominate the
upper echelons of  the party! Meanwhile, at the New York
Times, we notice that  only two out of the top 20 management
positions are held by women. That's 10%.

Source: Nathaniel C. Nash, "Shining Path Women: So Many and
So Ferocious," New York Times, 9/22/92, p. a4; also, a26 staff
box.

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