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Women and Literacy in Nicaragua

In Nicaragua, 50% of the adult population is single mothers. Abandoned by their husbands, or widowed by the war, they are often left to support large families. Through necessity their involvement in the revolution has been aggressive and radical. When women fight for their children they fight for everything real.

But prior to the Triumph of the Revolution in 1979, most of these women were uneducated, and many had never seen the inside of a school. Obviously it was not in the interest of the Somoza government to provide easy access to education for peasant or working class women. In their daily struggle to survive, the women themselves had little time to consider education a priority either.

So although literacy was a mandate from the beginning for the FSLN, the commitment to learning to read and write on the part of the people themselves seems to have some directly from a swelling political involvement and participation in the revolutionary process. As women started to gain power in the revolution and over their own lives, they then felt the need to learn to read and write. They needed to take notes in meetings, to understand the graffiti and posters of the underground, to have a voice in the neighborhood civil defense committees, and sometimes to carry messages to the Front. And they recognized that the opportunity to learn was a major part of what they had been fighting for. Here the idea that literacy was a right (and not a privilege) was more than just mere rhetoric. The Literacy Crusade was a direct proof of empowerment

The Literacy Crusade was planned prior to the Triumph and it was put into affect within months of the victory. Modelled after the Cuban literacy crusade, it had both political and practical aims, and used Paulo Freire's pedagogical framework to achieve them. For six months in 1980, 100,000 volunteers, including 60,000 high school students in the cities, took time out of their own studying and working to go to the remote areas of the country and teach 500,000 students. Adult volunteers joined them in teaching neighbors throughout Nicaragua. Along with the equally ambitious Health Crusade, this Popular Education movement probably made the greatest difference to the people of the country, so many of whom had had no education available at all to them in the past. Great hope was placed in the Crusade and people listened eagerly to the broadcasted literacy census that reported how many people in which region had learned to read and Write according to results of an organized testing process. After five months, the 'brigadistas' had reduced the illiteracy rate from 70% to 11%.

This Literacy Crusade mobilized women in crucial ways. First, sixty percent of the 60,000 teenagers who went into the country side as literacy brigadistas were young women, as were the majority of the popular (uncertified) teachers in the cities. Their participation would make or break the experiment. Many must have felt for the first time that their efforts were valuable to the success of the Revolution.

It's hard to guess how many of the learners were women. Amongst them there were certainly the expected problems.