Our strategies should be aimed at educational institutions-those depositories for young people where racism, extreme chauvinism, and anti-female feel… - Martha P. Cotera

Hispanas should no longer leave unchallenged the irresponsible expressions of ideologies and rhetoric that both disregard the basic tenet of individual worth and ignore women's continued contribution to culture and to the political, artistic, and intellectual evolution of the Hispanidad. Until we do this, the detractors of womankind will continue to promote bastardized machismo as basic and inevitable in the Hispanic culture. Unless we do this, the majority society, and many of our own people, will continue their fantasized portrayals of Hispanas as objects; passive nonentities, social reactionaries, and nonproductive members of society.

In terms of women's rights, the Mexican revolution of 1910 had enormous impact. During the revolution men and women developed relationships of partnership and mutual regard very seldom seen in most societies. Through their activities as clerks, secretaries, smugglers, telegraphers, journalists, financiers, and soldiers, women had a rare opportunity to develop their potential on a large scale, beside the men, and won their respect and recognition as partners. Perhaps within the Mexican culture this phenomenon was only to be repeated in the U.S. with the Chicano farmworker and civil rights struggles of the twentieth century.

The greatest victory for the women's movement was not victory for minority women. The suffrage amendment did not enfranchise Chicanas and black women. Chicanas were affected by the aftermath of the suffrage amendment, when women's movement activities slowed down, because white women achieved their desires, but Chicanas, like other minority women, had to continue to struggle for mere survival. They were affected when middle-class women were given preferential treatment in war industry, but blacks and Chicanas had to continue with unskilled, low-paid agricultural work and other service occupations. Chicanas were affected when white middle-class women went back home in the fifties, but minority women did not, and Chicanas, to boot, continued to suffer repression and deportation for their continued labor and civil rights advocacy. Chicanas have been affected when their community and their own gains in the 1960s have taken a back seat to the women's movement just as the black movement and black suffrage took a back seat to the suffrage movement in the latter part of the last century.