Women deliver themselves from subjugation by recovering their voices, by educating themselves, and by speaking out, in unison, against forces that have kept them under heel. The scope of Colombian Women: The Struggle Out of Silence is both personal and global: personal to the interviewees and to Elena GarcZs herself, as she tells her own story; and global, in that many features of the patriarchy and its dysfunction extend well beyond the borders of Colombia.

From her personal diary as an eleven-year-old in a Catholic girl's school, in which she chastises herself for the sin of wearing a bathing suit, through erudite analysis of the patriarchal structures on which most world communities stand, Elena Garces examines culture, history, economics, law, and religion as they apply to her native Colombia. In so doing, she promotes ideas which demolish the "forced enclosure" of women in that society. Eighteen Colombian women, selected at random from many regions and ethnicities, and from up and down the socioeconomic ladder, tell life stories almost...