This chapter focuses on the role of women teachers and campesinas in the class struggle. Two mass organizations played a critical role in building a combative labor movement: the National Association of Salvadoran Educators and Union of Rural Workers. Women comprised 80 percent of members in the teachers’ association, while significant numbers of campesinas participated in the rural union. By 1975, teachers and peasants joined forces in a revolutionary coalition to overthrow the political and economic system that exploited the entire working class. Many teachers and rural workers joined guerrilla organizations, such as the Popular Liberation Forces, whose cadre helped build mass organizations. Participation in the class struggle led to changes on two fronts. First, it deepened women’s class consciousness and revealed the state’s brutality in crushing the most minimal reforms. Second, the struggle transformed how women saw themselves and their role in changing society. Women confronted sexist expectations that shamed them for working alongside men and prioritizing political participation over domestic work. Fifteen years prior to the outbreak of the revolutionary war in 1980, a multigenerational movement of women had broken with patriarchal tradition. That rupture was fundamental. It facilitated women’s political participation and their increasing militant action that elevated class struggle to unprecedented levels. This gendered history allows us to appreciate what it took to build and sustain the revolutionary mass struggles of the 1960s and 1970s.

In essence, democracy in the workplace and the promotion of trade union representation are central to the survival of a democratic society.4 As a labor lawyer, I tend to think that law has a special role to play in this process. Yet my experience derived from Washington and Sacramento, both as a scholar and a practicing lawyer, convinces me of the limits of law. Law is subordinate to other factors, including union devotion to resources, the necessary expenditures involved, and the creation of strategic tactics and vision in organizing the unorganized – as well as foreign competition, American investment abroad, and technological innovation. Law is subordinate and can only play a symbiotic role in the proper promotion of collective bargaining by a reorganized movement. Law, however worthy of reform, has never been the solution in the past and is unlikely to be so now.