In Sustaining Activism, Jeffrey W. Rubin and Emma Sokoloff-Rubin tell the behind-the-scenes story of Brazil's women's movement of 1986.

In 1986, a group of young Brazilian women started a movement to secure economic rights for rural women and transform women's roles in their homes and communities. Together with activists across the country, they built a new democracy in the wake of a military dictatorship. In Sustaining Activism, Jeffrey W. Rubin and Emma Sokoloff-Rubin tell the behind-the-scenes story of this remarkable movement. As a father-daughter team, they describe the challenges of ethnographic research and the way their collaboration gave them a unique window into a fiery struggle for equality.

Starting in 2002, Rubin and Sokoloff-Rubin traveled together to southern Brazil, where they interviewed activists over the course of ten years. Their vivid descriptions of women’s lives reveal the hard work of sustaining a social movement in the years after initial victories, when the political way forward was no longer clear and the goal of remaking gender roles proved more difficult than activists had ever imagined. Highlighting the tensions within the movement about how best to effect change, Sustaining Activism ultimately shows that democracies need social movements in order to improve people’s lives and create a more just society.

"“This slim book is free of academic jargon and instead exudes authenticity and positivity. The women's stories about their own histories and current circumstances are handled capably by the authors who acknowledge the interesting dynamics that play out as they interview women whose own fathers rarely let them leave the house or attend secondary school. High school and undergraduate students interested in Latin American politics and women's studies will especially find this intriguing and informative.”" - Library Journal

"“[T]he book itself, a unique collaboration between distinct voices and perspectives, is a rich, thought-provoking, and surprisingly accessible addition to the study of democratic social movements.”" - NACLA Report on the Americas

"“Sustaining Activism works precisely because in the context of examining a women’s movement the scholarly value added by a father-daughter team can offer new windows on to the theme. . . . Inevitably, a father will have a different understanding and approach to such themes to a daughter, and so, very cleverly, this duo have provided an extra layer of analysis that can only benefit the reader and scholarship more generally.” " - Latin American Review of Books

"This is scholarship that grew from productive and transparent 'circuitous dialogue' among father and daughter, women and men, activists and researchers, university settings and local schools, teachers and students, and professional colleagues and personal friends in both Brazil and the US. It is scholarship rich with nuanced insights but highly accessible to a non-academic audience. It speaks simultaneously to deeply political and deeply private issues, which is the point." - Luso-Brazilian Review