Since the job posting was announced, Vane’s phone hasn’t stopped ringing: “What are we going to do on March 8th?” The question is repeated in all the chats where libertarian activists spend several hours a day sharing current information. “We’ll go anyway,” some propose. “We can’t give the square to the leftists,” says another. Ana has reservations: “The atmosphere is very heated; let’s go, but without flags. It’s going to be worse than in previous years.” So, what should we do? Vane wonders.
The presence of women involved in political spaces linked to Javier Milei on March 8th generates controversies among other march attendees; also among external observers and interpreters from outside the self-proclaimed liberal-libertarian world. Although it may seem absurd or incomprehensible from this perspective, they have been repeating the ritual since 2021. That year, the political force that ran to the right of macrismo “for not having done enough,” which built a militant mystique in the streets against the quarantine and the government of Alberto Fernández, formed a party front. Thus, 2021 burned a common history between mileísmo and this feminism that participated, in different ways, in March 8th. Since then, women from diverse backgrounds have grouped under different names: “liberal women,” “libertarian women,” “women for freedom,” and “liberal feminists” to shape the concept that unites them: “liberal feminism.” This ideology has a long history within feminism, but in this context, it is the expression that articulates them within a political space that its leaders, both men and women, publicly define as “anti-feminist.”
Milei has expressed support for “life” multiple times, spoke of the “bloody abortion agenda” at the Davos Forum, and referred to abortion as “aggravated homicide.” He closed the Ministry of Women, Gender, and Diversity, his spokesperson announced with fanfare the prohibition of inclusive language in state agencies, and rumors circulated about a project to repeal the IVE (Voluntary Interruption of Pregnancy) law. All these issues were at the center of public debate in the days leading up to the march. On March 8th itself, Adorni announced in his usual press conference that the Women’s Hall in the Casa Rosada would no longer carry that name.
Is it a contradiction to be a feminist and a mileísta? they ask. Agustina Sosa is a representative of Ladies Of Liberty Alliance (LOLA), an international organization of women that seeks to “spread the ideas of freedom worldwide.” In “Being a Woman, Being Argentine, and Being Liberal (and Voting for Milei),” she offers some clues to understand how this feminism is conceived. She argues that although progressives “choose not to take responsibility, they also contributed to part of the heartache that thousands of Argentine women felt when casting a vote for a candidate [Javier Milei] who, in his path to the presidency (…) brushed against misogyny.” She reproaches them for “placing [women] in an irreversible position of victims,” criticizes the idea that “personal progress” depends on state intervention, and the folly of “a movement that claims to represent all women but, in the process, loses a bit of strength and form every day.” In a provocative gesture, she suggests the need for a “lucid feminism” in the face of macho culture, one that transcends formulas like “swifties don’t vote for Milei” and is capable of “kicking the board of the dogmas that still attempt to encapsulate what it means to be a woman. Without simplifications, intermediaries, or Cristinas, or Mileis (at least we know that Javo already understands this).”
From the heart of the square, spicing up with slogans in favor of the free carrying of weapons and against the state, they seek and contest a space for themselves in the recent history of feminism.
How many feminisms fit within March 8th?
In 2019, different feminist collectives began to organize within the liberal-libertarian space. That year, LOLA arrived in the country, organized two Liberal Women’s Meetings in 2020, which were held virtually due to the pandemic context, where they created the slogans that resonate today in LLA: “Free markets empower more than reading Marx,” “The free market empowers us. Not governments,” or “Fiscal rebellion now.”
Pibas Libertarias is a collective created within Pibes Libertarios, the youth group born during the pandemic to share memes and political information. In 2021, the Pibas attended March 8th for the first time. They carried a large yellow Gadsden flag and hand-written signs. Mimí’s sign and those of other activists read: “Free carrying of weapons to defend ourselves without depending on the state.” That afternoon, Mimí felt that it was the first time they had stepped onto “such hostile ground.” Many women, she says, “became aggressive upon seeing the sign: ‘How are you going to defend yourself?’ they asked us. They told us that we should wait for someone to come and save us.”
A year later, the more conservative wing of LLA participated alongside the Pibas Libertarias. They marched with pro-life sky-blue scarves tied around their hands and necks, and their presence in the square generated insults and shoves. A group of protesters yelled at them to take off the scarves: “You should be ashamed to face me because I think differently,” the pro-life protesters yelled amid insults, “Isn’t Women’s Day selective?” The more libertarian sector of the front chose to leave the square when they began singing: “Just like the Nazis will happen, wherever they go, we will go looking for them.”
In 2022, Mujeres por la Patria —along with the student group Avancemos por la Libertad y el Desarrollo and LLA deputy Rebeca Fleitas— organized the First Meeting of Women for Freedom for March 8th. In a Buenos Aires venue of the Unión del Centro Democrático (UCEDE), they debated the history of suffrage, “gender ideology,” self-defense, and “progressivism discrimination.” With different panels and speakers, the Meeting was repeated in 2023 and 2024 in a hall of the Buenos Aires Legislature, where they built a common space for socialization in which they tested definitions and scopes of “liberal feminism.”
The March 8th march in 2024 had among its main slogans “This time we have to go” and “If you were there, you have to be there,” rejecting a broad spectrum of measures carried out by Milei’s government. In contrast, the calls and actions of women militants of mileísmo were heterogeneous, fragmented, and much less numerous.
The usual question about how to participate in the March 8th mobilization was joined by a new one: how to be part of a square filled with slogans against the government that they support and for which they campaign. The villarruelistas, who do not identify or are recognized as part of liberal feminism but as “right-wing” militants, attended with banners saying “End the feminism scam.” Among the liberal feminists, some chose to participate without party flags or libertarian symbols, others joined the Third Meeting of Liberal Women in the Buenos Aires Legislature. Over the years, March 8th has become a significant date in the agendas of liberal feminism, which has occupied the square in various ways: initially disorganized, later expelled; through parallel women’s meetings or within the march but without carrying symbols that make them visible. Inside, outside, or on the margins, they share one idea: “Let’s not allow the left to appropriate this day.”
Boundaries
Liberal feminism is a work in progress. It is built through events, discussions —like those in which they define how to participate in key anniversaries like March 8th or June 3rd— and the boundaries they draw in a double movement: outward, with what they call “hegemonic” or “radical” feminism, and inward, with the more conservative sectors of La Libertad Avanza.
The murder of Lucio Dupuy, for which his mother and girlfriend were convicted, and the disappearance of Cecilia Strzyzowski in Chaco are two cases that allowed liberal women to differentiate themselves from “feminist women.” They defined the Dupuy case as a crime of “gender hatred.” “Feminism is hating the other for being a man, whether a child or adult (…) Feminism said nothing about him because they only know how to hate men.” In the Strzyzowski case, where the links between the murderers and the provincial political power were exposed, they sarcastically asked: “And where are the feminists? Stop speaking for us; they don’t represent us” and ended up chanting the slogan “Not one less. Justice for Cecilia.”
Liberal women see themselves as heirs of first-wave feminism and oppose “gender struggle.” “We believe in equality between men and women, we believe in merit and fight against quotas and victimhood,” says Martina, 25, head of the women’s department at the Movimiento Integración y Desarrollo (MID).
The expression #notrepresentus is repeated in various scenes, such as in the protest they organized to demand the closure of the Ministry of Women and Diversity in 2022. For “hegemonic” feminism, the state is the one that guarantees rights, while “liberal feminism” adheres to a minimal state vision that far exceeds the movement’s agendas. They are “improvers,” in the sense that Pablo Semán and Nicolás Welschinger explain, believing in personal progress through their own efforts in the market. Their interpretations resonate with broader views such as the centrality of personal merit and the feminist reinterpretation of “defending ourselves without depending on the state.” Martial arts, personal development, or leadership courses become prominent in this perspective.
Ana believes that women from the different sectors have something to learn from each other, “but the feminist perspective is often criticized by those who define themselves as ‘liberal women.’ They believe that feminism as a political movement is hegemonic and has little to contribute to their thinking.”
In recent months, several publications have appeared within liberal feminism that seek to define the essence of liberal feminism. With phrases like “libertarian feminism” and “liberal feminism,” they aim to generate an intellectual, theoretical, and political foundation for a feminism that, while linked to liberalism, does not seem to converge with other feminisms. In a political context where the opposition faces a fragmentation of its feminist and women’s movements, liberal feminism is taking shape in the streets, through the experience of women who affirm their participation in March 8th, always building their place in the debate and striving to maintain a space in the square.