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Labors Appropriate to Their Sex: Gender, Labor, and Politics in Urban Chile, 1900-1930 (review)
- The Americas
- The Academy of American Franciscan History
- Volume 60, Number 2, October 2003
- pp. 273-275
- 10.1353/tam.2003.0110
- Review
- Additional Information
The Americas 60.2 (2003) 273-275
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Hutchison's outstanding book chronicles the reality of, and the debates surrounding, women's waged work in urban Chile in the early twentieth century. The most comprehensive and far-reaching monograph to date on women and work, Hutchison's book surveys not only changes in women's paid labor but also the diverse discourses of workers, feminists, Catholic social activists, state officials, and politicians. It also provides wonderful discussions of private and public efforts to improve the conditions of women workers, showing how forms of working-class self-help, traditional charity, and private welfare shaped later state initiatives. Throughout, the author convincingly demonstrates the deeply gendered nature of law, politics, and policy.
Hutchison begins by noting that in the early years of the century industrialization and women's migration to cities facilitated the entrance of urban women into paid labor. Surveys of the manufacturing sector showed an increase in women workers. Although census figures showed a decline in women's workforce participation after 1907, Hutchison shows that these figures reveal more about what surveyors considered "work" than about the actual numbers of working women. Census takers increasingly categorized as nonworkers those who worked intermittently or in the informal sector.
Subsequent chapters explore a variety of responses to women workers' increased visibility in the city. Union activists claimed that to avoid the brutal sexual and economic exploitation women experienced in the workplace, women should remain in the home under the protection of male relatives. In so doing, Hutchison suggests, they linked women's sexual and economic autonomy. The author also notes how the figure of the abused woman worker came to symbolize the downtrodden, emasculated working-class as a whole. Even so, labor leaders recognized women's need to work and incorporated women into unions. Male leaders mobilized women as mothers [End Page 273] and daughters and as "virile" militants. The author's reading of the worker press is nuanced and insightful.
The worker feminists who emerged from labor circles are examined in a separate chapter. These pioneers injected a novel idea into worker discourse by proposing that working-class men, as well as capitalists, exploited women. However, they also sought to unite the "family of labor" and believed that the long run women workers should return to the home. Hutchison's unearthing of a Chilean working-class feminism is a major discovery and her explication of their complicated ties to labor makes a signal contribution to our understanding of the relation of feminism and socialism. Overall, Hutchison's treatment of the labor movement is exemplary in that it both lays out the diversity of worker opinion and points to shared patriarchal elements.
Unlike workers, industrialists interested in women's cheap labor minimized the negative aspects of women's work, and state-sponsored vocational schools sought to teach women skills that prepared them for industrial labor. Though students in these schools manifested ample interest in skills that would lead to factory work, as educators and politicians interested in protecting women's respectability took control, the schools increasingly taught domestic economy and prepared women to make crafts at home.
Like labor activists, Catholic women evinced a marked paternalism, seeking to create organizations for working women rather than encouraging those women to organize themselves. Yet unlike male workers, Catholic activists underscored women's right to work. Hutchison argues that this novel position was less a recognition of poor women's need for—and right to—employment than a justification for the presence of middle- and upper-class women in sales and clerical positions and in the liberal professions. Hutchison thus adds to prior work on feminism by revealing the frailty of a cross-class women's solidarity during this time period. She also insists on the necessity of including Catholic women in the...