Labor and Gender in the Chilean Town and Country

Elizabeth Quay Hutchison. Labors Appropriate to the Their Sex: Gender, Labor, and Politics in Urban Chile, 1900-1930. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001. xv+ 342 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-8223-2732-5 (cl); 0-8223-2742-2 (pb).

Heidi Tinsman. Partners in Conflict: The Politics of Gender, Sexuality, and Labor in the Chilean Agrarian Reform, 1950-1973. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002. xi + 366 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-8223-2907-7 (cl); 0-8223-2922-0 (pb).

When I was entering graduate school in the early 1970s, Chile's experiment with socialism was in full swing and I intended to study the Chilean working class and its labor movement. At that time there was a steady stream of books focused on Chile's various movements for social change. Then, just as I was getting started, the 11 September military coup took place, repression set in, and the gains of the labor movement (along with opportunities for studying it) were dashed on the rubble of the Casa Moneda as the heady moment of the Chilean road to socialism ended abruptly. As the nineteen-year-long Augusto Pinochet dictatorship settled in, many researchers from the United States and United Kingdom turned elsewhere. One key exception was Peter Winn, who studied the textile workers at the Yarur plant. ¹ Winn's account detailed the way in which revolutionary ideology transformed the plant workers' lives, leading them to expropriate the factory from the owners only to lose out in the repression that all workers met at the hands of Pinochet's henchmen. The story of Yarur has been a famous one, and until recently there were few other accounts of radically transformative experiences among Latin American workers.

For all of its virtues, Winn's study included only a cursory discussion of the gender relations in the textile plant. Indeed, none of the accounts of trade union militancy and the effects of industrialization made much mention of women and ignored gender dynamics altogether. ² Fortunately, recent scholarship has amended the record and has emphasized the role of gender in the emergence of the modern industrial and labor movement, both in Chile and elsewhere. ³ Within this scholarship, these two books on Chile stand out. Both examine the relationship of women and women's labor to the fuller economic and political life of Chile in the twentieth century, yet each does so through different paths.

In Hutchison's study, women's relationship to the production process, their treatment at the hands of employers and the state, and their often unsuccessful attempts to organize, stand at the heart of the book. She meticulously reconstructs factory life, women's role in the economy, their place in the production process in a variety of factory settings, and their role in modernizing Chile. As she states, her study "explores the origins, motives, and objectives of debates on women's urban work in Chile over the first three decades of the twentieth century to show how these debates influenced broader developments in labor politics, women's activism, and state formation" (3).

The book resembles in some ways Susan Besse's work on Brazil, which traced the changes in women's lives and gender relations in the early twentieth century. ⁴ Besse emphasized attitudes toward middle-class women who were increasingly occupying the public sphere, whereas Hutchinson examines mainly transformations in the work force as well as the way those changes both affected working-class women and were perceived in the broader society. In Chile, as Hutchinson points out, the appearance of women in the public arena was so disturbing that they seem to have been expunged from the record. Although currently and historically, nearly one-fourth of Chilean "workers" were and are female, confined as they are to marginal, casual, outwork, and domestic labor, their importance in the labor force has been ignored in histories of the era.

The...