Affectionate Mothers and the Colossal Machine: Feminism, Social Assistance and the State in Uruguay, 1910-1932

In 1910, the Uruguayan Public Assistance Law established the concept of universal poor relief, declaring that "anyone . . . indigent or lacking resources has the right to free assistance at the expense of the state." ¹ Nothing better than this law qualifies Uruguay for its distinction as the 'first welfare state' in Latin America. ² As in other countries, much of the first social assistance legislation targeted poor women and children and relied on elite women for much of its implementation. ³ In the Uruguayan case, the primary intersections between public assistance and private philanthropy were the secular "ladies' committees" (comités de damas), charitable organizations without direct ties to the Catholic Church. These organizations were also an important catalyst for liberal feminism in Uruguay, whose chronology--from the foundation of the National Women's Council in 1916 through the women's suffrage law of 1932--closely parallels the history of the early Uruguayan welfare state. Following a discussion of the formation of the National Public Assistance and its significance for class and gender politics in Uruguay, this article will summarize the evolving relationship between the Uruguayan social assistance bureaucracy and one of these groups, the Sociedad "La Bonne Garde," an organization that worked with young unmarried mothers. It then discusses how a formal and direct relationship with the state helped make the Bonne Garde and other groups like it a principal point of entry for many elite women in the early phases of Uruguayan liberal feminism. ⁴ Finally, this article shows how processes set in motion in the 1910s resulted in a relative marginalization of elite women from both state welfare and organized liberal feminism in the 1920s. Through an examination of the history of these ladies' committees, we gain new insight into both welfare state formation in its earliest Latin American example as well as some of the elements and circumstances which helped shape liberal feminism in Uruguay.

Elite Women and the National Public Assistance:
Historical and Political Background

The roots of this ambitious reform project can be found in Uruguay's somewhat idiosyncratic post-independence history. Specifically, Uruguayan scholars have argued that the very weakness of the institutional infrastructure and of the social and political elite in the nineteenth century facilitated an ambitious state-building project in the twentieth. ⁵ Historian Francisco Panizza has argued that in Uruguay as in Argentina, "the general prosperity of the years 1905-1915 meant that expansive and redistributive policies were possible." But whereas in Argentina "nineteenth-century liberal institutions took the form of political representations of oligarchical hegemony," in Uruguay the landed elites were weak and disorganized as a result of prolonged post-independence civil wars and other factors. The result, he argues, was that "the modern Uruguayan political system was consolidated as a liberal state under non-oligarchical hegemony." ⁶ This also meant that the Uruguayan Catholic Church--never a strong institution in Latin American terms--was further weakened by this liberal dominance over the state-building process. It is important to underline here that the Uruguayan elite and the Church were relatively weak, not absent or ineffectual, and the state still ultimately counted on their cooperation in order to function. ⁷

The modern state that emerged during the first decades of the twentieth century is known as the estado batllista, named for the symbolic father of the Uruguayan welfare state, José Batlle y Ordóñez, president between 1903-1907 and 1911-1915. Largely a secular refashioning of Social Catholic ideology, the batllista state was conceived of and positioned as a mediator between conflicting groups. ⁸ The word often used to describe this protective action of the state was 'compensation': the state was to actively compensate for social and economic inequalities that were seen as a natural and inevitable outcome of capitalism. Batlle consciously defined himself (and by extension his Colorado party and the Uruguayan...