Labors Appropriate to Their Sex: Gender, Labor, and Politics in Urban Chile, 1900-1930 (review)

As part of a growing body of groundbreaking scholarship on women and gender in Chilean history, Hutchison's Labors Appropriate to Their Sex makes an important contribution to the existing scholarship on working-class women in early twentieth-century Latin America. This well-researched study details working women's agency and activism during this era, and demonstrates the ways in which changing definitions of work, the family wage ideal, and protective labor legislation reinforced the secondary status of working-class women in Chilean society.

The first part of the book is a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the place working women occupied in society, politics, and the economy. Most interesting is Hutchison's critique of the Chilean census, which shows a steady decline in women's workforce participation from the mid-nineteenth century through 1930. The author argues convincingly that what changed during these years was not so much women's quantitative participation in the workforce as the methods and definitions of census takers. Women were more likely than men to work shorter intervals and shorter hours, to labor inside their homes, and to be secondary wage earners. Hence, more formal and "modern" definitions of work left women workers seriously undercounted. Hutchison also provides a comprehensive overview of women's participation in the Chilean labor movement and a nuanced discussion of the images of working women in the anarchist, socialist, and communist labor press. She demonstrates that a precarious "worker feminism" persisted during these years, despite the increasingly central place that the family wage and notions of female dependency occupied in labor discourse (97).

The second part of the book explores attempts by reformers to provide assistance to the working woman and to enlist her as an ally in "countering the advance of socialism and corresponding feminisms in Chile" (172). Chapters 5 and 6 examine vocational schools aimed at working-class women and the efforts of Catholic damas to provide assistance and moral guidance to their less fortunate sisters. These programs benefited many, but their long-term effect was to strengthen the existing gender division of labor and bolster conservative values of female domesticity. The last chapter details protective labor legislation passed during the 1910s and 1920s. Labor inspectors' reports used in this chapter provide unusual insight into the everyday conditions faced by women factory workers and highlight the gap between legislation and enforcement. That middle-class inspectors like Elena Caffarena eventually became leaders in the Chilean suffragist movement testifies to the complex interactions between state formation and feminism in twentieth-century Latin America.