Partners in Conflict: The Politics of Gender, Sexuality, and Labor in the Chilean Agrarian Reform, 1950-1973 (review)

This magnificent monograph sustains the centrality of gender and sexuality in reassessing the successes and failures of Chilean agrarian reform between 1964 and 1973. In so doing, Heidi Tinsman makes a major contribution to our understanding of Agrarian Reform by exploring how politics, labor, land tenure, and sexuality are inextricably linked to gender. The gendered nature of campesino culture rather than its economy or its politics takes center stage in the unfolding of radical agrarian politics. This is a story of inequality in which men were empowered more than women and where patriarchal authority was left unchallenged. Although Chilean women are generally excluded from the benefits of agrarian reform, Tinsman disagrees with other scholars who have argued that they did not benefit or participate in the Agrarian Reform project and were hostile to radical agrarian politics in general.

Drawing on methodologies coming from anthropology, gender studies, cultural studies, and social history the author carefully constructs a marvelous case study of agrarian reform in the Aconcagua Valley, interweaving it beautifully with the national, urban-inspired projects of independent Catholics, Christian Democrats and the Popular Unity. In pre-reform Chile latifundism and minifundisim coexisted side by side in the Aconcagua Valley. Inquilinaje was on the decline, while the use of temporary and occasional male and female labor was on the rise by the early 1960s. Patriarchal patterns of authority continued to be shaped by the male patron-peon relationship, and they had an overriding influence on the campesino family and the gender division of labor. The second chapter is a tour de force in its use of oral interviews of men and women, civil records, and judicial records to uncover the nature of campesino sexuality and to challenge earlier studies that contended campesino gender relations were backward and dysfunctional. The author shows how patriarchal power is about men's sexual authority rather than economic or political predominance. Although sexuality lay at the root of the campesinos' claim to authority over their wives' and daughters' activities, women did find ways among themselves to limit their pregnancy, protest wife beating, and engage in premarital sex.

Eduardo Frei Montalva's Agrarian Reform program was based, argues the author, on the assumption that the male-headed household was synonymous with national progress and political peace. Thus, the reconstituting of masculinity, usurped by the old patron, was essential for the creation of a new, self-confident class of small producers and true citizens. Both Catholic and Leftist labor organizers conflated gender and class antagonisms to champion militancy towards the boss, the exclusion of women from landownership and unions, and public display of macho attributes. PDC reformers also promoted the idea of "gender mutualism" to solidify the campesino family and society. Dialectical tensions arose within gender mutualism, however, for it promoted simultaneously the reconstitution of masculinity and the uplifting of women. Just as with Lázaro Cárdenas' cultural project in Mexico, women were indirectly brought into the reformist project to modernize rural society, not as controllers of land or union members, but as sustainers of the family. The PDC's rural education, mothers' centers, and family planning programs all revealed mother/housewife-centered goals, but women took their first steps towards empowerment through these programs.

The UP Agrarian Reform project was also based on a gender hierarchy, Tinsman claims, where men served as the prototype of the citizen-man and the natural steward of women. However, the socialist plan envisioned the revolutionizing of female roles in the future. The UP expanded women's participation through maternalist politics in mother's centers or neighborhood councils rather than in trade unions. The key link to integration of women into the work force was via the transformation of the asentamiento into a unit...