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

Elizabeth Quay Hutchison's book is a meaningful study of a neglected topic: women workers as part of working-class history. Hutchison addresses the role of working women in early-twentieth-century Chile, where the growth of urban manufacturing transformed the contours of women's wage work while stimulating public debate, legislation, educational reform, and social movements aimed at workers. Hutchison argues that previous historians have wrongly taken at face value census figures that show a dramatic decline in female employment in industry after 1907. A closer examination of the records reveals that women's participation shifted, rather than evaporated: female labor was informalized by a combination of domestic sweatshops and changing definitions of employment, with the result that much of it disappears from the census by 1930. The author also claims that changing norms of gender and work in Chile were central factors in conditioning the behavior of male and female workers, relations between capital and labor, and political change and reform.

Hutchison divides her book into two parts, dealing with, respectively, the labor movement and the private and state project of Chilean elites. She first sets the stage and then develops what I think is her best chapter. Drawing on a diverse group of sources and interpreting them in a thoughtful way, she convincingly lays out her argument regarding the disappearance of working women from census records between 1907 and 1930. This is followed by two chapters that examine the response of organized labor to women's increased visibility in the urban workforce. The second part of the book explores the ways in which women's paid labor became the locus of anxiety among elites, who were alarmed by the changes resulting from industrial and urban growth. This section begins with a chapter on how industrialists and their allies in the elite set out to modernize Chilean industry and rescue women from poverty by establishing industrial schools for girls. The next chapter examines the attempts of elite women to address what they perceived as a gendered social crisis by educating, organizing, and protecting women workers. Finally, Hutchison analyzes how and why legislators debated laws and regulations intended to mitigate what they considered to be the undesirable effects of female employment on working-class families.

Like many studies of modern Chile, this analysis is grounded almost entirely in the perspective of the country's leading city, Santiago. Occasionally, Hutchison gives some glimpses of Valparaíso and Viña del Mar. However, further insights might, for example, have been gained by including Concepción, always considered Chile's third most important city and its most radical one. At the same time, Hutchison's archival research is limited to two collections in the National Archives, the records of the Dirección General del Trabajo (1906-30) and the Ministerio de Industrias y Obras Públicas (1887-1911). This material provides a broad overview and is very useful for some of the questions studied in the book. However, Hutchison's principal sources are magazines and periodicals. Her reliance on these in her discussion of women's exploitation and the "labors appropriate to their sex" means that her analysis does not shed fresh light on those themes. On the contrary, it narrows her analysis and limits her perception of the problem.

Hutchison employs feminist theory derived from the well-known work of Joan Scott to analyze the ways in which gendered ideologies shaped the politics of social reform, labor, and the Left. Unfortunately, this analytical perspective has usually been associated with political histories that focus only on the ways in which gender ideology shapes cultural and political discourses and state policies. This point of view leaves no...