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  • Women, Family Formation, and the Welfare State in Latin America
  • Susie S. Porter (bio)
Ann S. Blum . Domestic Economies: Family, Work, and Welfare in Mexico City, 1884-1943. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009. xliii + 351 pp., ISBN 978-0-8032-1359-3 (pb).
Donna J. Guy . Women Build the Welfare State: Performing Charity and Creating Rights in Argentina, 1880-1955. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009. 194 pp. ISBN 978-0-8223-4330-1 (pb)
Nara B. Milanich . Children of Fate: Childhood, Class, and the State in Chile, 1850-1930. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009. xv. + 376 pp., ISBN 978-0-8223-4557-2 (cl), 978-0-8223-4574-9 (pb).
Jadwiga E. Pieper Mooney . The Politics of Motherhood: Maternity and Women's Rights in Twentieth-Century Chile. Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2009. xiii + 201 pp ISBN 978-0-8229-7361-4 (cl); 978-0-8229-6043-0 (pb).
Nichole Sanders . Gender and Welfare in Mexico: The Consolidation of a Post-revolutionary State. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011. 176 pp. ISBN 978-0-271-04887-1 (cl).

In 1992, the historian Silvia Arrom pointed out that, for Latin America, the field of family history flourished prior to that of women's history.1 Since the time of Arrom's observation, Latin American women's history expanded considerably, often in close relationship with family history. The books under review demonstrate the benefits of considering the two fields in tandem. Each author focuses on different research interests: children, family formation, women's labor and organizational activities, maternal health, and women's rights. All speak to how gender relations within and across families informed interpersonal relations, family formation, labor, and political mobilization, while paying particular attention to cross-class relations and the perpetuation of socio-economic inequality. Moreover, these books contribute to important debates regarding the maternalization of women's rights, or the way "motherhood" has served as a central [End Page 212] identity by which women's rights have been formulated. Taken together, these scholars speak to the specificity of women's mobilization in different Latin American countries and show the way distinctive class relations in each country shaped family and women's history.

Nara Milanich's Children of Fate examines childhood within the context of family formation in Chile between 1850 and 1930. Family history has been a robust field of inquiry since the 1970s, focusing primarily on the colonial period and on class-specific family formations. Milanich explores the early republican period and the ways family formation created and reinforced class hierarchies. Working with judicial and notarial records and the papers of a Santiago orphanage, she traces various forms of filiation and the responsibilities and obligations of that relationship. Several factors defined filiation, or how an individual was related to a child, such as civil law, vernacular fosterage (extra-legal adoption), and compadrío (fictive kinship relations), which tied people together by affection and/or obligation.

Through civil law, the Chilean state played an important role in filiation by defining a child as either legitimate (hijo de familia) or illegitimate (hijo natural or hijo simplemente ilegítimo), and regulating the rights and responsibilities associated with each status. In Chile, as in most Latin American countries until the mid-nineteenth century, legal code stipulated that parents must provide food and moral tutelage for both legitimate and illegitimate children. Women could take fathers to court to gain financial support for sustenance (alimentos). The legal and cultural rights that this implied resulted in a modest safety net for illegitimate children and their mothers. Indeed, Milanich shows that the courts found in favor of women's demands for alimentos in over half of the cases she analyzed, while an additional 14 percent ended in settlements favorable to women and their children (46).

By the 1850s, however, women and their illegitimate children lost rights. Liberal reform swept Latin America during the mid-nineteenth century, with contradictory results. Whereas politicians who touted liberalism declared the primacy of the rights of the individual, as they revised civil codes, women and children lost legal rights and authority within the family. For example, the reformed Chilean Civil Code (1857) altered the means...

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