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

Tinsman's book examines rural gender relations during a crucial moment in Chile's agrarian history. She uses a variety of sources, including oral histories, government documents, and court records, to construct a complex—but densely written—argument about the impact of the Chilean Agrarian Reform on rural women. Her first claim is that rural gender ideologies arose out of anxieties about female sex and sexuality. Next she argues that the Agrarian Reforms of the 1960s and 1970s reinforced these gender ideologies by distributing land almost exclusively to male household heads. Finally, Tinsman addresses a major issue in Chilean political history, namely, that leftist candidates received as much as 25 percent less support from women than they received from men. She concludes that although by 1973, the left had improved its polling among rural women, it never closed the rural gender gap because agrarian reform policies favored men much more than women.

Tinsman's numerous oral histories allow her to argue convincingly that for peasants themselves, sex and sexuality provided the basis for gender ideologies that emphasized the subordination of women to men. Although this line of argument may not seem compelling at first glance, Tinsman's informants consistently and explicitly cited male fear of female adultery and sexuality as the explanation for men's economic and physical control of wives, daughters, and sexual partners. The typical worry might be that such oral histories might be unrepresentative or that personal memories might have been distorted in a systematic way by subsequent history. In this case, however, there is no reason to suppose a systematic bias in any particular direction. Tinsman presents too many cases for her arguments to be based on atypical individuals. Moreover, the frankness of her informants on the subject is often disarming. One of them told her simply, "In town, there is too much danger of [a man] having the cap pulled over his eyes" (187).

Tinsman presents striking evidence that women and men experienced the agrarian reforms differently and that specific state policies aggravated female subordination. Like other scholars, she points out that reform policies consciously sought to favor male head-of-household and to encourage the ideal of unremunerated female domestic work. However, Tinsman again draws on an extraordinary wealth of oral histories to document how these policies worked in practice. Some of her particularly dramatic examples demonstrate that even spouses could have different memories of the same agrarian reform events (275). Thus does Tinsman show not only distinct gender experiences but also enduring memories on the ground of the gender politics of the era.

Tinsman is less successful in her claim that agrarian reform policies can account for the persistent gender gap in left-wing political support. Following other arguments in the literature, she explains the initial gender gap as the result of lower rates of female registration among likely leftist voters (214-217). To make her argument convincingly about the effect of the agrarian reform, she would need to demonstrate that the persistent gender gap was not the result of a continuing lag in female voter registration. However, she presents no data about the evolution of rural voter registration during the period, and her oral histories give no clear instance of women voting against the left because of gender politics. In fact, Tinsman presents cases of women who supported the left despite their nonconformity with agrarian reform gender politics (276).

On the whole, Tinsman is most persuasive when able to draw effectively on her wealth of oral histories; these sources open up new ground for the study of peasant women and peasant families. They are less useful in the matter of feminine political participation in Chile.