The Politics of Motherhood: Maternity and Women’s Rights in Twentieth-Century Chile

Introduction

||  || I N T R O D U C T I O N I , Chilean writer Martina Barros Borgoño made it her personal task to translate into Spanish the acclaimed On the Subjection of Women, a work by Englishman, moral philosopher, and political theorist John Stuart Mill.₁ In a provocative prologue that gave her a name as a respected voice among Santiago ’s intellectuals,Barros Borgoño introduced what she considered Mill’s most important contributions to a critique of gender roles at the time, and added her own conclusions regarding the role of women in society.² She argued that Mill rightfully exposed some of the fundamental contradictions of societies where men used references to women’s “natural qualities” to justify women’s limited access to social and political rights.³ Mill had rightly identified a contradiction at the heart of patriarchy: men believed that they had a legal obligation to force women to engage in their supposed “natural vocations”: marriage and motherhood.⁴ Barros Borgoño viewed these contradictions not as an invitation to ignore all “natural differences” among the sexes, but instead as a call to question the seemingly unavoidable consequences of what men termed “women’s nature.” Why would men in Chile consider it their obligation to force women to choose between marriage and the convent? In her critique, she defended a woman’s right to make motherhood a choice and she requested women’s access to “social rights,” to an education, and to a career. Barros Borgoño provoked her readers by asking questions that had not yet been asked in Chilean society: “[W]ho would accept the tremendous responsibility of forcing you to become a wife or a nun if you had not been born with the ability to be a wife or a nun? In the name of what obligation [could anyone] . . . command such useless sacrifice for society or for God?”₅ Introduction||  || She demanded a new take on the “natural rights” of men and women, in the spirit of Mill’s liberal feminism. Both genders should have the right to select their paths based on individual “natural” abilities to avoid “useless sacrifice for society or for God.”₆ Barros Borgoño dared to question women’s “natural ,” supposedly predetermined path and argued that women’s reproductive capacities should not define their roles in society. Her concerns did not meet a widespread response during the s.They did, however, provide an ideological foundation for her compatriots in the twentieth century, who passionately debated women’s “natural” roles and “natural” vocations. Mothers and motherhood became the central concerns of different groups of women and men in Chile, including feminists, reformers, policymakers, doctors, and legislators. Motherhood and Women’s Rights Barros Borgoño’s call to question the seemingly unavoidable consequences of “women’s nature” is part of the historical trajectory of women’s rights in Chile that can be seen through the lens of the changing social constructions and political uses of the concept of motherhood. Motherhood, as the most important signifier of womanhood in Latin America, has been at the heart of the gender system and critical for defining women’s responsibilities throughout the nation. As such, different meanings assigned to motherhood have stood for different qualities associated with the supposed “essence” of femininity. The image of the sanctity of motherhood continues to shape Latin American realities.“Sacar la madre” (to bring out the mother) and question her virtue is still one of the worst possible insults.⁷ But motherhood has also stood for women’s submissiveness and dependency, justifying the lack of women’s individual rights. Stories of “mothers and machos,” of dependent women and controlling men, have often dominated interpretations of historical change in LatinAmerica . But the gendered access to citizenship rights was much more complex than the hierarchies reflected in these simple dichotomous definitions.⁸ My lens of motherhood builds on the historian Marysa Navarro’s critique of the marianismo model by showing that marianismo remains insufficient to explain even the persistent reliance on motherhood as a political tool.⁹ Referring to an ideal of womanhood modeled after theVirgin Mary oversimplifies the realities Introduction||  || of women’s lives and wrongly suggests that women have been passive recipients of roles assigned to them by men.Women, just like men, mobilized the category of motherhood, and thereby challenged the stereotype of passive, dependent mothers. In Chile, different groups of women reconfigured the understandings of motherhood throughout the twentieth...