Gendered Compromises: Political Culture and the State in Chile, 1920-1950 (review)

Gendered Compromises is a brilliant demonstration of how critical gender was to state formation, national identity, and working-class politics during the popular front governments in Chile (1938–1952). Rosemblatt’s study offers new insights and challenges accepted assessments about this pivotal period in modern Chilean history. She argues that relations between the elites who ran the popular front governments and the subalterns who composed its base were fraught with conflict and compromise, a reality that most other scholars have ignored. She also demonstrates that the popular classes enthusiastically supported the popular fronts, another point that scholars have failed to recognize. Rosemblatt attributes popular approval to the enhanced sense of power that members of the lower classes experienced as a result of their ability to influence government policies, and to the increased material benefits they obtained.

As this book makes abundantly clear, women and men shared neither these benefits nor the reality of empowerment equally. Rosemblatt’s rich discussion of the connections between state formation and the gendered distinctions made by and about men and women, on all levels and in a variety of spaces, constitutes both one of the main themes of the book and her most significant contribution to scholarship on Latin America.

The development of the modern Chilean nation and state guided the popular fronts’ political project. To achieve this goal, the governing elites sought to industrialize the nation, create an educated and compliant working class, and solidify the heterosexual nuclear family as the base upon which this modern and unified nation would be built. In the process, they also initiated the modern welfare state, which, as Rosemblatt points out, both reflected and constructed gender relations. Men, as workers, contributed to the progress and wealth of the nation. Therefore, they were entitled to certain rights as members of the productive class, rights that the popular fronts pledged to defend. This vision identified women as wives and mothers, not as workers, and thus deserving only charity.

Rosemblatt argues that negotiations, not force, characterized relations between the political elite and the subaltern. Popular front elites labored to convince working-class men that proper masculinity meant respectability and sought to persuade working-class women that femininity meant being housewives and mothers. The passage of the family wage law reinforced this conception of gender because it guaranteed higher wages and increased benefits to the male worker and made it much more difficult for women to obtain steady and well-paid jobs. In return, men were to abandon dissolute vices such as alcoholism and womanizing and become responsible heads of households. Large numbers of working-class men accepted this arrangement (and gave up their excessive drinking and “antimarriage sentiment”) because they knew that in return they would receive “state support for their wage claims” and they would be the “undisputed heads” of the family (68).

Independent economic survival did not prove viable for the majority of working-class women. The gendered structure of work meant that most women could not find jobs and if they did they were paid a pittance. As a result, marriage offered them a (more) secure and attractive alternative and most of them accepted it.

However, some women challenged the gender roles. In 1935, a group of women closely affiliated with the Communist Party founded MEMCh, the Movement for the Emancipation of Chilean Women, a progressive, feminist organization. It countered prevailing ideas about gender and argued that women should be independent of men economically and otherwise. One of the key questions of twentieth-century Chilean women’s history is why wasn’t MEMCh able to sustain itself (by the late 1940s it basically ceased to exist). Rosemblatt answers this question clearly and convincingly. Much of the MEMCh leadership was middle-class, while most of its base was working-class. Both the class and the party relationships produced tension. Many working-class women prioritized their “class” interests, which for them...