From “La Mujer Esclava” to “La Mujer Limón”: Anarchism and the Politics of Sexuality in Early-Twentieth-Century Chile
2001; Duke University Press; Volume: 81; Issue: 3-4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1215/00182168-81-3-4-519
ISSN1527-1900
Autores Tópico(s)Political and Social Dynamics in Chile and Latin America
ResumoThe world that the unhappy woman workerinhabits is a martyr's cell,where she suffers the infamies and miseriesof life with deep sadness!Could there be some hidden powerthat makes the woman, always enslaved,accept the foolish and miserable insultof the powerful and mystical bourgeois?No! Because the sun of the Social Questionhas already brightened the minds of the people.It destroys universal ignorance,and, woman, you must study in its templesWorkers of the world! Already, the lightthat shines on human knowledgehas begun to destroy the yoke and the crossthat we have carried on our shoulders for so many years—Clara Rosa González, "Al Combate," El Acrata, May 15, 1901The paradox of the Chilean labor movement under the Parliamentary Republic is not that so little attention was given to women, but rather that there was so much. As foreign labor ideology and modes of organization reached Southern Cone countries via tides of working-class immigrants—and, in the case of Chile, through translated foreign pamphlets that circulated among workers— the question of what to do about "the woman question" provoked considerable concern among working-class activists. Amidst the growing influence of anarchist ideology and the proliferation of the "resistance societies" (sociedades de resistencia) that they promoted, anarchists were among the first working-class organizers to draw attention to the topic of female subordination. When Clara Rosa González read her poem Into Battle to a large audience of men and women gathered at a union hall in downtown Santiago in April 1901, she joined prominent male anarchists in a program dedicated to the topic of the woman question, illustrating the level of attention anarchists generally dedicated to it at the turn of the century.1 González's brimming optimism about women's imminent transformation from victims of capital into agents of revolution reflects what Chilean anarchist leaders were writing and saying about women's emancipation; most anarchist writings on the woman question in Chile prior to World War I emphasized, as González did, that libertarian education alone could free women from their historic slavery to men and capital. Such utopian claims may have seemed less so to working-class listeners in the context of anarchist propaganda, which triumphantly recorded the proliferation of women's and mixed-sex resistance societies among working women in Santiago and Valparaíso after the turn of the century.By the third decade of the twentieth century, however, attention to women in anarchist newspapers and union broadsides revealed anarchists' relatively greater skepticism about women's revolutionary potential. The publication of diatribes such as "You are like a lemon" signaled a turn to more aggressive, sarcastic rhetorical strategies after 1918, as some anarchist writers publicly upbraided women for their intransigent passivity and blamed them for the declining participation of male workers in anarchist unions. These writers no longer rendered working-class women as the incarnation of revolutionary hope, but rather as a symbol of the regressive, slavelike mentality that betrayed the revolutionary aspirations of their working-class brothers. On the one hand, the ferocity of these attacks suggests the very real frustration that anarchists might have felt in the postwar period, as marxist unionization efforts came to outstrip those of anarchists, particularly among women industrial workers. On the other, the inversion of the symbolic function of "woman" in anarchist rhetoric of the 1920s also testifies to the contradictory and unstable nature of anarchist sexual politics throughout this 30-year period, a topic that has not been sufficiently addressed in existing literature on Chilean anarchist movements.2This study examines anarchist discourses on women and revolution in Chile in these two periods, tracing the evolution of themes such as female victimization, women's emancipation, and misogyny, as they emerged and recurred in the anarchist press and libertarian pamphlets. I will focus on anarchists' role in creating, sustaining, and reshaping the Left's discourse on gender and sexuality in the context of two central arguments. First, I argue that the communalist anarchism that pervaded many working-class organizations at the turn of the century stimulated a sustained, radical critique of male domination on the part of Chile's anarchist leaders, almost all of whom were men. In their attempts to illustrate how capitalism had denaturalized human social relations, Chilean anarchists punctuated their appeals for radical sexual equality with references to prior utopian moments of harmonious, "natural" relations between men and women.3 Further, because of the ideological heterogeneity of Chile's working-class movements at the turn of the century, this critique also gave crucial ideological and organizational impetus to other political movements that were open to a gendered critique of capitalism, such as the workers' movements affiliated with the Democratic party. In a second argument, I show how international and domestic factors combined in the postwar period to fragment anarchist organization and to dampen Chilean anarchists' former enthusiasm for women's participation in revolutionary politics. Chilean anarchists' turn in the 1920s to a relatively more conservative sexual politics coincided with the shifting sexual politics of international anarchism, which everywhere struggled against more effective state repression and competition from marxist-led unions and political parties. In the Chilean case, although anarcho-syndicalism in some sense flourished in the powerful associations of shoemakers and printers and the newly established International Workers of the World (IWW), the hardening of ideological divisions with marxist-led unions after 1921 and increased state repression under the Sanfuentes and Alessandri regimes forced anarchist unions into a bitter struggle for existence, in which the stakes for worker mobilization were much higher and the political payoffs more limited than in earlier years.4 While DeShazo is correct in asserting the vital importance of anarcho-syndicalism in urban Chile in the postwar period, the Federación Obrera de Chile (FOCh) remained a more powerful force among workers in clothing, food and textile manufacturing, industries in which women workers were concentrated. Further, the Wobblies remained strongest among maritime and construction workers, two industries which by their very organization excluded female participation. Given these shifts in anarchist organization from earlier in the century—when ideological differences were less marked and libertarian ideas more pervasive—the turn of some anarchist writers to a more conservative sexual politics in the 1920s is not surprising. The overtly misogynist tone of texts such as "You are a lemon" therefore expressed some anarchists' frustration with their increasing difficulty in mobilizing male workers for revolutionary action and their limited influence over women's unions in particular. While some anarchist writers of the 1920s continued to celebrate women's revolutionary potential, others railed against the continued postponement of social revolution by attacking ready and traditional symbols of social conservatism, namely, working-class women.The sources used in this study are the short-lived periodicals generated by working-class militants in Santiago and Valparaíso—where most anarchist activity was concentrated throughout this period—as well as the translated works of Spanish, French, and Argentine anarchists that circulated in pamphlet or excerpted form.5 These newspapers and pamphlets emerged side-by-side with the new trade unions, resistance societies, and socialist "brotherhoods" (mancomunales) that made up the landscape of organized labor in Chile at the turn of the century. This labor press not only gives us access to the meetings, rallies, and groups that composed the movement, but also testifies to the high priority accorded to propaganda and education in workers societies of the period. As elsewhere, Chilean anarchists devoted considerable energy after 1900 to the diffusion of libertarian ideals not only among workers and artisans but also in intellectual and artistic circles. Although this propaganda took many other forms—from public meetings and speeches to reading circles and dramatic performances—the labor press served both to provide news about such activities and disseminate anarchist editorial commentary and instructions in libertarian ideas. The shifting network of anarchist contributors and editors, as well as their newspaper exchanges with foreign anarchists, have left us with extensive evidence about the most public discussions on the woman question within Chile's self-identified revolutionary vanguard.As rich as this labor press is for understanding the ideals that motivated Chilean anarchist leaders, it does not shed much light on how anarchist representations were perceived by their working-class readers, male or female. That certain paradigms for gender relations were repeatedly stressed by anarchist authors testifies more to the legitimacy of such ideas among working-class intellectuals and journalists than it does to their acceptance among the rank and file. Without recourse to these voices, this article remains a study in the gendered fictions that operated in anarchist public discourse. As Ann Farnsworth-Alvear has argued, such fictions are incomplete without corresponding knowledge about what she calls "real" working-class men and women; but such cultural fictions in themselves expressed working-class leaders' assumptions about gender, assumptions that in turn shaped working-class political strategies.6 Further, we can see in the content and frequency of anarchist attention to the woman question some evidence of the fluctuating appeal of libertarian constructions of radical sexual equality: whereas by 1905, female emancipation had become a rallying cry for anarchists, socialists, and mutualists alike, by 1914 this attention had dwindled to a rare mention in the labor press; by 1917, as Chilean labor movements struggled to rebuild, the woman question reemerged and, for some anarchist unionists, in a decidedly misogynist form.Given the real limits of the labor press as a window on working-class culture more broadly, one of the most significant characteristics of anarchist writings is the degree to which it was dominated by male authors and male concerns. Most anarchist texts on the woman question were authored either by men, or by pseudonymous authors who claimed to be women.7 Although Moulián and Torres have taken female pen names as evidence of female participation in anarchist politics, the fact that other women authors do appear occasionally in the anarchist press in the 1920s—and under their own names— suggests another interpretation. The use of pseudonyms was admittedly a widespread practice in the Chilean labor press, particularly among anarchists; this practice both protected anarchists from police retaliation and universal-ized their contributions by denying individual authorship.8 Frequent contributors often cultivated symbolic pseudonyms, while others simply invented names that indicated their occupations or corresponded to a particular sentiment, such as "A baker for love" or "As a poor man I have made no laws, but I have followed all of them."9 Similarly, Chilean authors who attached female pseudonyms to their articles about "the woman question" may have done so in order to increase the validity and appeal of their arguments about women.10 Such literary cross-dressing testifies not to an anarchist challenge to fixed gender roles—which these writers repeatedly embraced—but rather to the pervasive paternalism that entitled male anarchists quite literally to speak for working-class women and to define women's interests in revolutionary terms. It is therefore significant that the harshest anarchist critiques of female passivity and obstructionism in the 1920s were penned by "women," demonstrating once again that the resulting discourse was not so much for or about women as it was a further expression of male anarchists' objectives, mediated through constructions of working-class femininity.11By the turn of the century, Chile's export-led development had produced a sizeable urban labor force, which together with workers in the nitrate sector comprised the key population for building a diverse array of workers organizations in urban areas. As Santiago and Valparaíso expanded as the centers for domestic manufacturing, administration, and transport, so too did the urban working-class communities where labor activism could flourish. While seasonal migration for agricultural work and unstable employment in nitrates ensured the high mobility of much of the Chilean workforce, protectionist policies, industrial investment and increasing domestic demand for foodstuffs, clothing, and other manufactures fueled the slow growth of a more permanent industrial labor force after the turn of the century.12 Chilean industry also employed workers in ever-larger establishments: in Santiago, for example, industrial surveys recorded 17,567 workers in 1,052 factories in 1895 (about 17 workers per establishment), and 25,183 workers in just 1,086 factories by 1906 (approximately 23 workers per establishment).13 By 1918, fully 42 percent of industrial workers were employed in firms of 11 to 100 workers, while a slightly larger percentage worked in factories that employed 100 or more workers.14The leading employment sectors in Chilean industry and most of its largest factories were concentrated in food and clothing production, activities that also employed the greatest number of women workers. While many of the women migrating to Santiago at the turn of the century initially sought work as domestic servants, the changing nature of the city and its industries provided women with a more visible and troubling option, from the point of view of organized labor, that is, factory work. Although women were numerically fewer than men or children in factories producing shoes, crackers, cardboard, or paper, women predominated in the areas of making dresses, corsets, shirts, sandals, wicker furniture, cardboard boxes and wool clothing. Women also made up a significant number of workers in bakeries, and in cracker, sweet, soda water, shoe, pasta, empanada, and glass factories.15 While national census statistics show that the almost 48 percent of economically active women employed in the "industrial" sector in 1895 declined dramatically in the twentieth century (reaching a low of 26 percent in 1930), more reliable figures from the annual industrial survey reveal that between 1912 and 1925, women made up a solid third of Santiago's factory workers, and that they also predominated in clothing, textile and tobacco factories at a rate of three women to every man employed.16 All told, approximately one-tenth of the wage-earning women of Santiago worked in factory production prior to 1930, including those who took in factory outwork to be completed in their homes.17 This visible presence of women in the factory workforce after 1900 ensured that working-class women—and women workers in particular—would become a primary concern for organized labor, since their participation constituted both a threat to male wages and prerogatives and a new audience for political education.Working-class mobilization in Chile—rooted in the nineteenth-century tradition of mutualism—gained significant momentum in the final decades of the nineteenth century, as increasing numbers of Chilean workers turned first to mutualist and socialist and then to anarchist forms of organization. Although anarchist ideas arrived in Chile later and without the dramatic tides of immigrants seen elsewhere in Latin America, libertarian ideology nonetheless made an important mark on the development of Chilean labor politics. In contrast to the flood of Italian and Spanish immigrants that carried anarchism directly to the shores of Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Chilean anarchism was fostered primarily through anarchist writings that were translated and published first in Argen-tina or Uruguay and later reprinted in the Chilean labor press. Alongside the articles and editorials produced by Chilean authors—from the well-known journalist, editor and orator Manuel Montenegro to an obscure "revolutionary hatmaker"—foreign anarchist texts littered and sometimes even dominated the pages of anarchist publications. Pieces by Bakunin, Kropotkin, Thackeray, Proudhon, Tolstoy and Zola appeared regularly in Chilean papers, as did as those of Spanish and Italian anarchists such as Mir i Mir and Pietro Gori. This flow of anarchist ideology and news was facilitated by the vast exchange network that flourished between domestic and foreign presses, which conveyed news to Chile from cities as distant as Madrid, Havana, Tampa, Montevideo, Buenos Aires, and Paris. Chilean labor movements were also occasionally nurtured by visits from well-known foreign anarchists: Italian anarchist Pietro Gori visited Chile in 1901; and Spanish freethinker Belén de Sárraga traveled to Chile in 1913 and 1915. Chilean anarchists' unembarrassed embrace of European ideas testifies not only to the accessibility of those ideas, but also to the eclectic nature of working-class politics in Chile at the time.18 Despite mutual suspicion between anarchists and socialists, for example, labor activists from both tendencies frequently collaborated in pursuit of common revolutionary and syndicalist goals throughout this period.The growth of Chile's anarchist press reveals the network of anarchist workers organizations that took hold among manufacturing and transport workers in the final decade of the nineteenth century, despite employers' frequent recourse to state-supported repression of strikes and other workers' activities. Through the radicalization of many existing mutual aid societies and the proliferation of resistance societies, anarchist groups formed the backbone of labor actions in this period, such as the shippers strike of 1890 that grew into a national movement.19 Thereafter, anarchist influence grew from its enclave among shipping and port workers to include other transport, tobacco, construction and leather workers, as well as typesetters and other artisans. It was during this period that anarchist ideology exercised decisive influence among several principal organizers of the Democratic party, a reformist workers party founded in 1887 that alternately collaborated and competed with anarchist federations for workers' loyalties.20 It was also during this period that labor mobilization spread quickly among women and unskilled workers, who formed their own mutual aid and resistance societies in the predominantly female or significantly mixed trades of sewing, weaving, and shoemaking.It was these women, who worked alongside men in textile, shoemaking, and cigarette factories, who formed a primary target of the mobilization efforts of anarchists, mutualists, and Democratic party leaders after the turn of the century.21 While mutual aid organization had existed among women workers in Santiago and Valparaíso since the late 1880s, anarchist-oriented women's resistance societies also flourished after 1902 among hatmakers, seamstresses, shoemakers, textile workers, and cigarette makers.22 Between 1902 and 1908 direct action in the form of strikes and work stoppages spread to these women working in industry: female workers participated in 24 percent of recorded strikes, demanding shorter working days, better working conditions, higher wages, and reforms in factory management.23 While women's activism—like men's—was rarely tied exclusively to anarchist principles, such actions frequently combined wage and workplace demands with the goal of revolutionary change through direct action, demonstrating that anarchist propaganda and leadership had indeed deeply influenced such movements.24Anarchist influence on working men and women was not limited, however, to workers who identified exclusively with libertarian goals and methods. The trajectory of socialist organization in Chile included close collaboration and near fusion with some anarchist groups around 1900, as workers associations already allied with the Democratic party began to favor the direct action tactics employed so successfully by anarchist-led groups. This convergence was further consolidated when the marxist journalist and orator Luís Emilio Recabarren led his brotherhood-based movement away from the Democratic party to form the Doctrinaire Democratic party between 1906 and 1908.25 It was precisely during this period of anarchist ascendancy that Recabarren and other Democrats raised the banner of female emancipation and provided material and rhetorical support to the cause of female union organization. The resulting movement of "worker feminism"—analyzed more extensively elsewhere—drew its inspiration from anarchist critiques of sexual inequality, but concentrated largely on working women's economic concerns and social respectability, producing a more dramatic surge in female unionization than anarchists' more radical critique ever would.26As elsewhere in the Southern Cone, anarchist writers of the turn of the century identified the emancipation of women with the overthrow of all forms of social, economic, and political hierarchy. The first references to female subjugation in these terms appeared in 1900 in the anarchist publication La Campaña (1899–1902).27 The newspaper's editors, who exchanged their own paper for the anarchist feminist paper La Voz de la Mujer of Argentina, proved to be consistently attentive to the role of women in anarchism. For example, an article denouncing obligatory military service included women in its list of society's victims: the working-class woman appeared here as "man's slave" and the "daughter of the people," as well as a victim of the workshop "where she suffers from anemia, where she is the beast of social corruption."28 The paper went on in succeeding months to record M. J. Montenegro's and Luis Morales Morales's speeches on the women's question, report the increasing participation of women in events such as Pietro Gori's public talks, and publish a call from "Juana Rosa revolucionaria" for the mobilization of "exploited" women workers.29 This sampling of news stories from one anarchist paper accurately reflects the diverse aims of anarchists concerned with the woman question: not only to promote the idea of female emancipation among its readers, but also to educate and mobilize women—particularly women workers—in active support of revolutionary goals.Anarchist critiques of female subordination were predicated on the common theme of "the enslaved woman," or the historic tendency of men to oppress women, even as laws, technology, and education eroded the real differences between the sexes. As early as 1902, La Ajitación reprinted excerpts from the 1901 work of French anarchist René Chaughi, whose La mujer esclava was later released as a pamphlet in Chile in 1921.30 In it, he attributed the weakness of "the fair sex" to the continued sexual division of labor, which, rather than protect women, exploited their labor, and made them more dependent on their male "protectors." He dismissed male superiority as "an illusion borne of the desire to dominate," which he claimed was only poorly masked by men's apparent respect for women. Since education had not prepared them for anything but "servility," women who sought economic independence from male domination were constantly forced to choose between badly paid work and prostitution. Finally, Chaughi proposed that the liberation of women would bring about a revolution of incalculable size and the end of war: "Women's freedom," he wrote, "is the rising up of a new humanity." These two elements—–a radical critique of male power and self-interest, combined with unfailing optimism about women's capacity for liberation—also characterized Chilean anarchist writings about women, thereby demonstrating the importance of international ideological currents in the development of anarchism in Chile.31The earliest Chilean anarchist writings on the woman question closely followed Chaughi's assessment, emphasizing that the main obstacle to female emancipation was the persistence of male domination, which anarchist writers argued were upheld by bourgeois institutions such as marriage and the state. Anarchist critiques of male domination thus emphasized the oppressive and unnatural strictures of the institution of marriage, and the desirability of its prescribed remedy, free love: Magno Espinosa argued in the first issue of El Acrata that "love will not be a conventional lie, as it is now, in which women must sell their bodies like some kind of merchandise; in the future men and women will unite freely and they will enjoy that love as long as the affection that united them shall last."32 In another example, women's emancipation in the private sphere implied their subsequent participation in revolutionary struggle: "Only then will the woman, finding herself in the fullness of herself, become an active and vigorous instrument of the human community."33 Significantly, anarchist challenges to the strictures of marriage did not imply acceptance of anything other than monogamous heterosexual practice: in addition to eliminating prostitution, the same author claimed that free love would "eliminate the huge phalanx of masturbators, as well as the great evils caused by abstinence, such as insanity, hysteria, catalepsy, and nymphomania."34 The problem with marriage, from an anarchist point of view, was that it trapped both men and women in a permanent and unequal relationship, one that violated the free will of both parties.This critique of bourgeois marriage was not nearly so pervasive, however, as anarchist appeals to the harmony of working-class families untainted by capitalist exploitation. Anarchist accounts of the destructive force of capitalism directed readers' attention not only to the effects of overwork on workers' bodies but also to its insidious effects on family relations. In "The modern family," Carlos Malato decried the impoverished moral environment of both poor and wealthy families. "What kind of family is this?" Malato repeatedly asked, recounting the tragedy of the father, mother and son "working like mercenaries in a factory so that they don't die of hunger; they compete against each other and later they meet at night, after ten or twelve hours of separation; because they are exhausted and disheartened slaves, instead of words of love, they rain curses on their partners in chains."35 The pathetic virtue of Malato's working-class family, crowded in one room and beset by the daughter's unwanted pregnancy, contrasted sharply with his vision of bourgeois immorality: a father who went with prostitutes, a mother who attended parties, a son who seduced actresses, and a daughter whose only desire was to catch herself a good husband. In the paper's following issue, Luís Sanz echoed the theme of working-class family crisis by describing the plight of the costurera (seamstress). Women's continuing need to work, even when surrounded by family members, testified to the continuing poverty of the working poor: "the proletariat is not only made up of the mason, the blacksmith, the mechanic, and the carpenter, who are the only ones that we acknowledge; it is necessary to speak and act on behalf of women workers—the mothers, partners, sisters and daughters of those masons, blacksmiths, mechanics and carpenters—who are forced by their comfortable living conditions to invade factories and workshops and to comb the streets of our metropolis heading for the [job] registry and shop that wants to rent their labor at the price fixed by the fief. Hunger demands adaptation!"36 The targets of Sanz's exhortation were the bourgeois senators who proudly touted the high wages earned by male artisans. While that might be enough, Sanz implied, to satisfy the material needs of single working men, family men must demand more and "speak and act on behalf of women workers," so that women's economic sacrifice might not be made in vain. Women's economic exploitation, anarchists argued, was not an injustice leveled only against the female sex; it was also an affront to working-class men's aspirations to provide for their families, and a persistent obstacle to family and male-female harmony.Like many observers concerned with the "social question," however, Chilean anarchists most often illustrated the extent of female exploitation by dramatizing the plight of working women. Anarchist writers participated in the prevailing consensus that women's work connected to factory production—both in the workshop and at home—placed women in grave physical and sexual danger. In 1904, for example, Jerminal published H. Deprax's ode to workers, which focused on the women's work considered most emblematic of the unjust exploitation of capital: "Seamstress—you clothe the fashions / with tedious work, sticking your fingers / ruining your eyes, coughing the nights away / as the ostentatious luxury robs you of sleep. / You have no more than a shirt / to protect your weak and flaccid body / and never in your life will your needle earn / furs, silks, or splendid dresses." This verse reflects a typical portrayal of the seamstress that could be found almost anywhere in the working-class or daily press at the turn of the century. Destroyed by overwork, seamstresses were even denied the luxurious fruits of their hard work for themselves. But the poem continued, in the next verse, to lament and to exonerate
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