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Writing the History of Women and Gender in Twentieth-Century Chile

2001; Duke University Press; Volume: 81; Issue: 3-4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-81-3-4-493

1527-1900

Thomas Miller Klubock,

Anarchism and Radical Politics

Three historical moments have, I believe, shaped the recent boom in historical literature on women and gender in modern Chile. First, the experience of the socialist Unidad Popular (UP) government of Salvador Allende has been critical in several ways. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Chile attracted scholars with a commitment to social reform, socialism, and the revolutionary projects of the 1960s. Histories of peasants and workers sought to shed light on the processes that produced the Western Hemisphere’s only explicitly marxist labor movement and democratic transition to a socialist economy and state. These studies built on the foundations laid by Chilean marxist historians and social scientists who wrote groundbreaking studies of mine workers, the early labor movement, and leading figures in the Left, such as Emilio Recabarren and Elías Lafertte, founders of the Chilean Communist party.1 Both Chilean and North American historians located their social-historical focus on (male) workers and peasants, ignoring working-class women, questions of gender inequality, and women’s political activism. This emphasis reflected both the politics and the historiography of the time, the subordination of women’s interests and feminist politics to the leftist revolutionary project of the UP, and the marginality of women’s history in the United States as well as in Chile. In addition, historians imbibed many of the prevalent assumptions, persistent to this day, about women’s political conservatism and passivity, and failed to see this image of the “traditional” Chilean woman as a contested ideological construct whose material conditions of historical production required analysis and unpacking.Nonetheless, the interest in social history, labor history, and the history of the Left inspired by the UP has shaped much of the gender history being written today. In Chile, many historians and social scientists began to write women’s history after participating in women’s movements and political movements tied to the Left, and turned to feminist history and activism as a response to their disenchantment with the often sexist politics and sometimes misogynist cultures of the labor movement and the leftist parties. A number of women’s historians sought to insert women into the history of the early labor movement in order to recover moments of feminist activism.2 While earlier social and labor historians examined male industrial workers, miners, and agricultural laborers to explain Chile’s unique history of a marxist labor movement and powerful socialist and communist parties, historians, such as Julietta Kirkwood, Cecilia Salinas, and Edda Gaviola, employed feminist theory to reexamine the historical relationship of women’s movements and activism with the Left and organized labor.Second, the 1973 military coup had a radical impact on the politics of writing Chilean history. The devastating defeat of the UP by the Chilean Right, the military, and the United States government provoked a profound rethinking of the history of labor and the Left. The disillusion of many leftist historians and social scientists (who were writing in exile or working for NGOs in Chile) led to new critiques of the Unidad Popular and a focus on social movements and social actors, the urban poor and women most prominently, that had been ignored by the labor/Left historiography’s definition of class in terms of industrial workers and miners. Consonant with, but not as a direct consequence of, second-wave feminism in the United States and Europe and the emergence of women’s history as legitimate disciplinary practice, historians and social scientists with ties to the women’s movement also began to produce a critique of the role of women and feminism in Chilean politics and the Left. In addition, as Peter Winn has pointed out, one of the results of the 1973 coup was the academic diaspora of Chilean intellectuals and historians who were exposed to new trends in Europe and the United States, including post-marxist cultural studies and women’s history.3Third, the central role played by women in the 1983–86 popular protests against the Pinochet dictatorship known as las protestas and during the campaign for the “No” in the 1988 plebiscite on Pinochet’s rule also led to a new concern with the history of women’s political activism.4 Under the military dictatorship, as in other Latin American countries experiencing authoritarian rule, women played a central role in the human rights movement early on, particularly in the Agrupación de Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos formed in 1975–76. In poor urban neighborhoods (poblaciones), women organized workshops (talleres) and soup kitchens (ollas comunes) in response to the high urban unemployment, deindustrialization, and cuts in public spending and services provoked by economic “shock therapy.” In addition, feminist activists began to organize in small groups, beginning with the Círculo de Estudios de la Mujer in 1977, which gave rise to the centers for research and activism on women’s issues Centro de Estudios de la Mujer and La Morada and the feminist political organizations Mujeres por la Vida and MEMCH83 (amply documented in the various collections on women and social movements in Latin America). During the early 1980s, women’s grassroots social and economic organizations in the poblaciones established the basis for alliances between these feminist groups and the social movements of working-class women. In these popular social movements, what Maxine Molyneaux has termed women’s “practical” interests became increasingly entwined with their “strategic” gender interests. Most notably, the Movimiento de Mujeres Pob-ladoras combined demands for services and respect for human rights with a feminist critique of authoritarianism, the neoliberal economic model, and the everyday practice of patriarchy at the levels of state, community, and household.5The development of a historiography of women and gender during the 1990s was sparked as much by the dynamic social movement of poor women and feminist women’s organizations as by the development of the practice of women’s history as a discipline. In Chile, the practice of women’s history emerged from the pobladora and women’s movements of the late 1970s and early 1980s, since the formal academic and disciplinary spaces where it might otherwise have developed were restricted by the dictatorship’s purges of the universities. Las protestas were particularly important because for many they represented the political protagonism of those sectors traditionally written out of the more orthodox marxist narratives of class and the traditional political strategies of the Left. Feminists, women, and the urban poor (pobladores), rather than industrial workers unions or the leftist parties seemed, to be the subjects of the social movements that sought to topple Pinochet.Two works were central to the development of women’s and gender historiography during this period: Gabriel Salazar’s Labradores, peones y proletarios and Julietta Kirkwood’s Ser política en Chile.6 Both books reflected the academic influence of the 1980s literature on “new social movements,” inspired by writers like Alain Tourraine and Manuel Castells, in which themes like the role of foreign capital in the economy, economic dependence, conflicts over land and production, and the history of the labor movement were replaced by a concern with the histories of multiple subaltern (rather than working-class) sectors, the formation of “subaltern” identity and subjectivity, and subaltern movements’ historical conflicts with the state.7 The focus of both works on the “popular” and on “social movements” reflected changes in the Chilean economy imposed by the military dictatorship’s neoliberal model of economic development. The deindustrialization caused by the regime’s free-market policies undermined organized labor’s base among male factory workers and sparked new urban social movements in which women and pobladores, rather than unions, were major participants. Whereas Salazar focused on the disruptive effects of the late-nineteenth-century process of peonización that expelled both men and women from the countryside and propelled women into labor in the informal commercial and service sectors, Kirkwood examined the ways in which the Pinochet dictatorship’s economic policies a century later produced many of the same effects by “imposing wage work on an unprecedented number of women in absolutely deplorable conditions” and transforming women into heads of households, as well as breads winners (p. 42). In this sense, both Salazar and Kirkwood turned to the history of women in response to the radical economic restructuring that had devastated urban and rural communities, thrown women into the informal and service sectors, and made them heads of households, as well as to women’s increased grassroots activism. Their works described analogous moments of economic and social transformation during the late nineteenth and late twentieth centuries.Salazar’s work on the bajo pueblo provided a groundbreaking social-historical portrait of landless laborers in the countryside, rural towns, and cities, and addressed the role of women in nineteenth-century rural economy, society, and culture.8 The last chapter of Labradores, peones, y proletarios on “el peonaje feminino,” one of the first social-historical treatments of subaltern women in Chile, adopted a romantic posture toward “women of the people” as “loyal to the creole cultural tradition” (in contrast to cosmopolitan upper-class women) and as promoters of “the development of new forms of popular sociability and cultural expression” (p. 260). Salazar highlighted the centrality of “women of the people,” first within indigenous communities and then peasant communities, in producing a semiautonomous popular economy. The wide range of women’s productive, artisanal, and commercial activities helped to sustain the subsistence base of the household economy while itinerant male peones traveled the country in search of work. During the nineteenth century, thousands of women, like men, were expelled from the countryside and settled in the suburbs of large cities, where they worked selling drinks, food, and providing lodging and entertainment. Salazar pointed to an independent trajectory of female peonaje, underlining the ways in which this female population was the backbone of an alternative popular culture as well as the target of the moralizing campaigns of social reformers and the state.While Salazar sought to write a social history from below of women of the popular sectors, Julietta Kirkwood, in her pioneering Ser política en Chile, attempted to write a gendered history of modern Chile from the perspective of both women’s history and feminist theory.9 Kirkwood located the origins of her intellectual project in the conversations and debates that circulated within women’s groups during the late 1970s and early 1980s and the feminist movement that posed a powerful challenge to the Pinochet dictatorship. Inspired, like Salazar, by the 1980s literature on new social movements, Kirkwood distinguished between “organic” popular movements of environmentalists, ethnic groups, and women and social movements tied to political parties. She sought to unpack the tensions and contradictions between feminist movements and demands and the project of human liberation based on class struggle that had animated the Chilean Left and the Unidad Popular. For Kirkwood, the challenge for the women’s movement was to analyze the organization of patriarchy at different historical moments, to explore how popular social movements had confronted the question of women’s oppression and to trace the historical trajectory of feminist politics.Kirkwood provided a sweeping history of women’s political activism that spanned the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and included the first efforts by women to assert their political rights in 1875, the role of women in the strikes and protests of nitrate mining communities, the creation of women’s centers (Centros de Belén Zárraga) in 1913 and the articulation of a feminist politics tied to the anarchist and socialist labor movement of Chile’s north, the upper-class women’s “Club de Señoras” in 1916, the Partido Cívico Feminino in 1919, the establishment of middle-class women’s groups during the 1920s, and the founding of the leftist Movimiento Pro-Emancipación de la Mujer Chilena (MEMCh) in 1935. Like Cecilia Salinas’s La mujer proletaria and the volume Queremos votar en las próximas elecciones, published around the same time, Kirk-wood sought to recover women’s involvement in the activities of the labor movement, Left, social reformist politics, and early feminist movements.10 In addition, she explored women’s weak support for the UP and their apparent political conservatism, arguing that this was not something essential to the character of Chilean women, but rather was rooted in the day-to-day authoritarianism experienced by women of all classes in the patriarchal household. The lack of gender democracy within the Left and the labor movement as well as the Left’s inability to speak to women’s everyday experiences of patriarchy made women receptive to the Right’s efforts to mobilize them against the UP. Like Salazar, Kirkwood underlined the tensions between popular movements and political parties. She argued that during the 1980s women’s role in movements for democracy was defined by the conflict between feminist demands for the democratization of gender relations as a necessary condition for overthrowing authoritarianism and making movements for democracy truly democratic (“No hay democracia sin feminismo”) and the assemblies of the female political militants in the parties of the opposition that made a return to democracy the condition for feminism (“No hay feminismo sin democracia”), subordinating the demands of the women’s groups that had formed during the late 1970s.11Kirkwood and Salazar established two distinct frameworks for the development of the historical literature on women and gender in Chile. First, Salazar’s work has inspired a rich social-historical literature on women of the bajo pueblo during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly by Chilean historians, while Kirkwood’s feminist rendering of Chilean history has provided a map of themes and questions that historians of gender have developed in a number of monographs and research projects. Kirkwood’s reexamination of the history of the UP, the Left, and popular social movements from the perspective of patriarchy and women’s contestations of masculine authority in feminist movements has been particularly influential in much of the work done by historians writing in the United States. The articles in this special issue by Hutchison, Rosemblatt, and Tinsman, for example, reflect a common interest in reworking the history of key moments of social reform, revolution, and state formation during the twentieth century from the vantage point of feminist theory and women’s history. Other historians in the United States have examined the role of the feminist MEMCh in politics during the 1930s and 1940s and right-wing women’s movements in opposition to the UP.12Salazar’s brief history of female peonaje has influenced a growing social-historical literature on working-class women during Chile’s years of export-oriented economic modernization and growth. Historians such as Alejandra Brito, Soledad Zárate, Lorena Godoy, Catalina Arteaga, Leyla Flores, and Consuelo Figueroa, to name a few among many, have written deeply researched and insightful studies of the lives of rural and urban women of the “popular sectors” during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.13 These studies provide detailed analyses of women’s work during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in regions as diverse as the rural town of San Felipe in the Aconcagua Valley, the coal mines of Lota, and the capital city of Santiago, documenting the ways in which working-class women brought the culture, lifeways, and forms of labor and economic enterprise developed in the countryside to towns, industrial and mining centers, and urban conventillos (tenements), often as independent migrants during a period of economic growth and modernization. Throughout Chile women supported themselves by taking in washing, sewing, and boarders in an extension of their traditional labors within the domestic sphere. In addition, women baked empanadas and brewed aguardiente in their homes and then sold their goods in the streets in comercio ambulante or in ranchos in urban areas and mining camps. Many also established their own small businesses, where they provided music, dancing, and drinking, or found employment as cantina workers or prostitutes. In urban areas, women also worked in workshops and garment factories and as domestic servants, the major occupation for women for much of the twentieth century.14Historians have demonstrated that during these decades a significant population of independent single women worked for themselves, headed families, and had either serially monogamous or nonmonogamous relationships with men. These women enjoyed a social and economic autonomy that offered them the possibility of freer and more fluid relations with men, since they were not as dominated by household patriarchy as middle- and upper-class women. Cantinas and brothels, often owned by women, became centers of recreation with music, drinking, and dancing, recreating the rural communitarian traditions of the chinganas and women continued to play a central role in popular festivals, selling food and alcohol, in ramadas, establishing the central networks of sociability for urban popular sectors.15However, far from celebrating the independence and agency of working-class women, as does Salazar’s somewhat idealized portrait of women of the bajo pueblo, women’s historians also underline the historical constraints patriarchy imposed on women in terms of economic insecurity, violence at the hands of male companions, lovers, and husbands, and the efforts by social reformers, the state, and the Catholic Church to supervise and impose order on their lives. Although women engaged in diverse forms of economic activity, their possibilities for wage labor continued to be restricted by a sexual division of labor that defined higher paying jobs in industry, agriculture, and mining as male; they experienced chronic economic insecurity as well as the terrible conditions of urban slums. Historians have examined judicial and police records to uncover the ways in which women of the popular sectors paid the price for a certain level of economic and social autonomy. Urban spaces were defined not only by the economic and social networks established by women, but also by the overcrowded and cramped hallways of conventillos, fights between female neighbors, and domestic violence by male companions and husbands. In addition, working-class women were vulnerable to municipal authorities’ campaigns to eliminate ranchos from the suburbs of cities and towns and to regulate prostitution and the economy of popular leisure and recreation run by women.The social-historical literature on women of the bajo pueblo in Chile introduces a number of questions drawn from feminist theory about the writing of women’s history. The project of recovering “hidden” histories of women and restoring the historical agency and subjectivity of subaltern women has been linked to the feminist political project of the second-wave 1970s. During the 1980s, feminist scholars, influenced by postmodernism and postcolonial studies, began to question some of the assumptions of the historiographical and political project of women’s history. As Kirkwood sought to rethink the conventional political narratives of modern Chilean history from the perspective of gender, and to examine the historical process of patriarchy, feminist critics, most notably Joan W. Scott, argued for a move from compensatory “herstory” women’s history to the history of the role of gender as an organizing principle.16 Feminist historians and critics demonstrated the complications in historical efforts to recover women’s “experience” and “agency.” The phrase “women’s history” masks the heterogeneity of women’s experiences and of women as a historical category, and artificially separates experience from the symbolic cultural and ideological systems and contexts that make historical experience meaningful and intelligible.17 Much of this work demonstrates that just as the category of the “subaltern” or “the popular” elides social distinctions and differences based on class, ethnicity, and gender, there is no unitary female experience or even homogeneous group of women, even among the bajo pueblo in the countryside and city. Feminist critics have insightfully argued that the very category of “women” is historically contingent and constructed.18Similarly, feminist critics have argued that experience separate from language, culture, and ideology does not exist; experiences are shaped by the ways in which they are understood and represented discursively. Can we write social histories of subaltern women that ignore the ways in which experience and subjectivity are produced in interaction with forms of ideological and cultural production and social discipline generated by elites and the state? Recent feminist historical approaches demand that women’s history be analyzed in terms of the historical organization of gender relations and systems that determine both femininity and masculinity. The history of women of the bajo pueblo is defined by the process of state formation and by the disciplinary apparatuses that constitute both women and men as subjects, even as they regulate their labor and sexuality and cannot be taken as independent or autonomous. This raises the methodological problem of reading women’s experiences through the records of courts, prisons, upper-class charities and social reform agencies, and the church. How do working-class women make their voices heard in this documentation? Reading against the grain, can we get a sense of the social and cultural worlds of women or of counterhegemonic ideas and behavior in the arenas of gender and sexuality?One response to these feminist critical approaches to the writing of women’s history has been a turn to Michel Foucault’s radical constructionist understanding of gender and sexuality. Foucault’s argument, in works such as The History of Sexuality, that sexuality and subjectivity are “effects” rather than causes or foundations, the constructions of “epistemes” or “power/knowledge” systems, has inspired a number of historians to move from the historiographical and political project of recovering the experiences of women of the bajo pueblo and establishing their changing social and economic roles during the process of economic modernization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to a genealogy of the institutional and discursive systems that operated to discipline women and impose order on their social and economic activities.19 Feminist historians, drawing on the work of Foucault, have pointed to the ways in which the state, social reformers, the church, and industrial employers targeted single women who lived and worked in rural towns and urban suburbs in their moralizing campaigns for social reform. In addition, they have traced the emergence of new institutions like prisons, asylums, and orphanages and the development of professions like medicine, social work, and criminology in terms of a broader disciplinary project aimed at women of the popular sectors in the name of producing modernization and modernity. In doing so, they have added a concern with the history of sexuality and reproduction to the historical project of documenting women’s social and economic activities.In a study of prostitutes in the city of Antofogasta, for example, Leyla Flo-res examines the ways in which organizations like the Liga Chilena de Higiene Social and the medical profession sought to promote social reform by regulating prostitution and imposing a “phallocratic ideology of female sexual passivity” on working-class women.20 In another case, Soledad Zárate describes how the technification and professionalization of medicine during the late nineteenth century led to the displacement and exclusion of female midwives who had played a major role in women’s healthcare, particularly in care for pregnant women.21 A similar Foucauldian approach animates María Angélica Illanes’s pathbreaking history of healthcare and social reform in Chile.22 In addition, Zárate examines emergent criminological discourses implemented through institutions like the charity Sociedad de Beneficiencia and religious orders in hospitals, orphanages, asylums, poor houses, and prisons. Here, her work coincides with the work of historians like Lorena Godoy and Elizabeth Quay Hutchison on industrial education offered women in vocational schools23 Schools run by the Sociedad de Fomento Fabril and the Ministerio de Obras Públicas established a curriculum for working-class women, focused on their moral education and their preparation for domestic responsibilities. While they provided training for women as seamstresses for garment workshops, they also offered classes in domestic economy, hygiene, and manners in order to prepare women to be housewives who administered the family budget, raised their children, and cared for their husbands.24This analysis of the ways in which early-twentieth-century social reforms were shaped by gender ideologies and involved the disciplining of working-class women’s social behavior through new scientific discourses and emergent professions that offered technocratic responses to the social problems provoked by modernization and urbanization also animates Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt’s study of the Chilean popular fronts. Rosemblatt, like Zárate and Flores, draws on Foucault to analyze the ways in which the formation of the social welfare state built during the Radical-party-led “Popular Front” Left-Center coalition governments of the 1940s involved the disciplining of “disorganized, improper family life and uncontained sexuality.”25 Rosemblatt seeks to show how the nationalism of the Popular Front was shaped by a reformist commitment to producing modernity through scientific and technocratic interventions in social problems that constituted the imposition of order on popular classes. As Zárate, Flores, and Illanes examine the role of religious orders, hospitals, asylums, prisons, and the professionalization of medicine in the regulation of working-class or “popular” female sexuality and social behav-ior during the 1880–1930 period, Rosemblatt insightfully describes the role of feminist and socialist reformers and professionals, especially doctors and social workers, in building state apparatuses that carried on this mission of resolving social conflict through the imposition of the norms of “rationalized modernity” and the expansion of state power in the lives of popular sectors during the 1940s.Despite their Foucauldian theoretical commitments, however, in these works there is a tension between an inclination to write the social history of working-class women and an analytical focus on the disciplinary apparatuses and regulatory systems which govern women’s live and constitute their subjectivity. While employing Foucault’s understanding of the radical constructedness of subjectivity, his blurring of the lines between subject and subjection, these studies suggest that a social history of subaltern women can be inferred from the discursive and institutional systems designed to produce normative ideas about sex and gender. In addition, these analyses insert a concern with the central role of gender in organizing social power and cultural signification into “decentered” genealogies of the systems of knowledge and institutions that discipline both women and men and constitute their gender identities. They implicitly raise the question of the commensurability of feminist and Foucauldian historical analysis: is the circulation of forms of discursive power that produce the subjectivities and sexualities of men and women so decentered that we can’t discuss a fundamental, perhaps even structural, historical dynamic rooted in men’s subjugation of women? As a Foucauldian approach undermines structural marxist analysis, might it also displace feminist critiques of patriarchy in favor of less structural “multiple” and “microhistorical” exercises of power and domination? For Foucault, the subject of historical genealogy was sexuality rather than gender, precisely because he was interested in the “capillaries” of power generated by the production of knowledge about sexuality, rather than more totalizing ideological and social-structural forms of inequality invoked by the use of gender. A Foucauldian history of sexuality, while it fruitfully departs from women’s history by including men and underlining the historical contingency of both femininity and masculinity, may not allow for a critique of the historical dynamics that define men’s subjugation of women as a central principle of social organization and political power. While Foucault’s work is useful in focusing attention on the historical construction of sexuality, his contention that historical subjects are effects of heterogeneous microcircuitries of power and desire, as Gayatri Spivak argues, neglects the role of [gender] ideology in the reproduction of [patriarchal] social relations.26The feminist histories that use Foucault are careful not to mystify the operation of discourse or the epistemic power/knowledge systems. Instead, they combine Foucauldian approaches to the technologies and techni