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Good Wives and Unfaithful Men: Gender Negotiations and Sexual Conflicts in the Chilean Agrarian Reform, 1964 –1973

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

10.1215/00182168-81-3-4-587

1527-1900

Heidi Tinsman,

Political and Social Dynamics in Chile and Latin America

On 14 February 1972 Hilda Gutiérrez Sánchez, described in judicial records as an “older housewife” living on a state-managed farm in rural Chile, charged a 25-year-old agricultural worker, Juan Pérez Hernández, of attempting to rape her while she was harvesting beans. She told the court that Pérez had passed under the barbed wire separating their places of work and sexually propositioned her while four of his male coworkers watched. She said that, although she had replied that she was a married woman, Pérez threw her to the ground and began ripping her clothes. Gutiérrez claimed she prevented the rape by screaming, at which point all of the men fled, but not before Pérez hit her and menaced, “You’re lucky I don’t have a knife!”1 All four of Juan Pérez’s coworkers testified that Hilda Gutiérrez was lying. Despite their contradictory accounts (two men reported that she was not even working in the field that day; two others maintained that, while she had been, they had heard no cries of distress), all of the men, together with Pérez’s father, defended the accused’s innocence on the basis of his honor. One testified to Pérez’s “shy and peaceful character,” another to the fact that he was a “responsible and hard worker, a man without vices,” and still another to Pérez being a man who “doesn’t [sexually] play around and is incapable of this kind of behavior.”2Hilda Gutiérrez also defended the veracity of her story on the basis of honor. She stressed her married status and attempts to resist even in the face of personal danger (Pérez’s threat about what he would do with a knife); and she submitted a statement from a local women’s organization testifying to her upstanding character. Marked with the thumbprints and signatures of 17 of her comembers, the document sternly condemned Pérez’s depravity and called for his severe punishment in order to protect young girls from future attacks. Finally, the women challenged the integrity of the investigation:Juan Pérez responded with an attack on Gutiérrez’s sexuality. While finally admitting that he had crossed over the fence to see her, he insisted this had been at her request, that she had asked him if he had a girlfriend and insinuated that she wanted to have sex, and that she had challenged his manliness when he honorably declined:This case began in 1972 on Valentine’s Day, two years after Salvador Allende Gossens was elected president and began taking Chile down what he hoped would be a peaceful road to socialism. A policy known as the Agrarian Reform, which was begun in 1964 by a reformist Christian Democratic government and accelerated by Allende’s Popular Unity (UP) coalition after 1970, had already expropriated nearly half of Chile’s agricultural land and reorganized it into peasant cooperatives and state-managed units like the one where Hilda Gutiérrez and Juan Pérez lived in the Aconcagua Valley, one of Chile’s oldest and most productive agricultural regions.5 The Agrarian Reform had also initiated the massive political mobilization of the rural poor. Almost a quarter million campesino men (most likely including Juan Pérez) would join unions by the end of 1972; and tens of thousands of youth and women (including Hilda Gutiérrez) were being incorporated into neighborhood organizations.6 Literacy classes, housewives’ committees, expanded housing and healthcare services, and Chile’s first sex education and family planning programs were all rapidly reshaping the contours of campesino life. Ideas about masculinity and femininity, including ideas about sex, were in flux as the state and the rural labor movement officially encouraged all campesino men and women to become conscious creators of a new society. Fights about sex had long been important to the way rural men and women negotiated their obligations and entitlements.7 But during the Agrarian Reform, rural poor people in Aconcagua and elsewhere in rural Chile embraced new sexual expectations and fought about sex in ways that differed from the pre-1964 world of great haciendas. This signaled how the Agrarian Reform was transforming campesino sexuality as well as how rural men and women were negotiating the process of political mobilization in sexual ways.Feminist scholars have long argued that gender shapes all social relationships and political processes and that sexuality is crucial to defining gender difference in the first place.8 But until the last decade, Latin American historiography as a whole tended to regard feminist work on Latin American gender and sexuality as a minor story, separate from the main narratives about class struggle, national politics, and economic development.9 In recent years, a number of scholarly works have set a very different tone by making gender and sexuality central to broader histories about such diverse subjects as subaltern colonial life, independence wars, state formation, social reform, populism, and the labor movement.10 Scholars have argued that dynamics of gender and sexuality are crucial to understanding the politics of history generally as well as to relating how people experience and negotiate their lives on a daily basis. Analysis of gender and sexuality has pointed not only to the diverse and unequal experiences of men and women but also to the way in which gender disparities create social power, exacerbate social conflicts, and undermine solidarities. Here, gender and sexuality are viewed not as providing a supplemental story with interesting details but as key to how historical processes unfold.This essay examines the significance of married men and women’s gender conflicts over sex to the labor struggles and political conflict of Chile’s Agrarian Reform between 1964 and 1973.11 It argues that married campesina women began to elaborate upon a long-standing female responsibility for the family in order to more closely tie concepts of female respectability to ideals of modern domesticity; and they increasingly objected to what they saw as men’s expanded sense of sexual license. Campesino men’s concept of masculine worthiness came to straddle two ideals: on one hand, the paternal figure of a responsible head of household and, on the other hand, the sexually assertive and politically militant comrade whose first loyalty was solidarity with other men. As the Agrarian Reform accelerated and became more volatile after Allende’s election, the multiple gender ideals increasingly clashed. As rumors spread about impending civil war, married campesina women, in particular, increasingly understood the escalating class conflict in terms of a deterioration in sexual responsibility.New conflicts over sex were apparent in the rape case involving Hilda Gutiérrez and Juan Pérez. In the Aconcagua district of San Felipe, where it was filed, the case was highly exceptional.12 The majority of rape cases that ended up in court in the late 1950s through the early 1970s involved very young women, often prepubescent girls. Determining the veracity of rape charges usually relied on evidence of a girl’s prior virginity, sexual ignorance, and/or mental incapacity.13 Hilda Gutiérrez was older, married, a mother, and perfectly sane. Yet she felt strongly enough about the matter to bring Juan Pérez to court, and gambled that she might convince the judge to rule in her favor on different criteria. Significantly, the statement from the Mothers’ Center urged that the court needed to recognize and vindicate an older woman’s honor in order to spare future dishonor to young girls. In a twist that departed from traditional markers of female virtue in rape cases, Gutiérrez’s defenders proposed that it was her very status as wife and mother that made her honorable—an implicit contrast to the more sexually suspect predilections of single women and adolescents, whose virtue the Mothers’ Center simultaneously claimed would be protected through their action.The case was also exceptional in that it became a public affair that appears to have divided the community. It was the only case, revealed either in judicial records or in oral histories used for this study that involved an organized response from a women’s civic organization, not only invoking women’s moral authority to defend a woman’s honor but also questioning the ability of the court to protect it.14 The reference to “outside influential parties” corrupting the investigation may pertain to state bureaucrats, labor activists, or political leaders from the Agrarian Reform unit where Juan Pérez worked. Hence, the case potentially pitted a housewives organization against an all-male union, state-managed farm and/or representatives of the Popular Unity state.Whatever the missing details, Hilda Gutiérrez’s case against Juan Pérez illustrated the ways that the Agrarian Reform had reshaped women’s and men’s self-understandings and differently positioned them within a process of dramatic social transformation. It also underscored how gendered expectations and grievances were understood in terms of sexual conflict. In their testimonies, both Gutiérrez and Pérez mobilized the official gender ideals that had been promoted by the Agrarian Reform since 1964, and especially after 1970. Gutiérrez presented herself as an upstanding wife and mother, but added evidence of her work in seasonal harvests as a bean-cutter and stressed her political activism and leadership within the Mothers’ Center. Pérez’s defense was built on arguments that he was an honest and hardworking laborer who respected and was respected by other men of his state-managed farm or union. Pérez attacked Gutiérrez’s claim to virtuous female character by maintaining that it was she, not he, who had been sexually irresponsible and aggressive. Invoking double meanings of manliness, he suggested that, while he had been manly (righteous) enough to decline Gutiérrez’s advances (out of loyalty to the sexual claims of Gutiérrez’s husband, his friend), he would have been manly (virile) enough to comply with the proposition were it not for his standards of sexual taste (Gutiérrez was not desirable). Women flatly denounced this masculine posturing. Through the collective voice of the Mothers’ Center, they affirmed Gutiérrez’s honor and condemned Pérez’s sexual license (as well as his overindulgence in alcohol) as dangerous enough to merit his expulsion from the community.Between 1964 and 1973 both the Christian Democratic and the Popular Unity governments defined cooperative marriages between hard working, responsible male breadwinners and domestically able female helpmates as fundamental to building a new rural society.15 Although similar domestic models had been encouraged among the urban and industrial working classes throughout the twentieth century, it was only after 1964 that they were extended by the state on a mass scale to the rural poor.16 Between 1964 and 1973 the Christian Democrats and the UP redistributed land almost exclusively to married adult men with children, based on their status as “head of household.”17 The state ran elaborate technical training programs to prepare men to become stewards of the land and labor activists began organizing men into unions. Adult campesina women gained access to land only through husbands and other male family members. With a few exceptions, the Agrarian Reform called upon women to build the new society by becoming modern housewives.18 Both the Christian Democrats and the UP sponsored organizations like the Mothers’ Center to which Hilda Gutiérrez belonged, that offered craft and sewing projects and instructed women on how to frugally manage household budgets and serve balanced meals to children.19The policy of giving land to men and promoting domestic partnership built upon existing gender divisions of labor in latifundia society. By 1955 men already comprised 94 percent of all permanent workers on haciendas, and the vast majority of campesina women survived within male-headed families.20 But the Agrarian Reform substantially transformed the meaning of “agricultural worker” and the possibilities of campesino households. In the 1950s, hacienda workers lived in the abject poverty and extensive servitude of Chile’s inquilinaje system, in which over 80 percent of irrigated land was controlled by less than 10 percent of the population and semipeons owed labor on haciendas in return for the use of subsistence plots.21 Most sectors of Chilean society regarded all campesinos as inquilinos (peons) and saw them as backward and racially inferior.22 In contrast, the Agrarian Reform hailed the liberated campesino man as the key to modernizing Chilean agriculture and celebrated new codes of masculinity based on political militancy, productive independence, and familial responsibility. Both Catholics and marxists spoke of the Agrarian Reform as a process of turning campesino “children” into “real men” and of making each man his own patrón (boss). The rural labor movement gave campesino men a powerful political voice at the national level and urged them to be activist citizens by carrying out strikes and land occupations. Even for men not belonging to Agrarian Reform production units, extensive labor guarantees passed in 1967 and a 600 percent raise in real wages during the decade made male breadwinning a reality in ways it never before had been.23Meanwhile, for adult campesina women, notions of what constituted good and honorable work increasingly emphasized the domestic. Prior to the Agrarian Reform, campesina women cared for children and prepared meals, but they also raised livestock, farmed subsistence plots, sold homemade cheeses, took in outside laundry, and earned wages during harvest seasons and as domestic servants.24 Although in the large hacienda regions such as the Aconcagua Valley, men’s more permanent employment as estate workers was given priority over women’s work, both men and women recognized what women did as critical to the household’s material survival and they rarely distinguished between work women did in the house from work done outside it. In contrast, the Agrarian Reform’s emphasis on transforming the means of production (defined as the redistribution and cultivation of the large estates) and its focus on men as the primary protagonists in this endeavor forced a definition of what women did as “nonproductive.”25 Between 1964 and 1973 rural women continued to perform almost the exact same types of labor they had in latifun-dia society, but this work was increasing referred to “helping out” or as “home-based,” in contrast to men’s “breadwinning.” Combined with the celebration of women’s roles as wives and mothers, “domesticity” and “housewife” emerged as more clear-cut categories for defining women’s experience. As one Mothers’ Center pamphlet described the purpose of assisting campesinas’ labor,The definition of women’s labor as domestic is particularly striking given that the Agrarian Reform considerably expanded women’s paid agricultural employment. Thanks to the expansion of fruit and vegetable cultivation, women were offered jobs during planting and harvest seasons: Whereas in 1964 just over five hundred women earned wages in seasonal agricultural employment in the Aconcagua Valley, by 1975 over two thousand did.27 Yet in oral histories, most campesino men and women recalled the Agrarian Reform as a time “when women didn’t work” and most prescriptive literature from the period addressed women mainly as housewives. On one hand, the discrepancy flows from the fact that new agricultural jobs went disproportionately to adolescent girls and unmarried women, a majority of whom were probably in their twenties or younger.28 As Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt has noted, gendered definitions and experiences of work vary significantly according to generation and marital status.29 But the idea that married women’s work was domestic was also heavily ideological and a direct product of Agrarian Reform discourse. Some married did work for wages in new agricultural jobs, but such work was defined as temporary (and, indeed, it lasted only a few months) and supplemental to a wife’s responsibilities at home. For those married women who labored in and around their homes, they continued to perform almost the exact same types of labor they had in latifundia society (including productive farm work and livestock raising on subsistence plots and family plots); but such work was labeled as “helping out” and outside what the agrarian reform defined as the economic realm: commercial estates and proletarianized workers.At the same time that the Agrarian Reform more clearly separated husbands’ and wives’ responsibilities and distinguished between youths and adults, it emphasized principles of gender harmony and family cooperation. Under both Christian Democratic and Popular Unity leadership, all campesinos were urged to see each other as partners in the joint project of community uplift and class struggle. The rural labor movement promoted the idea that a good wife understood the importance of the Agrarian Reform and supported her husband’s struggles.30 Women were invited to join picket lines and union marches and praised for providing meals to striking workers.31 Men were told that a good husband should better esteem these wifely labors. State-run literacy and adult education programs admonished husbands, as a 1968 manual from the state Institute for Agricultural Development put it, “to respect the vital roles that women play as home managers and educators of children,” and to communicate more openly with their women “so that wives can appreciate their spouses’ daily routines.”32The celebration of gender collaboration built upon long-standing campesino notions of reciprocity, but much more explicitly implied limits to men’s unilateral action without female consent. Prior to the Agrarian Reform, married women had exercised authority in decisions regarding children and subsistence gardens, but they did not routinely handle family finances. Men usually had the ultimate say about the allocation of family labor (including their wives’), frequently without consulting their spouses.33 The Agrarian Reform’s gender mutualism asked men to confer with women and to obtain their approval, while the idea that women should manage the household budget theoretically gave women control of men’s wages. Gender mutualism also provided unprecedented institutional spaces for women. If union membership was reserved for men, the all-female Mothers’ Centers provided campesinas with a state-sponsored, nationally recognized structure that represented women’s interests as housewives at public and political events.34 They promoted the idea that a “good” woman was involved in civic life; in exceptional cases (like Hilda Gutiérrez’s), they provided vehicles for women to collectively defend women’s honor and challenge men’s behavior.The ethos of gender mutualism was especially promising for campesina women in matters of sex. In 1964 the Christian Democrats initiated Chile’s first national family planning program with heavy financial backing from the Rockefeller Foundation and U.S. Alliance for Progress.35 Rural clinics were built and hospitals expanded to provide women with gynecological, prenatal, and postpartum care. Family planning seminars offered basic instruction on human anatomy and contraceptive use, and stressed men’s and women’s mutual responsibilities as parents. Cartoon pamphlets from the National Health Service and Chilean affiliate of Planned Parenthood warned campesino men against the foolishness of equating virility with the number of children one fathered, and argued that modern men had manageably sized families that they could adequately support.36 Campesina women were urged to become more knowledgeable about their bodies and to see female reproductive cycles as natural and healthy. They were also encouraged to collaborate with men about whether smaller families would be achieved by using contraceptives or foregoing sexual intercourse during ovulation. Under the UP, family planning programs went still further. The Ministry of Education began developing a curriculum to teach sex education in the school system so that “Chilean children and adolescents [could] enter into a society in which sex is a natural and happy fact situated in a cultural context free of falsehoods, superstition, fear, and commercial exploitation.”37 Abortion was permitted on a limited scale in state hospitals (although it remained illegal), and the minister of health advocated sex education for adults that would “help [couples] secure the right to separate reproduction from the exercise of their sexual lives.”38 A vocal, but frequently marginalized, feminist camp within the UP linked all of these matters to women’s emancipation and revolutionary success. In a pamphlet on women originally published by the UP but not distributed, communist feminist Virginia Vidál labeled sexual violence, male impotence, and female frigidity national political problems and boldly argued that women’s ability to decouple sexuality, motherhood, and marriage was crucial to building a socialist society:All of this marked a major change from the past. In oral histories conducted for this study as well as for others, campesina women who grew up in the 1940s and 1950s recalled, almost without exception, that they knew little or nothing about menstruation, sexual intercourse, pregnancy, or childbirth until the very moment that such events occurred in their lives.40 Women bore “the children God sent,” on average seven, and Chile’s rates of maternal death, infant mortality, and abortion were statistically among the highest in the hemisphere.41 In Aconcagua, 80 percent of rural women eventually married and another 6 percent lived with permanent partners.42 Although they saw sex as a “natural” part of marriage and usually viewed children as a blessing and positive sign of feminine fertility, women maintained that they had little control over the terms and frequency of sex with husbands and that they often associated it with men’s violence and inebriation. In Aconcagua, rural women married later than their urban counterparts (on average at age 24 as opposed to the Santiago average of 22).43 Campesinos placed a minimal importance on women’s premarital virginity and pregnancy was frequently a precursor to a couple becoming betrothed. At the same time, adolescent girls and young adult women were expected to marry men with whom they became sexually active because of the high likelihood of a pregnancy. Before such an event, campesino parents attempted to heavily restrict daughters’ interactions with men; and, once married, wives were expected to be sexually loyal to husbands.For men, having a wife and many children was a marker of maturity, good fortune, and sexual prowess. But men also defended their right or need for extramarital liaisons; among men, such activities usually signified manliness. For the almost one-third of male agricultural workers who regularly migrated in search of work, it was not uncommon to have multiple lovers and families throughout the country. Most of these men never married.44 In the case of permanent hacienda residents, men more carefully guarded exclusive access to one wife by restricting women’s contact with other men. This was never entirely possible, given poor men’s labor obligations away from home, the need for women of all ages to work as domestic servants and field hands, and the sexual license (often coercive) assumed by a supervisor or patrón. However, the principle of men’s right to police women’s mobility for sexual reasons was widely accepted and men often opposed wives’ work away from subsistence plots and family residences precisely for this reason.Family planning programs were intended to promote less controlling and unequal sexual expectations. They defined limiting family size and joint decision-making by husbands and wives as “modern” behavior and equated modernity with what was desirable and respectable. Although most family planning projects took for granted and reinforced existing principles of female sexual fidelity to husbands, they strongly suggested that men should show more fidelity (more respect) to wives, even if this amounted to less than perfect sexual loyalty. They also insisted that adult women should have a say on how and when a couple had sex and that women, rather than men, should be in charge of enforcing codes of female sexual responsibility. After the election of Allende, there was significant public discussion about separating issues of sexual fulfillment (especially women’s) from procreation. Despite the quashing of Virginia Vidál’s feminist manifesto on female desire, these issues were being raised in ways they never before had been. Sex education and expanded gynecological services offered women more knowledge about over their bodies and the de facto permission of abortion encouraged safer and more available pregnancy terminations.45 In addition, the UP moved to abolish distinctions between “illegitimate” children (born outside marriage) and “legitimate” children (born within marriage). Although the government argued that its intent was to “end unfair discrimination against innocent children” (a quarter of all children in the Aconcagua district of San Felipe were born out of wedlock), it simultaneously implied eliminating the legal stigma against common-law spouses and single mothers.46The Agrarian Reform’s promotion of gender mutualism between spouses was popular among campesina women. Married women welcomed the public validation of their child-rearing and household labors, while the directive for husbands to collaborate with and respect their wives gave teeth to older notions of reciprocity. Men’s dramatically increased wages, combined with the promise of access to land, improved the standard of living of the entire family and eased women’s responsibility for making ends meet. Importantly, there was no widespread opposition by campesina women to the Agrarian Reform’s redistribution of land to male “heads of household.” Most campesina women already lived in male-dominated families in which subsistence plots were entrusted to men, even if women’s agricultural labor was critical to the household’s survival. What was new and welcome was not the primacy of men’s economic activities but the expectation (and increased reality) that men would support their dependents in ways that diminished women’s burdens and allowed them to dedicate themselves to the now more ennobled office of wife and mother.But husbands and wives often disagreed sharply over what constituted good behavior. Adult rural men were enthusiastic about being taken seriously as economic producers; but, whereas wives interpreted the ethos of gender mutualism to mean that husbands should give them more respect and autonomy, men often interpreted it to mean that women should support and obey their husbands.47 This rift was aggravated by the Agrarian Reform’s celebration of a brand of campesino manhood that emphasized male agency, militancy, and being one’s own boss. Men’s political maturity was measured both by an ability to collectively stand up to employers and to take charge of one’s own household. As a organizer-training manual explained, campesino men needed to act on the consciousness that they could give their own orders rather than meekly follow those of others:Although the word “domesticate” (domesticar) implied a broad range of relationships of containment and subordination, it was most closely associated with women, and in particular, with female domestic servants. Women and servants naturally took orders from others. The manual juxtaposed political consciousness and masculine autonomy with femininity and female spaces. In contrast to women and the domestic realm, unions allowed men to decide things for themselves, placing them in the world of action. Indeed, to be truly manly, a man exercised his authority as household head by giving commands at home. In some ways, this encouraged men to continue exercising tight (or even tighter) controls over women as displays of a restored masculinity. Men were particularly wary of the state and the labor movement’s education and organizing efforts for women. In oral histories, both men and women recalled that husbands often objected to their wives’ participation in Mothers’ Centers because it distracted from their responsibilities at home. They also claimed that men frequently forbade wives to attend literacy programs or union marches because they saw politics as inappropriate for women and because such activities would presumably allow women contact with men outside their family.49 Some women bitterly recalled their lives as becoming more isolated after the Agrarian Reform since men’s much higher wages curbed the need for married women to take seasonal agricultural jobs or domestic service positions.50Campesino women and men also disagreed over the meaning of campesino economic obligations within the family. Married men did not readily hand wages over to wives, despite the fact that women were being told that they should manage household budgets. Men saw their much-improved incomes as reward for their labor and political work and understood control over money to be part of being a household head. However, as wages replaced payments in kind, women were increasingly dependent on cash to provide meals and clothing to families. Men’s decisions over how much money women needed and who would make cash purchases clashed with women’s growing sense of entitlement to men’s earning power. Anita Hernández, a campesina from the village of Santa María, explained this in an oral history:In some cases, women abandoned all hope of partnership with their spouses. Sonia Araya, a campesina from Los Andes, became so frustrated that she asked her husband’s employer to give her a portion of his wages each month, “seeing tha