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Chile
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Writing the History of Women and

Gender in Twentieth-Century Chile

Thomas Miller Klubock

T hree 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 criti-
cal 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 Reca-
barren 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 gen-
der inequality, and women’s political activism. This emphasis reflected both

Section photo: “Chilean Communist Party Meeting (ca. 1934).” Courtesy of Emperatriz
Villarroel.
1. Among these works, see Hernán Ramírez Necochea, Historia del movimiento obrero:
Antecedentes siglo XIX (Santiago: Ed. Austral, 1956); Jorge Barría Serón, El movimiento obrero
en Chile: Síntesis histórico–social (Santiago: Ediciones de la Univ. Técnica del Estado, 1971);
Michael Monteón, Chile in the Nitrate Era: The Evolution of Economic Dependence (Madison:
Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1982); and Eduardo Devés, Los que van a morir te saludan: Historia
de una massacre, Escuela Santa María Inique, 1907 (Santiago: Nuestra America, 1989). For
histories of male urban and industrial workers, see Peter DeShazo, Urban Workers and Labor
Unions in Chile, 1902 –1927 (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1983); and Peter Winn,
Weavers of Revolution ( New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986). For rural workers, see
Brian Loveman, Struggle in the Countryside: Politics and Rural Labor in Chile, 1919 –1973
(Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1979). For a more recent work that examines women,
see the pioneering social history of life and labor in the province of Tarapacá by Julio Pinto
Vallejos, Trabajos y rebeldías en la pampa salitrera: El ciclo del salitre y la reconfiguración de las
identidades populares, 1850 –1900 (Santiago: Univ. de Santiago, 1998).

Hispanic American Historical Review 81:3 – 4

Copyright 2001 by Duke University Press
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494 HAHR / August and November / Klubock

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 con-
struct 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 move-
ments 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 agri-
cultural 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 promi-
nently, 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

2. See, for example, Cecilia Salinas, La mujer proletaria: Una historia por contar
(Santiago: Ediciones LAR, 1987); Edda Artiga Gaviola et al., Queremos votar en las próximas
elecciones: Historia del movimiento femenino chileno, 1913 –1952 (Santiago: Centro de Analysis y
Difusión de la Condición de la Mujer, 1986); and Julietta Kirkwood, Ser política en Chile:
Los nudos de la sabiduría feminista, 2d ed. (Santiago: Editorial Cuarto Propio, 1990).
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Writing the History of Women and Gender 495

and the emergence of women’s history as legitimate disciplinary practice, his-

torians 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.3
Third, the central role played by women in the 1983 – 86 popular protests
against the Pinochet dictatorship known as las protestas and during the cam-
paign 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 orga-
nized 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 move-
ments 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

3. See Peter Winn’s “Impact of Military Dictatorships on Research and Researchers in

Chile, Argentina and Uruguay” ( paper presented at the CLAH Roundtable, Annual
Meeting of the American Historical Association, Boston, Mass., January 2001).
4. There is an extensive literature on women’s organizations and movements under
the Pinochet dictatorship. See Edda Artigas Gaviola, Eliana Largo, and Sandra Palestro,
Una historia necesaria: Mujeres en Chile, 1973 –1990 (Santiago: Aki & Aora, Ltd., 1994);
Teresa Valdés and Marisa Weinstein, Mujeres que sueñan: Las organizaciones de pobladores en
Chile, 1973 –1989 (Santiago: FLACSO, 1993); Natacha Molina, Lo feminino y lo democrático
en el Chile de hoy (Santiago: VECTOR, 1986); María Elena Valenzuela, La mujer en el Chile
militar: Todas ibamos a ser reinas (Santiago: Ediciones Chile y América, 1987); and Patricia
M. Chuchryk, “From Dictatorship to Democracy: The Women’s Movement in Chile,” in
The Women’s Movement in Latin America: Participation and Democracy, ed. Jane S. Jaquette
(Boulder: Westview Press, 1994).
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496 HAHR / August and November / Klubock

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 house-
hold.5
The 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 histo-
riography during this period: Gabriel Salazar’s Labradores, peones y proletarios
and Julietta Kirkwood’s Ser política en Chile.6 Both books reflected the aca-
demic 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

5. Maxine Molyneux, “Mobilization without Emancipation: Women’s Interests, the

State, and Revolution in Nicaragua,” Feminist Studies 11 (1985). Sonia Alvarez describes a
similar process during struggles for democracy in Brazil during the 1980s in Engendering
Democracy in Brazil: Women’s Movements in Transition Politics (Princeton: Princeton Univ.
Press, 1990). For a pathbreaking account of the ways through which women organized
around the immediate necessities of everyday life and traditional female domestic roles
while establishing the basis for their collective action in Spain, see Temma Kaplan, “Female
Consciousness and Collective Action: The Case of Barcelona, 1910 –1918,” Signs 7, no. 3
(1982).
6. Gabriel Salazar, Labradores, peones y proletarios: Formación y crisis de la sociedad popular
chilena del siglo XIX (Santiago: Ediciones SUR, 1985); and Kirkwood, Ser política en Chile.
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Writing the History of Women and Gender 497

movements’ historical conflicts with the state.7 The focus of both works on the
“popular” and on “social movements” reflected changes in the Chilean econ-
omy imposed by the military dictatorship’s neoliberal model of economic
development. The deindustrialization caused by the regime’s free-market poli-
cies 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 disrup-
tive 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 pro-
duced 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 transfor-
mation 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 socia-
bility 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

7. Manuel Castells, The City and the Grassroots: A Cross-Cultural Theory of Urban Social
Movements (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1983); and Alain Touraine, Return of the
Actor: Social Theory in Postindustrial Society, trans. Myrna Godzich (Minneapolis: Univ. of
Minnesota Press, 1988).
8. Salazar, Labradores, peones y proletarios; and idem, “La mujer del ‘bajo pueblo’ en
Chile: Bosquejo histórico,” Proposiciones 21 (1992).
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498 HAHR / August and November / Klubock

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 pro-
viding lodging and entertainment. Salazar pointed to an independent trajec-
tory 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 move-
ment that posed a powerful challenge to the Pinochet dictatorship. Inspired,
like Salazar, by the 1980s literature on new social movements, Kirkwood dis-
tinguished 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 chal-
lenge 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 tra-
jectory 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

9. Kirkwood, Ser política en Chile.

10. Salinas, La mujer proletaria; and Gaviola, Queremos votar en las próximas elecciones.
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Writing the History of Women and Gender 499

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 authori-
tarianism 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 move-
ments for democracy was defined by the conflict between feminist demands for
the democratization of gender relations as a necessary condition for overthrow-
ing 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.11
Kirkwood and Salazar established two distinct frameworks for the develop-
ment 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 devel-
oped in a number of monographs and research projects. Kirkwood’s reexamina-
tion 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 the-
ory 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.12

11. Kirkwood, Ser política en Chile, 222.

12. See Corinne Antezana-Pernet, “Mobilizing Women in the Popular Front Era:
Feminism, Class, and Politics in the Movimiento Pro-Emancipación de la Mujer Chilena
(MEMCh), 1935 –1950” (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of California, Irvine, 1996); Margaret Power,
“Right-Wing Women and Chilean Politics: 1964 –1973” (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Illinois,
Chicago, 1997); and Lisa Baldez, “In the Name of the Public and the Private: Conservative
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500 HAHR / August and November / Klubock

Salazar’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.14

and Progressive Women’s Movements in Chile, 1970 –1996” (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of
California, San Diego, 1997).
13. See Alejandra Brito P., “Del rancho al conventillo: Transformaciones en la
identidad popular feminina, Santiago de Chile, 1850 –1920”; Lorena Godoy, “ ‘Armas
ansiosas de triunfo: Dedal, Agujas, Tijeras . . .’: La educación profesional feminina en
Chile, 1888 –1912”; and M. Soledad Zárate, “Mujeres viciosas, mujeres virtuosas: La mujer
delincuente y la casa correcional de Santiago, 1860 –1900,” in Disciplina y desacato:
Construcción de identidad en Chile, siglos XIX y XX, ed. Lorena Godoy et al. (Santiago:
Sur/CEDEM, 1995); Catalina Arteaga A., “Oficios, trabajos y vida cotidiana de mujeres
rurales en San Felipe, 1900 –1940: Una reconstrucción a partir de causas criminales del
Archivo Judicial de San Felipe”; and Leyla Flores, “Vida de mujeres de la vida: Prostitución
feminina en Antofogasta (1920 –1930),” in Perfiles revelados: Historias de mujeres en Chile,
siglos XVIII–XX, ed. Diana Veneros Ruiz-Tagle (Santiago: Univ. de Santiago de Chile,
1997); and M. Consuelo Figueroa G., “Revelación del subsole: Las mujeres en la sociedad
minera del carbón, 1900 –1930” (master’s thesis, Univ. de Santiago de Chile, 1999).
14. Brito, “Del rancho al conventillo.”
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Writing the History of Women and Gender 501

Historians have demonstrated that during these decades a significant pop-

ulation 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 communi-
tarian 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.15
However, 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 patri-
archy 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 con-
ditions 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 addi-
tion, working-class women were vulnerable to municipal authorities’ cam-
paigns to eliminate ranchos from the suburbs of cities and towns and to regu-
late 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 writ-
ing of women’s history. The project of recovering “hidden” histories of women

15. A forthcoming study of “plebian” single women and family arrangements among
the subaltern sectors, as well as elite and popular understandings of legitimacy, family, and
honor during this same period is Nara Milanich, “ ‘Los Hijos de Azar’: Culture, Class, and
Family in Chile, 1850 –1930” (Ph.D. diss., Yale Univ., in progress).
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502 HAHR / August and November / Klubock

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 perspec-
tive 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 organiz-
ing 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 distinc-
tions 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 con-
structed.18
Similarly, feminist critics have argued that experience separate from lan-
guage, culture, and ideology does not exist; experiences are shaped by the ways

16. See Joan W. Scott, Gender and the Politics of History ( New York: Columbia Univ.
Press, 1988).
17. See Judith Butler, “Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of
‘Postmodernism’” and Joan W. Scott, “Experience” in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed.
Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott ( New York: Routledge, 1992). See also Denise Riley, Am I
That Name? Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History (Minneapolis: Univ. of
Minnesota Press, 1988); and Chandra Mohanty, Third World Women and the Politics of
Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1991).
18. Judith Butler, “Gender Trouble, Feminist Theory, and Psychoanalytic Discourse,”
in Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda J. Nicholson ( New York: Routledge, 1990), 325.
Butler argues that feminisms that rest on foundational claims to define a set of “values or
dispositions” that define the subjectivity of women assert normativity, even if implicitly,
and thus become necessarily exclusionary of a variety of subject positionings defined by
class, race, ethnicity, and sexuality. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Julia Kristeva have
argued that for strategic political purposes some kind of essentialist rendering of the
concept of “woman” is necessary in terms of feminist activism. See Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary
Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1988).
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Writing the History of Women and Gender 503

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 fem-
inist 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 historiographi-
cal 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 oper-
ated to discipline women and impose order on their social and economic activ-
ities.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.

19. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley
( New York: Vintage Books, 1990); and The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human
Sciences ( New York: Random House, 1970).
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504 HAHR / August and November / Klubock

In doing so, they have added a concern with the history of sexuality and repro-
duction 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 regulat-
ing prostitution and imposing a “phallocratic ideology of female sexual passiv-
ity” on working-class women.20 In another case, Soledad Zárate describes how
the technification and professionalization of medicine during the late nine-
teenth century led to the displacement and exclusion of female midwives who
had played a major role in women’s healthcare, particularly in care for preg-
nant 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.24
20. Flores, “Vida de mujeres de la vida.” See also M. Soledad Zárate, “Lujería, pasión
y prevención: Familia y sexualidad en la Liga Chilena de Higiene Social, 1910 –1925”
( paper presented at the XX International Congress of the Latin American Studies
Association, Guadalajara, Mexico, April 1997).
21. M. Soledad Zárate, “Mothers and Midwives at the Service of the Chilean Nation,
1900 –1940” ( paper presented at the Eleventh Berkshire Conference on the History of
Women, Rochester, NY, June 1999).
22. María Angélica Illanes, “En el nombre del pueblo, del estado y de la ciencia, (. . .)”:
Historia social de la salud pública, Chile, 1880 –1973 (Santiago: Colecto de Atención Primaria,
1993).
23. Lorena Godoy, “ ‘Armas ansiosas de triunfo’”; and Elizabeth Quay Hutchison,
Labors Appropriate to Their Sex: Gender, Labor, and Politics in Urban Chile, 1900 –1930
(Durham: Duke Univ. Press, forthcoming).
24. For discussions of industrial employers’ efforts to both train women workers for
factory labor and provide “moral” training that would allow them to justify female factory
labor as properly feminine in Brazil and Colombia, see Barbara Weinstein, For Social Peace
HAHR 81.3/4-03B Klubock 11/27/01 4:51 PM Page 505

Writing the History of Women and Gender 505

This 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 pro-
voked 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 “disor-
ganized, 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 moder-
nity” 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 subjec-
tivity. While employing Foucault’s understanding of the radical constructed-
ness 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

in Brazil: Industrialists and the Remaking of Working Class in São Paulo, 1920 –1964 (Chapel
Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1996); Susan Besse, Restructuring Patriarchy: The
Modernization of Gender Inequality in Brazil, 1914 –1940 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North
Carolina Press, 1996); and Ann Farnsworth-Alvear, Dulcinea in the Factory: Myths, Morals,
Men and Women in Colombia’s Industrial Experiement, 1905 –1960 (Durham: Duke Univ.
Press, 2000).
25. Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt, Gendered Compromises: Political Cultures and the State
in Chile, 1920 –1950 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2000), 12 –13.
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506 HAHR / August and November / Klubock

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 decen-
tered 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” exer-
cises of power and domination? For Foucault, the subject of historical geneal-
ogy was sexuality rather than gender, precisely because he was interested in the
“capillaries” of power generated by the production of knowledge about sexual-
ity, 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 under-
lining 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.26
The 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 techniques of
power with an understanding of the central role of gender ideologies in build-
ing social relations. For example, while drawing on Foucault to analyze the
disciplinary activities of the experts, specialists, and technocrats who peopled
the social welfare agencies and institutions built during the popular front gov-
ernments, Rosemblatt also employs Gramscian theories of politics and femi-
nist understandings of the role of gender in history to build a sophisticated
analysis of state power. Rather than decentered and multiple locations of
power, Rosemblatt describes a hegemonic state built on political alliances

26. Spivak cites Althusser’s analysis of the role of ideology in the reproduction of
capitalist social relations, but her analysis might easily be extended to consider gender
ideologies. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Also see Nancy C. M. Hartsock, “Foucault
on Power: A Theory for Women?” in Nicholson, Feminism/Postmodernism.
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Writing the History of Women and Gender 507

between middle-class professionals, social reformers, feminists, unions, and

leftist parties. She shows that the alliances that defined the nationalist-
populist project of the 1938 – 52 period were sustained by the shared commit-
ment of leftist party leaderships, social reformers, and moderate feminists to
upholding a sexual division of labor and gender ideology that granted male
laborers in industries and mines the status and prerogatives of citizenship,
while excluding “nonproductive” women workers, rural workers and peasants,
and the indigent from full membership in the national community and the
working class.
The popular fronts, with the support of labor and the Left, built their
political hegemony on the foundation of a gendered political ideology that
defined the rights and benefits of national citizenship in terms of the male
worker and head of household and the female housewife. The state imple-
mented a family wage system supported by labor and the Left, in which wages
paid male workers and benefits for children and wives would guarantee the
exclusion of women from the labor market and provide incentives for both
men and women to marry.27 In her article for this issue, Rosemblatt demon-
strates that Left-labor participation in the establishment and administration of
social welfare institutions benefited male blue- and white-collar workers, who
were defined as productive, while women workers and housewives, as well as
male and female rural workers and peasants, were defined as nonproductive.
Women were thus relegated to a subordinate and dependent position in working-
class households and a secondary role as citizens of the modernizing nation.
Elizabeth Quay Hutchison’s work also reflects the influence of Foucault in
its focus on the history of discourses about women workers and more general
systems of knowledge about women and sexuality produced during the early
twentieth century. Yet, like Rosemblatt, Zárate, and others, Hutchison also
employs a feminist analysis, derived from the work of Scott, to analyze how
the politics of social reform, labor, and the Left were shaped by gender ideolo-
gies. Hutchison’s study of gender and the social reform in early-twentieth-

27. Recent studies have examined the ways in which industrial and mining employers
implemented a similar gender ideology and sexual division of labor as a strategy for
establishing a disciplined and productive labor force. Consuelo Figueroa, for example,
examines efforts by coal companies to reform and regulate the social habits of men and
women and to consign women to “hygienic” activities and the domestic space as a means to
cracking down on transience, labor militancy, and social disorder; see Figueroa,
“Revelación del subsole.” For the copper industry, see Thomas Miller Klubock, Contested
Communities: Class, Gender, and Politics in Chile’s El Teniente Copper Mine, 1904 –1951
(Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1998).
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508 HAHR / August and November / Klubock

century Chile follows Kirkwood’s rethinking of the history of the class-based

movements of the Left from the perspective of gender and Scott’s by now
well-known claim that “gender constructs politics and politics constructs
gender,” as well as Scott’s searing critique of labor history for ignoring women
and the gendered historical constitution of the male working-class subject.28
Hutchison is interested in revising the political history of the first decades of
the century by exposing the centrality of gender ideologies and hierarchies in
debates about women’s work and women workers to the politics of the labor
movement and the discussions of leftists, elites, social reformers, feminists,
educators, industrialists, and legislators. Thus, in the article for this special
issue she shows that, despite the shift from an early discursive construction of
women as agents of both class and human emancipation to a more pessimistic
portrayal of women as backward and Catholic, concern with women and sexu-
ality was a central element of anarchist rhetoric.29 Hutchison recovers strands
of feminist thought in early working-class and leftist politics that critiqued
both the class exploitation of women workers and the more general sexual sub-
jugation of women and demonstrates how during the 1920s, as in the case of
the anarchists, this “worker-feminism” was ultimately marginalized and sup-
pressed.
Hutchison shows that the politics of the early labor movement were
defined by the commitment of socialists, anarchists, and labor militants to a
gender division of labor that relegated women to the domestic sphere and
defined wage-labor as a masculine domain. Male leftists and labor activists
employed the trope of the vicitimized woman worker to exclude women from
the labor market and assert their own prerogatives to protect and control
women’s labor and sexuality. Similarly mobilized by the image of the sexual
and social danger of women’s work, industrialists, elite women, and legislators
sought to implement social reforms designed to protect women workers while

28. See Scott, Gender and the Politics of History; and Hutchison, Labors Appropriate to
Their Sex.
29. Eileen Findlay charts a strikingly similar trajectory from a radical and libertarian
politics to a more reformist and gender conservative labor-anarchist discourse in Puerto
Rico during the same period in Imposing Decency: The Politics of Sexuality and Race in Puerto
Rico, 1870 –1920 (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1999). For an analysis of gender in anarchist
discourse in Argentina, see Maxine Molyneux, “ ‘No God, No Boss, No Husband’:
Anarchist Feminism in Nineteenth Century Argentina,” Latin American Perspectives 13, no.
1 (1986). For a review of studies of anarchists’ gender politics in Spain and France that
makes similar points about the centrality of patriarchalism to anarchists’ political culture,
see Sharif Gemie, “Anarchism and Feminism: A Historical Survey,” Women’s History Review
5 (1996).
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Writing the History of Women and Gender 509

establishing a gender-segregated labor market. Vocational schools and Cath-

olic worker cooperatives and unions were organized to moralize working
women, train them in domestic duties, offset the perceived corrupting influ-
ence of wage labor, and counter labor radicalism. The first legislative debates
to promote the social reforms that would be the foundation of the welfare
state engineered by the popular fronts were sparked by efforts to protect
women workers. This legislation reduced women’s workforce possibilities and
consolidated men’s positions as wage laborers and heads of households.
These feminist histories of the politics of social reform, inspired by Fou-
cault’s and Scott’s redirection of gender history to the realm of representation,
move away from women’s history and social history “from below” to histories
of politics that focus on the ways in which gender ideology shapes cultural and
political discourses and state policies and, by inference, structures the experi-
ence and positions the subjectivities of subaltern men and women. Rosem-
blatt’s and Hutchison’s examination of the discursive and ideological processes
that accompany state formation and constitute the regulation of gender and
sexuality render both the category of “women” and subaltern experience and
agency historically contingent and constructed. They insightfully demonstrate
how the establishment of a sexual division of labor and gendered social hierar-
chy were central to the processes of state formation during the first half of the
twentieth century. While these state-centered analyses reach down to interme-
diary actors like union leaders, political activists, professionals, and social
reformers, the ways in which women (and men) negotiated the terrain of patri-
archy and gender ideology at the level of the day-to-day is less visible. The
focus on the importance of gender to the politics of social reform, the Left,
and the labor movement leads to analysis of the political rhetoric, and ideolo-
gies of party and union leaderships and away from histories below of the
everyday lifeways, social practices, and cultural worlds of subaltern women,
the main concern of the social-historical literature.
As recent histories of state formation have underlined, the hegemony of
the state and elites is contingent on their ability to absorb and reshape popular
cultures and forms of sociability. This raises the question of the capacity of the
state, employers, and private welfare organizations to control “popular” prac-
tices and identities around gender and sexuality. An analysis of the hegemony
of gender ideologies of female domesticity, for example, would require a sense
of the popular cultural worlds of gender and sexuality that the state incorpo-
rated, appropriated, and repressed.30 Where social histories from below have

30. For discussions of the tensions between social history and the “new cultural
history” of state formation, see Florencia Mallon, Peasant and Nation: The Making of
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510 HAHR / August and November / Klubock

tended to neglect the role of the state, the church, the professions, and para-
state institutions like hospitals and charities in defining the terms of gender
identities and relations, histories of politics and the state have tended to slight
the relationship between popular cultural understandings and social practices
of gender and sexuality and state projects of reform and regulation.
A resolution of this tension between gendered analyses of politics and
state formation and social histories of subaltern men and women might be
found in the reintroduction of feminist theories of patriarchy and sexuality. If,
as for Joan Scott, gender is a form of representing or signifying power rela-
tions, the set of ideas that create cultural norms around sexual difference, how
do we also understand gender as the historical construction of material social
hierarchies? To write about gender as a cause of inequalities between men and
women, as a force or ideology that explains inequality between men and
women, approaches a tautology in which gender inequality is produced by
gender which is, in turn, a product of gender inequality. Gender then appears
as an abstract, almost transhistorical, concept, as an ideology or semiotic sys-
tem producing social inequality with a historical dynamism and logic of its
own. Its material historical origins, the conditions of its production, are left
unexplained.
A theorization of patriarchy would prompt a historical reconsideration of
the nature of men’s subjugation of women. In much of the history of women
and gender in Chile, the focus has been on women’s work, the structure of the
labor market, and the politics of the labor movement, perhaps because as a his-
toriographical project Chilean women’s/gender history has focused on rewrit-
ing earlier marxist historical narratives of the Left and labor, which fore-
grounded the politics of production. In these histories, gender inequality in
and outside the home is rooted in the exclusion of women from the labor mar-
ket, the labor movement, and leftist politics. Similarly, in recovering moments
of “progressive” feminism, historians have focused on those movements that
both critique the exploitation of women as workers and challenge the sexual
division of labor and gender ideology of female domesticity. The gender ideol-
ogy that defines women’s appropriate activities as domestic, undervalues their
labor as unskilled, nonproductive, or secondary, and limits their possibilities
for wage-work may be at the heart of women’s political, social, and economic
subordination to men, but, as Heidi Tinsman has argued, why this gender ide-
ology has operated in different historical contexts still needs to be explained. A

Postcolonial Mexico and Peru (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1995); and the essays on
“Mexico’s New Cultural History: ¿Una Lucha Libre?,” HAHR 79 (1999).
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Writing the History of Women and Gender 511

simple focus on production and the division of labor, as in marxist-feminist

attempts to unite class and gender analysis, ignores the ways in which patri-
archy is rooted in forms of social power and social contests around sexuality
and reproduction.
The question would be how to write about the history of sexuality while
maintaining a concern with gender relations and hierarchy. I would argue that
women’s history should consider both the relationship between class relations/
production/labor and forms of social power based on gender and the ways in
which gender hierarchies are also rooted in sexuality. As two activities of
human praxis, labor and sexuality are the spheres in which social relations are
built and social power exercised, in which class-based social systems and patri-
archy are rooted. The articulation of patriarchy and capitalism, the subject of
much discussion by marxist feminists, lies in the ways in which class and gen-
der are both simultaneously rooted in the organization of labor and sexuality.32
To analyze gendered social hierarchies and ideology in terms of the social
organization and politics of both labor and sexuality would ground historical
analyses of “patriarchy” in the material terrain of everyday life. It might pro-
vide an avenue to move from top-down histories of the state, institutions,
political rhetoric and ideology to the ways in which men and women negotiate
the social terrain of patriarchy on a daily basis, albeit not within conditions of
their own choosing.31
Tinsman’s article in this volume combines an analysis of the gendered pol-
itics of state formation with an almost ethnographic social-historical account of
the ways in which rural men and women experienced and struggled over the

31. Steve Stern’s use of patriarchy in The Secret History of Gender: Women, Men, and
Power in Late Colonial Mexico (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1995) in terms
of “patriarchal pacts” that shape conflicts and negotiations between women and men and
determine the ways in which men and women understand and employ gender ideologies is
a fine example of the use of the category of patriarchy to bring together the social and the
ideological in describing the day-to-day struggles over gendered forms of social power in
the arenas of labor and sexuality. See also Heidi Tinsman’s insightful discussion of
patriarchy and feminist theory in the introduction to her Partners in Conflict: The Politics of
Gender, Sexuality, and Labor in the Chilean Agrarian Reform, 1950 –1973 (Durham: Duke
Univ. Press, forthcoming).
32. The classic rendering of the Marxist-feminist approach is Heidi Hartmann,
“Capitalism, Patriarchy, and Job Segregation by Sex,” Signs 1, no. 1 (1976). See also
Christine Delphy’s discussion of the “domestic mode of production, gender, and class,” in
Close to Home: A Materialist Analysis of Women’s Oppression, trans. Diana Leonard (London:
Hutchinson, 1984); and Michele Barrett, Women’s Oppression Today: The Marxist/Feminist
Encounter (London: Verso, 1988).
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512 HAHR / August and November / Klubock

meanings of social reform through conflicts over sexuality and reproduction.

As early efforts to enact protective legislation limiting women’s work and the
social welfare programs of the popular fronts were rooted in a gender ideology
that defined an unequal sexual division of labor, so, too, Tinsman argues the
revolution in the countryside that accompanied the Agrarian Reform during
the 1960s and early 1970s was structured by gender inequality.33 In line with
work by scholars like Ximena Valdés on patriarchy on Chilean haciendas,
Tinsman seeks to insert women and gender into a narrative of rural class
struggle in which conflicts between campesinos and estate owners were
defined as conflicts between men or in which male campesinos stood for the
entire rural working class (including women and landless migrant laborers).34
She unpacks the historical processes that led to rural women’s marginalization
from the leftist project of social reform and revolution and to their apparently
more “conservative” political outlook.
Both the Christian Democratic and socialist governments that imple-
mented the Agrarian Reform and sought to organize campesinos in peasant
unions defined social reform and political mobilization in terms of the male-
headed nuclear family. As during earlier moments of social reform and reorga-
nization described by Hutchison and Rosemblatt, women’s various forms of
work were defined as nonproductive, with their social position and political
rights and identity structured around the ideal of the modern housewife.
Women would receive the benefits of social reform through their positions as
daughters and wives of men; they would join political parties and the labor
movement as support for male activists. Despite the tremendous revolution in
rural landholding and labor relations, then, the Agrarian Reform actually
operated to consolidate the patriarchal power of rural men, “democratizing”
patriarchy by endowing them with the authority and prerogatives enjoyed
through the 1950s by oligarchic landowners. Tinsman demonstrates that this
“unequal uplift” served to drive a wedge between campesino women and men
by validating and reinforcing women’s domestic role and family-based political
activism and by empowering rural men outside the household.
While Tinsman analyzes the ways in which the 1960s Agrarian Reform
was shaped by the gender ideology of female domesticity that structured the
social reforms implemented in urban areas by the popular fronts during the

33. Tinsman, Partners in Conflict.

34. Ximena Valdés, Loreto Rebolledo G., and Angélica Willson A., eds., Masculino y
femenino en la hacienda chilena del siglo XX (Santiago: Fondart–CEDEM, 1995); and Ximena
Valdés, Mujer, trabajo, y medio ambiente: Los nudos de la modernización agraria (Santiago:
CEM, 1992).
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Writing the History of Women and Gender 513

1940s, she also shows that the sexual division of labor and the everyday politics
of patriarchy and state formation were rooted in negotiations between men
and women over sexuality and reproduction. For Tinsman, the Agrarian
Reform provoked profound changes in campesinos’ sexuality, and sexuality
was at the center of the ways men and women navigated the political and eco-
nomic transformations of the times. Men interpreted the Agrarian Reform as
license to control women’s labor and the sexuality to assert their status as
“their own boss” in political, social, and sexual activities outside the house-
hold. Women’s increased dependence on men meant that they were, ironically,
more isolated in the household and more vulnerable to the social disruptions
and political conflicts provoked by the revolution in the countryside. Tinsman
underlines the links between sexual subordination and other forms of gen-
dered social hierarchy in the spheres of labor and politics.
A focus on the everyday struggles over social power and patriarchy that
took place on the terrain of sexuality also illuminates men’s and women’s resis-
tance to and divergence from the gendered norms and ideologies imposed
from above. In my study of the El Teniente copper mining community, I tried
to show how both men and women maintained forms of sociability and sus-
tained patterns of gender relations that transgressed and challenged the norms
associated with notions of respectability based on the model of the male-
headed nuclear family and the family wage imposed by North American capi-
tal and the Chilean state in the copper industry. Single women worked as
domestic servants, maintained polygamous and serial monogamous relation-
ships with men, and drank and danced in bars and brothels. They rejected the
strictures of the local courts and the copper company, as well as the attempts
of male workers to control their social behavior and labor and to demand def-
erence and submission.35 Similarly, as Tinsman and Rosemblatt also show,
working-class men often rejected efforts to control their sexual and social
behavior according to an ideal of masculine responsibility and respectability by
gambling, drinking, going to brothels, spending their earnings on themselves,
and abandoning their wives.

35. Nara Milanich describes an analogous alternative popular cultural understanding

of gender by subaltern single women who headed households that diverged from
prescriptive notions of masculine honor and feminine shame in “ ‘Los Hijos del Azar.’ ” For
interesting examples of histories of single working-class women and alternative urban social
and popular cultural worlds of gender and sexuality in the United States, see Kathy Lee
Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York
(Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1986); and Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and
Class in New York, 1789 –1860 ( New York: Knopf, 1986).
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514 HAHR / August and November / Klubock

Tensions, as well as certain consonances, between the model of masculin-

ity based on the “respectable” head of household promoted by the state, orga-
nized labor, and the Left, and a model of masculinity based in men’s indepen-
dence and comradery, expressed in a series of unrespectable social activities
that were also central to the everyday practice of class solidarity, shaped the
contours of subaltern patriarchal practice. While these norms of masculinity
differed in their understanding of the nature of honor and respectability, both
defined masculinity in the patriarchal terms of men’s independence as wage
earners and their associated sexual autonomy and their dominion over
women’s sexuality and labor. In this sense, patriarchy, as a system, was multi-
ple, rather than unitary, and defined by internal tensions and contradictions
that established spaces in which men and women might negotiate the terms of
their subordination to dominant gender ideologies.
By focusing on contests and negotiations, rather than on the unilinear
imposition of a patriarchal order, this approach to the history of patriarchy
also examines the benefits for women of gendered state programs, social
reforms, and the family wage. As feminist theorists such as Carol Pateman
have pointed out, under the conditions of industrialization shaped by sexual
divisions of labor, marriage can be an important alternative for women, sup-
plying security, rights, and guarantees and imposing restrictions on male
( patriarchal) behavior — domestic violence, drinking, abandonment.36 Thus,
throughout the twentieth century in Chile the state empowered women in
some ways and restricted male behavior and patriarchal prerogative as it
extended its own patriarchal authority into the most distant corners of men’s
and women’s everyday lives. As Rosemblatt demonstrates for the case of the
popular fronts and Tinsman shows for the case of the Agrarian Reform, the
patriarchal structures imposed by the emergent welfare state from the 1920s to
the 1940s and institutionalized further during the social reforms of the1960s,
limited men’s control over women in certain ways, restricting their patriarchal
prerogatives within the family, and often earning working-class men’s opposi-
tion. In El Teniente, I tried to show how men and women frequently married
and accommodated to the ideology of the family wage precisely because of the
material benefits it provided and how this led women to understand their rela-
tionship to the state in terms of a new discourse of rights. Similarly, Tinsman
shows in the case of the 1960s Agrarian Reform that women read ideologies of
gender mutualism, circulating, as Rosemblatt demonstrates since the 1940s, as
recognition of the value of their domestic work, economic security for their

36. Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1988).
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Writing the History of Women and Gender 515

families, and the disciplining of husbands’ behavior by limiting domestic abuse

and abandonments. In these instances, social history from below demonstrates
the ways in which men and women contested and appropriated reigning gen-
der norms and ideologies and built their own understandings of labor, gender,
and sexuality.
As a category of historical analysis patriarchy may, however, be too total-
izing. Gender and women’s historians have yet to build an approach that does
not reduce sexuality to either gender ideologies or to patriarchy. Many femi-
nist analyses that root patriarchy in either reproduction or sexuality tend to
suggest a historical immutability and inevitability to a patriarchy that erases
the historical specificity of class and state formation and defies historical
change and the agency of social actors. Even an understanding of sexuality and
gender in terms of the negotiations that shape the organization of everyday
patriarchy, as in Steve Stern’s concept of “patriarchal pacts,” seems to flatten
out the experience of sexuality and gender, reducing them to contests over
social power and to predetermined conflicts between men and women, a prob-
lem inherent, perhaps, in the reliance on judicial records to capture the day-
to-day sociohistorical realities of gender relations.
Can we write histories that take into account the ways in which gender
relations and sexuality involve love, intimacy, and erotic pleasure, as well as
patriarchy? As historians can we find documents, texts, or ethnographic mate-
rial that will provide access to these spaces of everyday life? Our access to
sources that illuminate the functioning of patriarchy or the disciplinary appa-
ratuses and gender ideologies that regulate sexuality is more straightforward
since the state, institutions, and elites provide a wealth of documentation on
their gendered modes of social domination. But how might we think about the
worlds of gender and sexuality as more fluid and less constrained? Can histo-
ries of gender and sexuality focus on the everyday practices of love, intimacy,
and pleasure, as well as the ideologies and institutions of patriarchy, with the
understanding that while they cannot be extricated from patriarchy, neither
can they be reduced to it in a functional manner? Tinsman provides, for exam-
ple, a rich account of flirting, courtship, elopement, and youth culture that
seems to suggest a world of sex and intimacy that undermined conventional
gender norms and forms of patriarchy and provided young women a certain
autonomous social space. Sexuality is both a site of social power and hierarchy
and a site of pleasure, creativity, and identity formation, shaped by, but not
reducible to, the immutable logic of patriarchy, just as workers’ labor under
capitalist systems of production cannot be reduced in any automatic way to
class exploitation; instead, it must be understood in terms of self-definition,
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516 HAHR / August and November / Klubock

solidarities, and fulfillment, as well as alienation and subordination. It is pre-

cisely the fact that sex and work provide meaning, identity, and forms of self-
fulfillment, as well as powerlessness and exploitation, that establishes the basis
for the reproduction and hegemony of patriarchy and capitalist class relations.
Nor does an exclusive focus on patriarchy, with an implicit assumption of
naturalized heterosexuality, of an inevitable male-female binary opposition,
provide much room for analysis of nonheterosexual social relations and identi-
ties. I would argue that historians must complicate and expand their under-
standing of patriarchy to examine homosocial gender relations, as they are
built in workplaces, neighborhoods and streets, social clubs, unions, and polit-
ical parties, between friends, neighbors, workmates, and comrades. It would be
important to understand the homosocial networks and ties that men and
women build in a variety of spaces as potentially disrupting, as well as rein-
forcing, rigid structures of male-female subjugation, as in the case of female
friendships or solidarities between women workers or neighbors. We have few
histories of homosocial spaces like bars, barracks, prisons, kitchens, house-
holds, and marketplaces, where alternative kinds of gender relations may be
constructed in terms of solidarities, friendships, and intimacies, even as they
reproduce the broader structures of patriarchy. Social histories of rural Latin
America have explored the ways in which male landowners exercised patriar-
chal authority over male workers. Similarly, historians should also examine the
ways in which patriarchy shapes and inscribes homosocial gender relations and
identities, the ways in which men exercise power over men and women over
women in a variety of forms and social spaces, in leisure and at work, in labor
and politics, as well as in families and communities.
A number of historians of gender have underlined the links between patri-
archy and homosexuality in terms of the discursive deployment of “homosexu-
ality” as a means of establishing the limits of sexual behavior and gender iden-
tity and ensuring regimes of heterosexual gender inequality. As historian
Victoria Thompson has written for the case of homosexuality in nineteenth-
century France, definitions of normative sexuality and representations of
“deviant” forms of sexuality like transvestitism or homosexuality, serve to
shore up the systems of heterosexual gender relations, as well as other forms of
social order, including class relations, by signifying “disorder.”37 For example,
in terms of Spanish anarchism, Richard Cleminson has argued that discursive

37. Victoria Thompson, “Creating Boundaries: Homosexuality and the Changing

Social Order in France, 1830 –1870,” in Feminism and History, ed. Joan W. Scott (Oxford:
Oxford Univ. Press, 1996).
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Writing the History of Women and Gender 517

constructions of sexual aberrance were employed by both anarchosyndicalists

and later fascists to define their opponents as politically deviant, thus exercis-
ing role in guaranteeing normative forms of heterosexual and patriarchal male
social and sexual behavior.38 Similarly, Latin American labor historians have
shown that the menace of same-sex desire was often used as a rhetorical means
to bolster forms of social solidarity and political power that rested on patriar-
chal notions of appropriate masculine and feminine behaviors. Thus both male
and female leftists, labor activists, and striking workers frequently defined
scabs and capitalists as effeminate and unmanly and, alternatively, feminists
and female working-class activists as masculine and unwomanly.39 In these
cases, homophobic discourses were more than the nineteenth-century epis-
temic construction of “the homosexual” described by Foucault. Rather, they
were part of a broader patriarchal system that governed both heterosocial and
homosocial relations.
These histories of the discursive deployment of “homosexuality” in polit-
ical rhetoric point to the ways in which the ideological construction of the cat-
egory of homosexuality and cultural understandings of same-sex relations,
from friendship to intimacy and desire, are linked to the historical process of
patriarchy. Yet here the history of sexuality has been reduced to the history of
ideology and ideas. Social histories of same-sex love and desire, homosexual
gender relations and identities in Chile and Latin America have yet to be writ-
ten. The challenge for historians of gender is to uncover the worlds not only
of nonconventional heterosexual love and pleasure, but the varieties of sexual
experience and intimacy that do not fit comfortably in the scheme of male-
female gender relations defined by patriarchy. At the same time, while search-
ing for “hidden” histories of nonheterosexual sexuality and sociability, histori-
ans will need to consider how patriarchy and dominant gender ideologies
shape even those practices and identities that appear to subvert or oppose nor-
mative gender conventions.40

38. Richard Cleminson, ed., Anarquismo y homosexualidad: Antología de artículos de la

Revistas Blanca, Generación Consciente, Estudios e Iniciales (1924 –1935) (Madrid: Huerga y
Fierro Editores, 1995).
39. Hutchison, Labors Appropriate to Their Sex; Klubock, Contested Communities; and
Farnsworth-Alvear, Dulcinea in the Factory. Donna Guy demonstrates how the “menace” of
homosexuality shaped Peronist policies on sexuality and prostitution in Sex and Danger in
Buenos Aires: Prostitution, Family, and Nation in Argentina (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press,
1991).
40. A pioneering social and cultural history of male homosexuality in twentieth-
century Brazil is James Naylor Green, Beyond Carnival: Male Homosexuality in Twentieth-
Century Brazil (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2000).
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518 HAHR / August and November / Klubock

Here again we arrive at the meeting point of social history and gender
history, of experience and structure, where men’s and women’s everyday prac-
tices of sex and gender are determined by dominant ideologies and discursive
regulatory apparatuses and contribute to their reproduction even, perhaps, as
they also contest and undermine patriarchy’s expansive reach from the state
into the nooks and crannies of daily life. I would argue that locating the his-
tory of patriarchy in the organization of sexuality and labor brings together
the history of gender ideologies and politics with social history. It allows us to
write the history of patriarchy as a hegemonic process related to the processes
of state and class formation and defined by tensions, contradictions, and
appropriations, as well as subjugations, regulations, and restrictions. Reintro-
ducing patriarchy as a central category of historical analysis and examining the
material conditions of its production allows us to consider not only the institu-
tional and ideological maps of gender hierarchy in the domain of politics, but
also the ways in which men and women navigate the terrain of gender in their
daily lives.