Labors Appropriate to their Sex: Gender, Labor, and Politics in Urban Chile, 1900-1930.

Parker, David S.

by Elizabeth Quay Hutchison. Durham, North Carolina, and London, Duke University Press, 2001. xvii, 342 pp. $64.95 U.S. (cloth), $21.95 U.S. (paper).

This exceptional study of women's paid employment and its regulation in early twentieth-century Chile is destined to become obligatory reading for students of Latin American gender and labour history. Liz Hutchison convincingly demonstrates that the worker question, the women question, and the social question were all intimately connected; indeed, it is impossible to make sense of debates about labour and social legislation without appreciating how profoundly those debates were gendered, just as it is impossible to make sense of early Chilean feminism without appreciating its relationship to questions of social and economic reform. But Hutchison has done more than just bring labour and gender questions together; she also brings nuance to questions that too often get treated as morality plays. This is a study refreshingly without pure villains or simple victims, filled with mixed motives and intractable contradictions, as all good history should be.

The book is divided into two parts. Part I, "Working-Class Life and Politics" sets the stage by outlining the characteristics of women's paid employment, primarily in Santiago. Part I then focusses on how the labour press dealt with questions raised by women's presence in the workforce. Chapter three, the heart of this section, shows how leftist militants (mostly but not exclusively men) developed a discourse that emphasized employers' victimization of women workers (and especially the sexual danger to women's morality) as emblematic of the evils of capitalism. The discourse of women's helplessness and oppression won widespread currency, despite contradictory evidence that at least some working women were organized and conscious of their interests. By gendering labour militancy as masculine and passive victimhood as feminine, the Chilean labour movement contributed to a growing consensus that women's paid employment, especially in industry, was an evil to be eradicated or at least tightly controlled, in order to protect and promote women's natural roles as wives and mothers.

Part II, "Women Workers and the Social Question," examines the many and complex ways in which the perceived need to protect the woman worker translated into policy. By "policy" I do not just mean state laws and regulations (the subject of chapter seven), because Hutchison also looks at the creation of girls' vocational schools (chapter five) and the private initiatives of catholic elite reformers (chapter six). Each case illustrates, in different ways, the principal contradiction that arose out of the discourse of the woman worker as victim. Was the solution to improve the conditions of women's paid employment? Or to promote the ideal of the male breadwinner earning a family wage so that the working-class wife could dedicate herself to raising a family (thereby contributing to the eugenic improvement of the race)? Further complicating the issue were the cross-cutting interests of industrialists, elite reformers, organized labour, and women themselves, and the fact that well-meaning reformers were so utterly oblivious to the logical incompatibility of their twin goals of "dignify[ing] women's wage labour while working to eliminate the need for it" (p. 197).

For example, Hutchison finds that the administrators of female vocational schools, which were quite successful in Chile, eternally debated the balance between instruction in marketable skills versus homemaking and moral education. While elite reformers and government experts constantly pushed for more of the latter, industrialists joined forces with the female students themselves to ensure that the schools never lost their emphasis on practical training. In addition, elite reformers' promotion of domesticity as women's proper role was at least partially undermined by the growing acceptance of white-collar work and retail sales for young women of the middle and upper classes. Indeed, some reformers sought regulation to restrict the employment of men in supposedly emasculating jobs such as the selling of women's clothing, lingerie, or cosmetics (p. 187).

The core of Part II (and arguably of the entire book) is chapter seven, which outlines the extensive legislation, introduced mostly in the 1910s and passed in the 1920s, to regulate female wage labour. In eloquent testimony to the intimate connection between the woman question and the social question, the very first labour laws ever enacted in Chile (as in most of Latin America and Europe) were those dealing with female and child workers. These laws generated a surprising degree of consensus, testifying to the power of the discourse of women's victimization. Indeed, in parliamentary debate, leftist and conservative parties fought mostly over who had more right to take credit for the reforms.

Hutchison sees a pattern, and again many contradictions, in this legal regulation of women's paid work. First, legislation designed to protect women tended to have the opposite effect. Instead of complying with laws that raised women's wages, limited their hours, and provided benefits such as maternity leave and on-site day care, industrial employers chose to eliminate or, more typically, hide their female workforce through outsourcing and homework arrangements. The perverse though perhaps not entirely unintended result was the reinforcement of gender separation in the labour force, with women relegated to jobs believed to be consistent with their natural proclivities, jobs that coincidentally were the most difficult to regulate: domestic service, sewing and weaving at home, and the like. In Hutchison's words: "Ironically, although women, like children, were singled out repeatedly as a category of worker requiring immediate and drastic state protection, most women worked in jobs that excluded them from such protections" (p. 231).

Queen's University

David S. Parker