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

by Elizabeth Quay Hutchison (Author)

In Labors Appropriate to Their Sex Elizabeth Quay Hutchison addresses the plight of working women in early twentieth-century Chile, when the growth of urban manufacturing was transforming the contours of women's wage work and stimulating significant public debate, new legislation, educational reform, and social movements directed at women workers. Challenging earlier interpretations of women's economic role in Chile's industrial growth, which took at face value census figures showing a dramatic decline in women's industrial work after 1907, Hutchison shows how the spread of industrial sweatshops and changing definitions of employment in the census combined to make female labor disappear from census records at the same time that it was in fact burgeoning in urban areas.

In addition to population and industrial censuses, Hutchison culls published and archival sources to illuminate such misconceptions and to reveal how women's paid labor became a locus of anxiety for a society confronting social problems--both real and imagined--that were linked to industrialization and modernization. The limited options of working women were viewed by politicians, elite women, industrialists, and labor organizers as indicative of a society in crisis, she claims, yet their struggles were also viewed as the potential springboard for reform. Labors Appropriate to Their Sex thus demonstrates how changing norms concerning gender and work were central factors in conditioning the behavior of both male and female workers, relations between capital and labor, and political change and reform in Chile.

Back Jacket

This is a work of superior scholarship on an important but neglected subject. Hutchison has written from a new perspective that reflects considerable and original research in a wide variety of documents. Representing a new wave in feminist studies, this multifaceted book reveals the gendered character of Chilean discourse on work, poverty, activism, and reform.--Peter Winn, author of "Americas: The Changing Face of Latin America and the Caribbean"

Author Biography

Elizabeth Quay Hutchison is Assistant Professor of History at the University of New Mexico.