Charity, Rights, and Entitlement Gender, Labor and Welfare in Early 20th Chile

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Charity, Rights, and Entitlement:

Gender, Labor, and Welfare in
Early-Twentieth-Century Chile
Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt
In 1939 the Caja de Seguro Obligatorio (CSO, Obligatory Insurance Fund),

the Chilean agency that provided social security, disability, and health care
insurance to blue-collar workers, published an advertisement in the Socialist
party magazine Rumbo. The social security system, read the advertisement,
tries to replace the denomination of indigent with that of taxpayer [imponente], a switch from charity to insurance and from alms to rights. The
CSO thus aligned itself with a modern notion of state welfare as a right.
According to the agency, the extension of CSO-administered benets would
suppress demeaning and retrograde forms of public and private welfare, which
it termed charity.1
This CSO advertisement appeared in Rumbo less than a year after the
election to the presidency of Pedro Aguirre Cerda, the rst of three Radical
party members elected as standard bearers of Center-Left, popular-front coalitions. The rst popular-front coalition was formed in 1936 and was formally
composed of the Socialist, Communist, and Radical parties. This and successive Center-Left coalitions won presidential elections in 1938, 1942, and 1946.
The alliances persisted in some form until around 1948, when cold war rivalries tore them apart. Programmatically, the popular fronts sought not simply
to modernize the Chilean economy but also to mobilize and incorporate
working-class Chileans into the polity. According to popular-front leaders,
working-class Chileans were vital and therefore worthy members of the nation
This essay was originally presented at a conference on Honor, Status, and the Law,
organized by Sueann Cauleld at the University of Michigan in December 1998. Thanks to
Sueann for urging me to write the essay and to John D. French for commenting on it.
Thanks as well to Heidi Tinsman and Thomas Miller Klubock for their exceptionally
useful and constructive suggestions and to Gilbert M. Joseph for his editorial guidance.
1. Rumbo, Sept. 1939, 89. Unless otherwise noted, all periodicals and newspapers were
published in Santiago. All translations are the authors.
Hispanic American Historical Review 81:3 4
Copyright 2001 by Duke University Press
Published by Duke University Press
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who deserved both to share in the economic benets of development and

to have a recognized political voice. Along with promoting industrial selfsufciency and economic development, the coalitions championed the economic and social rights of the poor, fostered a rhetoric of citizen entitlement
among popular sectors, and sought to democratize public services.2
Yet as this essay argues, not all impoverished Chileans beneted equally
from popular-front efforts to expand state services and democratize welfare.
Workers employed in the formal sector,3 most of them male, were the popular
fronts core constituency and received CSO and other benets that were seen
as rights. Characterized as temporary aid given in times of need, CSO-administered disability and health benets did not imply worker dependence on the
state. And since workers helped nance these benets, worker organizations
consistently demanded and obtained participation in the administration
of social security and health programs. By contrast, nonworkers and workers
outside the formal sector continued to receive forms of state aid that were
more akin to charity. Women who were for the most part housewives or
nonindustrial workers as well as unemployed and informally employed men
had fewer rights and little, if any, say in the operation of the agencies that dispensed aid to them as indigent. State ofcials would continue to determine the
need of these clients deemed dependents who had no legal right to state
aid.4
The popular fronts extension of health and social security benets thus
simultaneously furthered and limited democratization. For workers, material
entitlements and the right to help determine how those benets would be
administered became a palpable manifestation of broader citizen rights. Those
2. On the popular fronts, see Toms Moulian, Violencia, gradualismo y reformas en
el desarrollo poltico chileno, in Estudios sobre el sistema de partidos en Chile, ed. Adolfo
Aldunate, Angel Flissch, and Toms Moulian (Santiago: FLACSO, 1985); Paul W. Drake,
Socialism and Populism in Chile, 1932 1952 (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1978); Thomas
Miller Klubock, Contested Communities: Class, Gender, and Politics in Chiles El Teniente Copper
Mine, 1904 1951 (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1998); and Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt,
Gendered Compromises: Political Cultures and the State in Chile, 1920 1950 (Chapel Hill:
Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2000).
3. I dene formal-sector workers as those workers who are subject to labor contracts
and/or eligible for unionization. I also use the terms worker or industrial worker to
refer to this group.
4. My view of the gendered nature of welfare state draws on Carole Pateman, The
Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism, and Political Theory (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press,
1989); and the articles in Linda Gordon, ed., Women, the State, and Welfare (Madison: Univ.
of Wisconsin Press, 1990).
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Charity, Rights, and Entitlement
inducements helped secure working-class support for the popular-front

alliances. At the same time, the popular fronts circumscribed the claims of
women, nonworkers, and workers outside the formal sector all of whom
received fewer benets and had less say in how benets would be dispensed.
Nonworkers and informal sector workers became subordinate members of the
popular-front alliances.
As this essay demonstrates, these distinctions were intrinsically gendered.
Political elites justied political and economic entitlements by acknowledging
(male) workers productive contributions to the nation and by linking the
rights and responsibilities of workers to their role as family heads. They also
advanced worker rights by contrasting productive, reputable, manly men with
both dependent family members and disreputable men. In so doing, the popular fronts not only failed to recognize the importance of the labor performed
by those outside the formal sector. They also advanced the rights of presumably productive workers by asserting their masculine privilege and power vis-vis nonworkers and dependents.
Formal sector workers on balance beneted from state-administered benets as well as from the recognition of their authority over dependent family
members and disreputable men. As a result, they generally reinforced the gendered hierarchies that undergird the construction of state policies. Like popular-front ofcials, workers and their organizations argued at times for the
extension of entitlements to nonworkers and workers outside the formal
sector. Yet they just as often deepened gendered divisions by presenting
organized workers as especially deserving. In so doing, they reinforced their
alliance with the middle-class reformers who spearheaded state expansion
while politically distancing themselves, at least in some ways and at times,
from other working-class Chileans. Overall, then, the popular-front coalitions
and their supporters extended citizen rights by broadening and democratizing
state services and by bolstering the authority and inuence of formal sector
workers. But they also dened entitlement in ways that limited the rights and
the citizen inuence of other Chileans.
State Intervention, Reform, and
the Emergence of the Popular Fronts
The popular fronts unique and contradictory blend of popular empowerment,

state intervention, and capitalist revitalization emerged after several failed
attempts to move beyond traditional oligarchic elites primarily repressive
approach toward popular classes. After 1920 reformist elites increasingly advo-
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cated an enhanced role for the state in mediating labor disputes, mitigating
capitalisms worst excesses, and directing economic development. Yet given
traditional elites aversion to social reform and popular organizations continuing reservations about top-down state policies, none of the governments of
1920 38 successfully implemented its project. The popular fronts would, by
contrast, succeed in reforming economy and polity by recognizing and mobilizing existing popular organizations.
During the rst two decades of the twentieth century, Chiles traditional
ruling elite had tried to combat communism through a combination of charity, repression, and scattered social legislation. Yet it failed to discourage labor
organizing or stie popular mobilization. The mildly reformist Liberal party
member Arturo Alessandri, who was elected president in 1920, sought to
advance labor stability and capitalist modernization by regulating labor relations and bettering workers living and working conditions. To solve the countrys social problem and avoid the costs associated with the repressive policies of the oligarchic state, he and his followers advocated legislation that
mandated health, social security, and disability insurance for blue-collar workers; provided for state recognition of labor unions; and set up tripartite conciliation and arbitration boards.5
Signicant segments of workers and employers opposed Alessandris proposals. Alessandri alienated organized labor by calling on troops to put down
striking mine workers at the San Gregorio nitrate ofce in 1921. More important, worker organizers feared the reforms he proposed would allow employers and the state to co-opt their until-then illegal organizations. Mutualists
rejected control of pension and health funds, which workers would help
nance, by bureaucrats or the wealthy. Luis Emilio Recabarren, at the time a
congressional deputy for the pro-labor Partido Obrero Socialista, presented a
counterproject that called for locally administered work tribunals.6 Congress
and proprietors were not overwhelmingly enthusiastic about Alessandris proposals either. While some employers, such as the U.S.-owned Braden Copper
5. James Morris, Elites, Intellectuals, and Consensus: A Study of the Social Question and the
Industrial Relations System in Chile (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1966).
6. Morris, Elites, Intellectuals, and Consensus, 206, 24347; Mara Anglica Illanes, En
el nombre del pueblo, del estado y de la ciencia (. . .): Historia social de la salud pblica, Chile
1880 1973 (Santiago: Colectivo de Atencin Primaria, 1993), 18791; Peter DeShazo,
Urban Workers and Labor Unions in Chile, 1902 1927 (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press,
1983), 18687; and Mario Gngora, Ensayo histrico sobre la nocin de estado en Chile en los
siglos XIX y XX, 4th ed. (Santiago: Ed. Universitaria, 1986), 12223; Gngora associates
dwindling support for Alessandri with the 1921 massacre.
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Company, supported legislative changes, a great many others feared that

reforms would give workers unwarranted leverage. They rallied around a
more traditional and repressive approach to labor relations and responded to
the round of strikes that accompanied Alessandris election with a series of
lockouts. Discrepancies erupted into violence: a bomb exploded at the door of
the deputy who had authored social security legislation.7 Reforms stalled in
Congress.
Only a military intervention secured the passage of controversial labor
and welfare laws. Under pressure from the military, in September 1924, Congress acceded to legislation that regulated the formation and nancing of labor
unions, the right to strike, and the establishment of conciliation and arbitration boards. It also passed a law creating the CSO. Shortly afterwards, Colonel
Carlos Ibez del Campo placed himself at the head of the military movement
and began to rule from behind the scenes. In 1927 he was elected president in
an almost completely uncontested election.
Once he assumed the presidency, Ibez forged an alliance of organized
workers and state-employed, middle-class reformers that foreshadowed the
popular-front alliance. Ibez did not hesitate to jail labor leaders who
opposed him, and labor movement did not as a whole support the military
caudillo. Yet like his Brazilian counterpart Getlio Vargas, Ibez bolstered
loyal trade unions and sought to form them into an ofcial, government-sponsored labor movement. Given employer hostility to unionization, many labor
leaders saw alliance with state ofcials as the best way of consolidating the
labor movement and satisfying at least some of its demands. Ibez also rallied
popular support by putting progressive middle-class reformers sensitive to
popular demands in charge of state agencies dealing with labor, health, and
welfare. Several of the middle-class reformers who would later found the
Socialist party in 1933 held ofce in labor and welfare agencies during Ibezs
presidency. There, they learned to court popular sectors and to make state
employment a political springboard.8
Yet Ibezs attempt to control and co-opt popular sectors, like Alessandris attempt before his, ultimately proved unsuccessful. In 1931 massive street
7. On Braden Copper Company support for legislation, see Klubock, Contested
Communities, 74. On employer lockouts, see DeShazo, Urban Workers and Labor Unions,
18894. Revista de Asistencia Social 1 (1944): 436, 438, 440.
8. Jorge Rojas Flores, La dictadura de Ibez y los sindicatos (1927 1931) (Santiago:
Direccin de Bibliotecas, Archivos y Museos, 1993). On Vargas, see John D. French, The
Brazilian Workers ABC: Class Conflict and Alliances in Modern So Paulo (Chapel Hill: Univ.
of North Carolina Press, 1992).
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demonstrations fueled by rapidly deteriorating economic conditions brought

Ibez down, and by 1932 the Right had recaptured the presidency. Yet Liberals and Conservatives could not hold on to power either, in part because they
were divided on issues of social reform.9 As a result, the until-then impossible
task of reconciling capitalist development with the needs of Chiles working
people would fall to the popular fronts.
Like Ibez, the popular fronts used working-class support and state
intervention to curtail the excesses of the oligarchy. But they also introduced
new ways of winning the adherence of popular sectors: they promoted equality
and inclusion and offered to eliminate patronizing charitable forms of private
and public aid to the poor. Perhaps most important, they sought to enhance
the material well-being of popular classes, solicited the backing of existing
popular organizations, and explicitly eschewed repression. These strategies
apparently paid off. In the streets and at the polls, popular sectors rallied
enthusiastically behind the popular fronts. In the mining province of Antofagasta, a traditional stronghold of the labor movement, for instance, popularfront candidates obtained over 68 percent of the vote in each of the three presidential elections between 1938 and 1946.10 Ultimately, it was this enthusiastic
popular support that allowed the popular fronts, unlike Alessandri and Ibez,
to maintain power.
Progressive middle-class reformers as well as members of the laboring
classes beneted from popular-front rule. Working-class organizations gained
direct access to spheres of political decision-making, as they had begun to during Ibezs years as president. However, because popular-front elites frequently quarreled amongst themselves and because the popular fronts, unlike
Ibez, eschewed repression, labor now had greater leverage. Middle-class
members of the coalitions especially Radicals and to a lesser extent the
Socialists beneted from the extension of state services, which provided
attractive employment opportunities within the bureaucracy. They also surmounted the subordinate status they had inevitably assumed in prior governing coalitions. As Aguirre Cerda asserted on the eve of the 1938 election,
because of the Rights unyielding incomprehension, the Radical party, which
represents mainly the middle class, has openly taken a step to the Left in order
to ally itself cordially with the working class.11
9. Toms Moulian and Isabel Torres Dujisin, Discusiones entre honorables: Las
candidaturas presidenciales de la derecha entre 1938 y 1946 (Santiago: FLACSO, 1988).
10. Germn Urza Valenzuela, Historia poltica de Chile y su evolucin electoral: Desde
1810 a 1992 (Santiago: Ed. Jurdica de Chile, 1992), 501 2, 531 32, 541 42.
11. Aguirre Cerda in Unidad Grfica, 9 Oct. 1938, 1. On state employment, see
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At the same time, the popular fronts furthered capitalist development.

More conservative sectors of the Radical party actively sought the support of
the modern sectors of the capitalist class. The Socialist and Communist parties courted economic elites to further the bourgeois-democratic capitalist
modernization they believed should precede a socialist revolution. As a result
of this widespread support for capitalist economic development, popular-front
leaders undoubtedly quelled popular protest and redened popular demands
in a way that made them more palatable to entrepreneurs.12
Yet the middle-class leaders of the popular fronts did not completely stie
popular militancy, co-opt working-class organizations, or disregard popular
demands. Indeed, popular classes gained signicant material advantages during
the popular-front era. According to the best gures available, the real wages of
formal sector workers in manufacturing rose a formidable 65 percent between
1937 and 1949. In addition, the popular fronts failure to repress popular mobilization allowed popular groups to grow and to maintain a degree of autonomy.
As state ofcials abandoned their repressive tactics, labor organizing and work
stoppages mushroomed, as did other forms of popular mobilization.13
Germn Urza Valenzuela and Anamara Garca Barzelatto, Diagnstico de la burocracia
chilena, 1818 1969 (Santiago: Ed. Jurdica de Chile, 1971), 74.
12. On the Radicals, see Jaime Reyes Alvarez, Los presidentes radicales y su partido:
Chile, 1938 1952, Documento de Trabajo, no. 120 (Santiago: Centro de Estudios
Pblicos, 1989). On Communists, see Carmelo Furci, The Chilean Communist Party and the
Road to Socialism (London: Zed Press, 1989); and Augusto Varas, ed., El Partido Comunista
en Chile: Estudio multidisciplinario (Santiago: CESOC/FLACSO, 1988). On the Socialist
party, see Fernando Casanueva and Manuel Fernndez, El Partido Socialista y la lucha de
clases en Chile (Santiago: Ed. Nacional Quimant, 1973); and Julio Csar Jobet, El Partido
Socialista de Chile, 3d ed. (Santiago: Prensa Latinoamericana, 1971).
13. One index of real wages in selected manufacturing industries, which most likely
included only CSO-insured workers, rose from 100 in 1937 to 165 in 1949. Another index
of daily wages paid rose from 89.8 in 1935 to 155.6 in 1949 (1927 1929-100). See Anuario
estadstico, ao 1950: Finanzas, bancos y cajas sociales (Santiago: n.p., 1954), 74; and Estadstica
Chilena 23, no. 12 (1950): 709. I calculated the former index by deecting the index of real
wages by the index of worker days. The index of real wages was derived, I believe, from
total wage bills, as estimated by employer contributions to the CSO. The index included
the following industrial sectors: sugar; cement; beer; electricity; match making; gas, coke,
and tar; cotton cloth; cloths and woolens; paper and cardboard; tobacco. According to
ofcial sources, membership in industrial and professional unions almost quadrupled from
54,801 in 1932 to 208,775 in 1941, with the greatest increase coming after 1938. The
number of strikes and other collective actions also rose steadily during this period, with a
sharp jump in 1939. See Revista del Trabajo 12, nos. 7 8 (1942): 37 8. Cf. Drake, Socialism
and Populism in Chile; and Ruth Berins Collier and David Collier, Shaping the Political
Arena: Critical Junctures, the Labor Movement, and Regime Dynamics in Latin America
(Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1991).
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Moreover, the prominent participation of Socialists and Communists in

the popular-front governments a feature that distinguished the Chilean
popular fronts from national-popular coalitions in Argentina, Mexico, or Brazil
provided popular organizations with distinct venues of inuence. Members
of the Socialist party secured positions within the bureaucracy until 1947
Communists sought to maintain their independence by avoiding ministerial
appointments and both Socialists and Communists embraced electoral politics. Because leftist political parties were relatively weak, they tended to
indulge popular demands as a way of gaining support and to encourage at least
certain forms of popular mobilization. Consequently, members of both parties
provided popular sectors with access to formal and informal political spheres
that might otherwise have remained unavailable. Compared to Mexican workers during this period and Argentine workers under Juan Pern, Chilean
workers maintained greater organizational autonomy from both the state and
ruling parties.14
Hierarchy, Respectability, and the Popular Fronts
Though Chileans of modest means generally beneted from the popular-front

governments, the coalitions favored industrial workers, including miners, over
rural and nonindustrial workers and over women. As past scholarship on the
popular fronts has indicated, in relation to rural labor the exclusionary policies
of the popular-front leadership apparently resulted from an explicit bargain
between popular-front politicians and the Right. In return for passing legislation that created the Corporacin de Fomento (CORFO, Development
Corporation), the motor of state-led industrialization, right-wing politicians
demanded that rural unionization be stopped. The exclusion of women was
more subterranean. Yet women were denied full political rights and other
restrictions on suffrage such as literacy requirements continued because
political elites on both the Right and the Left believed that universal suffrage
14. On the Chilean Socialist and Communist parties, see note 12. On labor
movements elsewhere in Latin America, see French, Brazilian Workers ABC; Kevin
Middlebrook, The Paradox of Revolution: Labor, the State, and Authoritarianism in Mexico
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1995); Daniel James, Resistance and Integration:
Peronism and the Argentine Working Class, 1946 1976 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press,
1988), chap. 1. On the role of the Left in Mexico, see Barry Carr, The Fate of the
Vanguard under a Revolutionary State: Marxisms Contribution to the Construction of the
Great Arch, in Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in
Modern Mexico, ed. Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent (Durham: Duke Univ. Press,
1994).
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would cause political dislocations. The popular fronts position on the family
wage system, which dened men as entitled breadwinners and women as
dependent housewives, was negotiated even more quietly. Yet on balance, the
popular fronts cemented male-headed nuclear families materially and ideologically, making it difcult for women to make independent political or
economic claims. Male industrial workers made concrete gains as a result.
Depressed rural wages beneted urban workers materially by keeping the
price of foodstuffs low, and the family wage system assured men that women
would not compete for the best jobs.15
The gendered hierarchies that undergird popular-front rule were constructed by relating the type of labor believed to promote progress particularly industrial and mining work to political entitlement and by associating
entitlement with hegemonic forms of masculinity. Because industry and mining were seen as crucial to Chiles economic well-being, (male) industrial
workers were considered important members of the national community.
Conversely, because industry and mining had long been considered critical
economic activities, organized industrial workers were more effectively able to
demand political and economic entitlements. By contrast, women, campesinos, and informally employed workers gained less political inuence and
fewer economic benets because popular-front governments, and the worker
organizations that supported them, continued to see workers as exceptionally consequential actors and to dene women and nonindustrial workers as
nonworkers. As I discuss below, this gendered political economy reafrmed
the association of masculinity and industrial work by asserting womens role as
housewives and mothers, by ignoring women who performed industrial work,
and/or by portraying women workers as anomalous. Men who either performed informal or unproductive work or who did not work were seen as
dependent and feminized. As a result, industrial workers afrmed their superiority not only over women but also over less reputable men. The gendered
hierarchies of the popular-front years thus structured relations not only
between working-class men and women, and between popular-front leaders
and their constituents but also among men of the laboring classes.
15. On the bargaining that accompanied the passage of the law authorizing CORFO,
see Oscar Muoz Gom, Chile y su industrializacin: Pasado, crisis y opciones (Santiago:
CIEPLAN, 1986), 92. On the interest of urban laborers in keeping rural wages low, see
Brian Loveman, Political Participation and Rural Labor in Chile, in Political Participation
in Latin America, vol. 2 of Politics and the Poor, ed. Mitchell A. Seligson and John A. Boothe
( New York: Holmes and Meier, 1979), esp. 186 87. On the family wage system, see
Rosemblatt, Gendered Compromises.
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At a strictly formal level, popular-front policies did not for the most part
discriminate based on gendered criteria. Despite widespread claims to the contrary, many formal sector workers labored outside manufacturing and mining,
and all workers, even purportedly unproductive rural workers and domestic
servants, could receive CSO benets if they had labor contracts. Even selfemployed workers could qualify for CSO benets if they paid the requisite
taxes. Furthermore, popular-front leaders and their supporters often argued
that entitlements should be extended to those who lacked them, such as the
sizable number of domestic servants and rural laborers who worked without
contracts or benets. However, even as popular leaders and political elites
argued for the formal extension of benets, they justied entitlements by
equating formal sector work with industrial labor and masculinity. In so doing,
they reinforced normative gendered denitions of worker and undermined
the claims of those who did not t those denitions.
In regards to women, political elites and labor activists together circumscribed womens rights by rejecting paid labor for women and by dening fulltime homemaking as the only proper feminine activity. Politicians and activists
also downplayed the importance of both womens work within the home and
informal forms of employment, activities that were deemed similarly unproductive.
By implicitly and explicitly disapproving of womens work outside the
home on the grounds that women could and should depend on the economic
sustenance of a male breadwinner, popular-front leaders limited womens
access to the one presumably productive activity that might have entitled
them to citizen rights. Throughout the popular-front period, few women
worked for wages (see table 1). The CSO itself called for the dismissal of its
white-collar women employees when they married, and the Postal and Telegraph Service sought both to exclude married women and to set quotas barring women from occupying more than 20 percent of the positions within the
service. Similarly, a 1940 civil service competition for the Direccin General
del Trabajo stipulated that women should occupy no more than 50 percent of
new positions and 10 percent of total inspector positions. Though feminists and
many popular-front leaders opposed these measures, other popular-front ofcials defended mens positions as breadwinners even when that meant openly
discriminating against women in the workplace.16
16. El Movimiento Pro-Emancipacin de las Mujeres de Chile en el dcimo
aniversario de su fundacin, reprinted in MEMCh: Antologa para una historia del
movimiento femenino en Chile (Santiago: n.p., 1982), 41 42; and Memoria presentada al
Segundo Congreso Nacional del MEMCh [1940], Archivo Personal Elena Caffarena
(hereafter APEC) A1 4. See also Frente Popular, 26 July 1940, n.p.
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Table 1: Womens Workforce Par ticipation

Year
Men
Women
Total Workers
% Women
1930
1940
1952
1,116,513
1,362,275
1,616,152
290,961
432,903
539,141
1,460,474
1,795,178
2,155,243
20
24
25
Source: Chile, Direccin General de Estadstica, X censo de la poblacin efectuado el 27 de

noviembre de 1930, 3 vols. (Santiago: Imp. Universo, 1935), 3:xviii, 17 18; Chile, XI censo
de poblacin, 1940, Estadstica Chilena 19, no. 9 (1946): 564; Chile, Servicio Nacional de
Estadstica y Censos, XII censo general de poblacin y I de vivienda, levantado el 24 de abril de
1952 (Santiago, 1956 1958): 205 7.
Note: Economically active population has been adjusted to include the unemployed and
domestic servants and to exclude students, prisoners, hospital residents, and persons living
on xed incomes.
Some working-class activists echoed this logic. A front-page article in the

newspaper of the Partido Socialista de Trabajadores decried the miserable
working conditions, long hours, and bad pay faced by white-collar women in
commerce. To remedy this situation, the article called on labor inspectors to
trap scoundrel employers. It went on to argue, however, that prohibiting
women from working would be just as effective and class-conscious a remedy:
Womens work in certain businesses should be prohibited, not only limited.
This measure would oblige the employment of men and make an enormous
contribution, beneting workers homes, at the same time it would oblige
those hasty nanciers, who have made an enormous market of our patria, to
curb a bit their overowing prots. Believing that women took jobs away
from men who really needed them, thereby undermining the male-headed
nuclear family and the prosperity of the patria, this article called for the exclusion of women from paid labor. In a similar but more misogynistic vein, when
Socialist mayor of Santiago and womens movement activist Graciela Contreras de Schnake provided women with employment in the municipality, a
rival socialist faction accused her of misspending on hundreds of worthless
and frivolous girls who took the bread away from many workers [obreros].17
Womens housework and childrearing did not for the most part make
them full citizens because these activities presumably constituted unproductive, private work performed within the home. The contributions of house17. Tribuna (Puerto Natales), 6 Mar. 1941, 1, originally published in Combate, 12 Oct.
1941, 4. On similar rhetoric in the labor movement in an earlier period, see Elizabeth
Quay Hutchison, Labors Appropriate to Their Sex: Gender, Labor, and Politics in Urban Chile,
1900 1930 (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, forthcoming).
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wives and mothers to the patria were deemed at best indirect: they would raise
the future citizens of the nation and facilitate the productive labor and political
participation of male family members. Within working-class organizations, a
signicant (but not necessarily widespread) discursive strand dened womens
political participation as auxiliary to that of men and as social (because based
on domestic roles) rather than political. For instance, Eusebia Torres, a Communist municipal councilor from the coal mining town of Coronel, touted the
importance of miners labor to the nation even as she praised her women constituents for supporting their men family members and refusing to work outside the home. Her constituents were, she said,
not those workers who must go to the factory to win their daily bread,
but . . . the wives [mujeres] of the authentic workers, of the authentic
workers, those workers who [endure] pain and suffering. They are the
ones that, risking their lives, because the work they carry out is the most
outrageously dangerous work, I am referring to the miners, contribute
every day to the grandeur of our patria.
Later in the same speech, Torres downplayed the womens role in a cost-ofliving protest, and called it a rearguard, last ditch effort in support of the
miners:
How painful it was for the woman to go get the our so that her compaero could go down into the mine and to nd that the money she had
with her was not enough to buy it. So the women said, We cant take it
any more, we have to organize a movement, were not going to be able to
feed our compaeros and children. . . . The women said, We who make
so many sacrices are going to make a last ditch effort. . . . The women
shouted with their babies in their arms and their children by the hand
and they said, If the price of our doesnt go down, were going to put
out our stoves.
Here, Torres drew on a long tradition of portraying womens protest as motivated by appropriately feminine concerns, and she underscored womens
familial role by pointing out that they protested with their children by their
sides. While in her view the miners struggle was closely linked to the wellbeing of the nation, their wives actions were not.18
Similarly, voicing the notion that womens political participation was aux18. Palabra de la compaera Eusebia Torres de Coronel, 1947, APEC A2 3.
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iliary, in a 1993 interview, Fresia Gravano suggested that in the Vergara nitrate
camp, where she grew up, womens activism was more social than political, and
that womens role was one of support: The women . . . worked with the
unions. And when workers presented their demands, they worked with the
strikes. . . . It was an activity, lets say, not so much a political activity as a social
activity, in the sense of supporting the union, supporting the workers with
womens struggle. Gravano regured womens political involvement as unity
with and aid to family members. Like Torres, she echoed a discourse that discounted womens political contributions to the nation and therefore limited
womens claims to full citizenship.19
Popular-front ofcials sometimes recognized the importance womens
homemaking and mothering and granted certain limited benets to mothers
and wives. Yet state benets that rewarded womens work within the home
family allowances, widows pensions, and maternal health care were generally provided to the wives of workers. Those benets thus reafrmed womens
status as dependents. Given the indirect nature of womens contributions, their
rewards would also be indirect. For instance, although family allowances were
meant to support wives and children, they were paid to male laborers.
Many women undoubtedly saw their services within the home as important to their country as well as their families, and certainly many regarded
family wages as rewards for their critical services within the home. In fact,
workers wives often demanded the payment of family allowances directly to
them. The feminist organization Movimiento Pro-Emancipacin de la Mujer
Chilena (MEMCh, Movement for the Emancipation of Chilean Women)
argued for a law guaranteeing the payment of family allowances to wives. Similarly, working-class activists who participated in a womens group in the nitrate
mining community of Ricaventura saw maternity care for the wives of CSOinsured workers as something Organized women had obtained for themselves
and not simply as an entitlement for their husbands. However, political and
labor elites tended not to see these benets as a reward for womens service. As
one observer noted of family allowances, On the part of workers, the family
wage has been received with great enthusiasm . . . because the family wage constitutes a recognition of the social value of the worker as a family head.20
19. Fresia Gravano, interview by author, Santiago, 17 June 1993.
20. El Despertar Minero (Sewell), 15 Mar. 1941, 3; Servanda de Liberona, Elsa Orrego,
Ana Liberona y Custodia Moreno de la Ocina Ricaventura a Olga P. de Espinoza, 6 Feb.
1948, APEC A1 21; and Carlos Villarroel Rojas, Aspectos fundamentales de la poltica de
proteccin familiar obrera (Memoria, Facultad de Ciencias Jurdicas y Sociales, Univ. de
Chile, 1936), 32.
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Given that women were often not deemed full citizens who made important contributions to the nation, it is not surprising that popular-front ofcials
saw womens well-being not as the direct responsibility of the state but as the
private responsibility of men family members who should protect them economically and sexually. Employees of social service agencies spent inordinate
energy tracking down recalcitrant husbands and trying to ensure that they
supported their wives, and state efforts to enforce mens responsibility toward
women and children arguably constituted the single most important state policy aimed toward those groups. In contrast, state agents only sporadically
found women jobs usually in domestic service and rarely insisted on
womens right to support themselves and their children. The state thus reinforced womens status as dependents.21
Finally, the rights of women were circumscribed not only by excluding
them from wage work and by denying the importance to the polity of their
domestic labor and political mobilizations but also by belittling the types of
paid work that women most commonly performed. Of those women who
worked for wages, few did industrial work (see table 2). Most did industrial
work at home, engaged in artesanal production, or participated in domestic
service and laundering (see table 3). Of 144,589 blue-collar women paying
social security taxes in 1945, for example, 17.3 percent were self-employed (as
opposed to 3.6 percent of men); and 58.8 percent of the non-self-employed
were domestic servants.22 Like mothering and unpaid domestic labor, these
occupations (which ofcial tabulations never fully documented) were neither
well regulated nor recognized as socially useful. In 1935 the Consejo Superior
del Trabajo a state advisory board that included representatives of labor,
capital, and the state proposed legislation that exempted domestic servants
from minimum wage dispositions and allowed a 30 percent reduction in living
wages for women who work as obreras in jobs proper to their sex.23 Even
labor leader Mara Gonzlez, herself a domestic servant, denigrated domestic
service by characterizing it as unproductive and semifeudal. Jos Vizcarra,
a popular-front supporter and CSO physician, asked of the limited legislation
regulating domestic service: Have these social laws . . . made domestic servants into citizens who are incorporated into the benets of society? He
21. Rosemblatt, Gendered Compromises, chaps. 2, 5.
22. Figures cited in Raquel Weitzman Fliman, La Caja de Seguro Obligatorio
(Memoria, Facultad de Ciencias Jurdicas y Sociales, Univ. de Chile, 1947), table 5.
23. The legislative proposal drafted by the Consejo Superior del Trabajo can be found
in Revista del Trabajo 5, no. 3 (1935). Another proposal can be found in Cmara de
Diputados, 1 June 1936, 5a. sesin (sesiones ordinarias, 1936, I, 247).
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569
Table 2: Women in the Manufacturing Workforce

Year
Female Factory Workers
% of Women Workers
1930
1940
1952
90,756
93,904
131,850
31
22
24
Source: X Censo, 3:xviii, xxviii 17 18; XI censo, 549 58, 564; and XII Censo, 205 7, 269.
Table 3: Women in Domestic Ser vice

Year
Female Domestic Servants
% of Female Workers
1930
1940
1952
114,782
172,975
171,330
40
40
32
Source: X Censo, 3:xviixviii, 17 18; XI censo, 546, 564; and XII Censo, 205 7, 269.
Note: For 1930 and 1940 domestic service includes classied and unclassied domestic
servants, laundresses, and cooks. Figures for 1952 include only domestic servants classied
as such.
answered himself with a rotund no. In short, women were identied with
either the home or with informal and intermittent work and were therefore
marked as dependent and subordinate.24
Besides insisting that women were unproductive and therefore undeserving of direct state aid, labor and leftist leaders advanced the notion that male
industrial workers were reputable and deserving by differentiating them from
itinerant, criminal, ignorant, lazy, and unmanly men. Carmen Lazo, whose
father worked at the Chuquicamata copper mine, distinguished her presumably respectable family from the rural southerners who migrated to the mining
community where she lived in the 1930s. At that time, she recalled in an
interview, there was a lot of insecurity in the [mining] camps because a lot of
people from the south who were not exactly workers [obreros] would arrive,
and they would rob the workers, assault them. Using a similar notion of
respectability, in 1941 workers at the El Teniente copper mine demanded the
reinstatement of quintessentially respectable labor leaders who had been laid
off and prohibited from coming into the mining camp. Are these workers
bandits, assassins, or rabble? they asked. No! . . . [T]hey are honorable
24. Vanguardia Hotelera, 6 Jan. 1934, 2; and Boletn Mdico-Social de la Caja de Seguro
Obligatorio, nos. 98 99 (1942): 446 55, quotation on 450.
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laborers who should be working for the company. Communist Volodia Teitelboim, like other labor and leftist leaders, characterized nonworkers as effeminate. In Teitelboims ctionalized account of the life of Communist leader
Elas Lafferte, the protagonist, still attached to his mothers skirt, felt
unmanly as well as useless and perverse and extremely incorrect, because
he was unemployed.25
As labor and leftist leaders used the differences between respectable male
workers and dishonorable others to justify privileges for male industrial
workers, professional elites accepted and amplied those distinctions. For
example, social worker Margarita Urquieta praised industrial workers who
produced the manufactured elements which modern civilization had made
necessary. In contrast to the day laborer, whose attire was dirty and disordered, the factory worker wore clean and ordered clothing. Another social
worker categorized workers in a similar fashion, noting that day laborers were
dependents since they usually worked as subordinate helpers and earned
lower wages.26
Professional experts as well as popular-front leaders and labor activists
thus distinguished reputable and worthy industrial workers from nonindustrial
workers and nonworkers and used this distinction to justify privileges for the
former. However, unmanly others were not completely excluded from the
popular-front pact. Women or campesinos who were employed in the formal
sector received the same benets as male industrial workers (even when their
labor was not characterized as worthy), and many Chileans undoubtedly
moved in and out of the kind of productive, formal sector labor that was associated with masculine respectability. Feminists and social workers, as well as
some labor and leftist activists, sought to extend and codify rights for women
and nonworkers. Socialists and Communists continued to organize rural
25. Carmen Lazo, interview by author, Santiago, 21 Apr. 1993; El Despertar Minero
(Sewell), 11 May 1939, 2; and Volodia Teitelboim, Hijo del salitre, 2d ed. (Santiago: Ed.
Austral, 1952), 106. For scholarly works that postulate the existence of two male genders,
see Luise White, Separating the Men from the Boys: Constructions of Gender, Sexuality,
and Terrorism in Central Kenya, 1939 1950, International Journal of African Historical
Studies 23, no. 1 (1990); Sonya Rose, Respectable Men, Disorderly Others: The Language
of Gender and the Lancashire Weavers Strike of 1878 in Britain, Gender and History 5, no.
3 (1993); and Robert Connell, Gender and Power (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1987),
esp. 183 88. On labor stability, hard work, and masculinity, see Klubock, Contested
Communities.
26. Margarita Urquieta Tognarelli, Problemas psico-sociales del obrero siderrgico
chileno (Memoria, Escuela de Servicio Social, Ministerio de Educacin Pblica, Santiago,
1946), 3 4, 33; and Servicio Social 12, no. 4 (1938): 164 65.
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571
laborers and to seek material improvements in the countryside although

with limited success. Indeed rights that were rst obtained by workers were
eventually extended to other Chileans. The hierarchies implicit in notions of
masculine respectability clearly blunted the impact of struggles to extend citizen rights. Yet they did not completely undermine them.27
The Caja de Seguro Obrero and State Welfare
Popular-front leaders used the CSO to reward purportedly reputable, industrial workers in tangible ways. The CSO was nanced by worker, employer,
and state contributions, and charged with providing health care, disability
insurance, and retirement benets to blue-collar workers. Improved living
conditions, the reformist elites who rst created the CSO believed, would
mollify disgruntled workers and stabilize the social order. Social welfare measures would also help create the kind of disciplined, hardworking laborer who
would increase prots for capital and raise Chile above its status as a secondclass nation. Like proponents of corporate welfare, reformist political elites
believed that traditional, repressive labor relations were ineffectual because
they precluded cooperation between labor and capital. Yet because only a
minority of Chiles presumably selsh and antinational capitalist class favored
modern, nonrepressive approaches to labor relations, progressive political
leaders argued that only state intervention would allow Chile to advance
industrially and achieve social peace.28
The legislation that created the CSO was passed in 1924, but the law was
not applied consistently until 193536. In the rst years following the passage
of the law, both employers and workers continued to fear that state-administered benets would reduce their control over welfare benets, and state of27. On continuing efforts to organize rural workers, see Jean Carrire, Landowners
and the Rural Unionization Question in Chile, 19201948, Boletn de Estudios
Latinoamericanos y del Caribe 22 (1977). For state publications that advocated increased
economic and political benets for rural workers or domestic servants see, for example,
Boletn Mdico-Social de la Caja de Seguro Obligatorio, nos. 98 99 (1942): 446 55; Accin
Social 9, no. 78 (1939): 10 11; and Accin Social 9, no. 79 (1939): 1 3. For leftist
publications, see El Grito del Obrero Agrcola, Aug. 1940, 2; Mujeres Chilenas, Dec. 1947, 9;
and CTCh, 11 Nov. 1943, 7.
28. On elite motivations, see Morris, Elites, Intellectuals, and Consensus. For an example
of reformist corporate elites, see Klubock, Contested Communities. On the relation between
the state and economic elites in So Paulo, see Barbara Weinstein, For Social Peace in Brazil:
Industrialists and the Remaking of the Working Class in So Paulo, 1920 1964 (Chapel Hill:
Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1996).
572
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cials, anxious and inexperienced, postponed the drafting of the legal decrees
necessary to the running of the CSO. The institution was further restricted
when the state failed to disburse funds it was legally required to pay the
agency. Then, between December 1927 and March 1932, the provision of
medical care for CSO beneciaries was entrusted to the Benecencia Pblica,
a state-overseen institution that was for the most part privately run. Other
CSO services were also parceled out to existing state agencies during this
period, effectively gutting the agency.29
However, after the overthrow of Ibez in 1932, the CSO regained control of medical and other services. In 193536 it began to expand its benets.
The CSOs increasingly activist stance was part of a broader process of state
expansion that, although it had originated in the mid-1920s, accelerated in
response to the 1930 depression and reached its peak after 1938. From 1930 to
1950 total state spending rose nominally from 1,131 billion to 20,637 billion
pesos, and state employment grew from 30,147 to 68,225 between 1929 and
1949. Proportionally, social services absorbed the largest number of new state
employees, and the CSO spearheaded this growth: in the six years between
193435 and 194041, its income increased from 94 to 292 million pesos, and
between 1935 and 1939 the number of physicians in the CSO medical services
alone expanded from 396 to 926. During this same period, the number of
social workers and sanitary nurses employed by the CSO medical services rose
from 17 to 74. Within the CSO as a whole, there were 25 social workers in
1935 and 115 in 1945.30
The CSO, although in a precarious nancial position, had a very substantial budget. Unabashedly publicizing its own economic clout, the CSO proclaimed in a 1942 advertisement: The Caja de Seguro Obligatorio has a cash
ow of more than one billion pesos a year, that is to say, more than 50 percent
of the states budget. There was more than a little hyperbole involved in this
29. Accin Social, no. 113 (1942): 5 7; Revista de Asistencia Social 13 (1944): 435, 438;
and Boletn Mdico-Social de la Caja de Seguro Obligatorio 11, nos. 117 119 (1944): 205 13.
30. Ibid. On state expenditures, see Anuario estadstico, ao 1935: Finanzas, bancos y cajas
sociales (Santiago: n.p., [1937?]), 2 5; Estadstica Chilena 23, no. 12 (1950): 703. On state
employment, see Urza Valenzuela and Garca Barzelatto, Diagnstico de la burocracia
chilena, 74. On CSO expenditures Accin Social 12, no. 113 (1942): 17. On social workers
and physicians in the CSO, see Salvador Allende, La realidad mdico-social chilena (sntesis)
(Santiago: Ministerio de Salubridad, Previsin y Asistencia Social, 1939), 144. On CSO
social workers, see Servicio Social 20, no. 1 (1940): 44; Servicio Social 16, nos. 1 2 (1942): 73,
76; Isabel Norambuena Lagarde, El servicio social en la CSO (Memoria, Escuela de
Servicio Social, Junta de Benecencia, Santiago, 1943), 2, 1112; and Boletn Mdico-Social
de la Caja de Seguro Obligatorio 12, nos. 125 127 (1945): 178.
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573
advertisement. The billion-peso gure included both income and expenditures

(and even then the real gure fell short of one billion); the states budget was
closer to three billion.31 However, a single agency charged with investing the
pension funds of all blue-collar workers undoubtedly had access to very significant resources.
As a result, Caja programs were far-reaching. Beginning in 1932, the
institution disbursed limited widows and orphans pensions to workers
dependents, and in 193639 it began to provide prenatal care to workers wives
and health care to their children under the age of two. In the years after 1932,
it also built housing for workers, created recreational programs, and operated
a cooperative store. To provide cheap foodstuffs and medicines to Chilean
workers, it bought and ran a pharmaceutical company, a milk pasteurizing
plant, and several haciendas. As early as 1935, a CSO publication noted with
alarm that other state agencies were lagging behind it, shirking their responsibilities: That the evolution of the Cajas services is more rapid than that of the
rest of the countrys social welfare organisms is unfortunate, for on more than
one occasion, the CSO has appeared as a quasi-revolutionary institution. By
1944 the CSO alone provided health care to between one-fth and one-third
of all children under the age of two.32
Through CSO health and welfare programs aimed at improving workingclass childrearing, housekeeping, and leisure habits, middle-class professional
elites sought not only to improve the popular classes materially but also to
moralize and discipline them, instilling the values of cleanliness, moderation,
hard work, and love of family. Nevertheless, during this period, the CSO
became a haven for Left-leaning and progressive professionals who linked
CSO expansion not only to capitalist development, national prosperity, and
the disciplining of labor but also to political and economic democratization
and the end of paternalistic forms of public and private charity. This process
31. The quotation is from El Siglo, 4 July 1942, 9. For budget gures, see Estadstica
Chilena 18, no. 12 (1945): 678, 683.
32. The quotation is from Boletn Mdico-Social de la Caja de Seguro Obligatorio 2, no.
19 (1935): 4. On the CSOs power, see also Norambuena Lagarde, El servicio social en la
CSO, 2. On CSO programs, see Accin Social 12, no. 113 (1942): 9 14; Accin Social, no. 12
(1933): 7; Accin Social 4, no. 51 (1936): 35; Boletn Mdico-Social de la Caja de Seguro
Obligatorio 11, nos. 117119 (1944): 205. On CSO health care for infants see Helga Peralta,
La atencin materno-infantil en la Caja de Seguro Obligatorio (Memoria, Escuela de
Servicio Social, Univ. de Chile, Santiago, 1951), 32; Revista Chilena de Higiene y Medicina
Preventiva 8, no. 3 (1946): 149; and Revista Chilena de Higiene y Medicina Preventiva 5, no. 1
(1942): 103.
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actually began in 193336, when Santiago Labarca, a progressive Radical,

headed the agency and sought to invest the CSOs proceeds in ventures that
would directly help workers, such as the construction of low-cost housing.
CSO efforts to improve benets for workers and to court their support accelerated between January 1939 and January 1943, when the CSO was under the
leadership of Socialist party members Luciano Kulczewski, Salvador Allende,
and Miguel Etchebarne. (During those years, Allende and Etchebarne also
took turns as minister of health.)33 Workers productive contributions, progressives argued, were an essential part of national well-being, and in recompense the state should collaborate with workers in order to ensure their health
and well-being. CSO medical care was, a 1942 agency publication stated, a
right, which gives the contributor motive to demand efciency from an organism created with his own contributions.34
During the popular-front years, the CSO not only provided important
benets to workers but also sought the backing of workers by fostering working-class organizing and developing ties with union leaders. The Centro de
Reposo Nocturno Valparaso (Valparaso Nocturnal Rest Center), a CSO
boarding house for men deemed to be at medical risk, explicitly saw its role as
stimulating mens associative tendencies, in the interest of social solidarity
and brotherhood [compaerismo]. The Centers social worker corresponded
with a union representative, and although boarders were not generally permitted to leave the house during the evenings, an exception was made for union
meetings. In fact, residents of the Center were actually encouraged to participate in union events, and the Centers social worker happily reported that after
leaving the Center many ex-participants were elected to leadership positions
within their unions. Surprisingly, the promotion of unionization occurred
despite the condescending nature of the Centers social worker who deemed
her charges big children. It was the political ethos of the CSO, and not simply the inclinations of particular state ofcials within it, that facilitated collaboration between organized workers and the popular-front state.35
Within the CSO health services, professionals attempted to create more
33. On Socialists in the CSO, see the biographical catalogue on congressional
representatives in the Biblioteca del Congreso; and the second through the tenth editions
of the Diccionario biogrfico de Chile (Santiago: Empresa Periodstica Chile, 1939 58). For
an indication of other Socialists who held high ranking positions in the CSO, see Tribuna, 6
Mar. 1941, 2.
34. Accin Social 12, no. 113 (1942): 4.
35. Vida Sana (Valparaso) 1, no. 2 (1942): 6; Servicio Social 16, nos. 3 4 (1942):
195 202.
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575
horizontal, less coercive relations between workers and medical staff. The
head of the CSOs social service division saw social workers medical interventions as essentially pedagogical. Similarly, the CSO health publication Vida
Sana saw its role as purely educational and declared itself open to collaboration with and consultation by its audience. Acknowledging that laborers might
mistrust counsel dispensed by more educated and wealthy professionals, the
magazine tried to reduce the social distance between state ofcials and clients.
It often presented its advice as conversations among workers. A typical
Workers Dialogue published in one issue of Vida Sana, and most likely written by a physician, concluded by saying, Let my experience be of use to you,
my friend Pedro.36
In addition, CSO physicians likened their analyses of illness to those of
labor and leftist organizations by adopting a social approach to medicine.
Practitioners of social medicine championed preventive health care and recognized environmental conditions, including poverty, as important causes of illness. One CSO physician who analyzed the causes of tuberculosis went so far
as to claim that they escaped the domain of medicine and might be better
understood from a sociological or socioeconomic perspective.37 Likewise, in
1939 Allende approvingly quoted a 1935 article that saw the eradication of
poverty as the best cure for tuberculosis: Tuberculosis, a social disease,
requires a corresponding social hygiene, a hygiene of the masses, the application of which cannot be assured either by the individual or by the family;
a hygiene that, having as its point of view the economic inequality of individuals, from the moment that there are rich and poor, compensates for class differences.38
After 1938 Allende and other progressive physicians afrmed that a social
medicine could not prosper if the dominant classes control over medical
36. Boletn Mdico-Social de la Caja de Seguro Obligatorio, nos. 117 119 (1944): 347; and
Vida Sana (Temuco) 1, no. 1 (1938): 1, 7.
37. Vida Sana (Temuco) 1, no. 5 (1941): 4. For similar views in an earlier period, see
Boletn Mdico-Social de la Caja de Seguro Obligatorio 1, no. 11 (1935): 1 2; and Boletn
Mdico-Social de la Caja de Seguro Obligatorio 2, no. 17 (1935): 3 4. On sanitarista ideology
elsewhere in Latin America, see Dain Borges, Puffy, Ugly, Slothful and Inert:
Degeneration in Brazilian Social Thought, 1880 1940, Journal of Latin American Studies
25, no. 2 (1993); Eduardo Zimmerman, Racial Ideas and Social Reform: Argentina,
1804 1916, HAHR 72 (1992); Donna J. Guy, Sex and Danger in Buenos Aires: Prostitution,
Family, and Nation in Argentina (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1991); and Nancy Leys
Stepan, The Hour of Eugenics: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America (Ithaca: Cornell
Univ. Press, 1991).
38. Cited in Allende, La realidad mdico-social chilena, 87.
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establishments, and the paternalism that went along with that control, continued. Private and public charitable initiatives, they argued, simply individualized and pathologized the poor. Allende criticized the Benecencia Pblica
because it did not exercise a social function. According to Allende and other
progressive professionals, the Benecencia was tainted by its palliative medical
approach and its roots in private charity. Medical establishments that were
truly controlled by the state would, by contrast, provide health care that took
into account the social determinants of health and disease, well-being and misery. Thus, in 1942 the socialist La Crtica paraphrased the 1935 article quoted
by Allende saying, Tuberculosis, a social disease, needs a corresponding social
hygiene, a hygiene of the masses, the application of which cannot be handed
over to the individual, nor his family, nor public charity. The state must take
charge.39
CSO ofcials, in short, promoted cooperation between workers and the
state and portrayed state control as the sine qua non of effective solutions to
working-class problems. Employers and the political Right responded with
indignation to these efforts. It was not simply the socialist militias purchase of
low-cost shirts at a CSO cooperative store that outraged right-wingers. They
also opposed the Cajas contracting of agents to study unionization in six
provinces. And they were surely irritated by projects such as the Centro Valparaso. As early as Labarcas administration the Right responded to progressives within the CSO by seeking to put CSO investment decisions directly in
the hands of Congress. Later, near the beginning of the rst popular-front
presidency, right-wing politicians allied with certain members of the Radical
party to launch a virulent campaign against alleged Socialist misuse and mismanagement of CSO funds, a campaign that led to the removal of CSO head
Luciano Kulczewski. On a local level, employers also boycotted the CSO.
When the Caja contracted out the provision of medical services for blue-collar
employees to the Tarapac and Antofagasta Nitrate Company, for instance,
medical doctors hired by the company refused to cooperate with a Caja physician carrying out a campaign against venereal disease.40
39. Ibid.; and La Crtica, 5 Sept. 1942, 3.

40. For a right-wing criticism of state agencies favorable to popular sectors, including
the CSO, see La Voz de la Provincia (Valdivia), 1944. On congressional attempts to control
the CSO, see Accin Social 4, no. 51 (1936): 35. On the Rights accusation of Luciano
Kulczewski, see Rumbo, Dec. 1939, 85; Cmara de Diputados, 14 Nov. 1939, 4a. sesin
extraordinaria (sesiones extraordinarias, 1939, I, 292307). Boletn Mdico-Social de la Caja de
Seguro Obligatorio 6, nos. 6061 (1939): 71.
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577
Welfare for Nonworkers
Although the Caja often spoke of its actions on behalf of Chiles poor, in reality, it was charged only with attending to the welfare of workers. Wage earners
could opt to insure their family members for a fee, but in 1945 only 2,500
CSO beneciaries chose to do so. Socialists pushed for the extension of free
benets to family members, but until 1952 were largely unsuccessful. In October 1938, Socialist deputy Natalio Berman proposed a social solidarity insurance scheme, under which all the countrys inhabitants would have access to
public health care. Yet this initiative did not prosper, and when the rst popular-front minister of health, Socialist party member Salvador Allende, introduced legislation that would have extended health insurance to workers families, it stalled in Congress. Even if the proposed extension of coverage had
passed, many Chileans still would not have been insured. Allende insisted that
the popular fronts intended to provide all citizens with CSO health care, and a
CSO publication argued that if such legislation passed only a small minority
of rentistas and social parasites would be excluded. But in reality the proposed
legislation covered only family members of the insured, and that small
minority was likely larger than Allende and CSO ofcials granted.41
Taking up the CSOs slack, a diverse array of state-funded, state-overseen,
and state-run institutions and programs provided welfare for nonworkers.
These institutions included the Patronato Nacional de la Infancia, the Direccin General de Sanidad, the Benecencia, the Consejo de Defensa del Nio
(CDN, Child Defense Board), the Caja de Habitacin, the Direccin General
de Auxilio Social, and municipalities. Like the CSO, these agencies generally
expanded in the 1930s and 1940s. Yet outside the CSO, state control did not
always lead to the abandonment of casework methods that clients themselves
often equated with charity. Social workers continued to determine the needs
of clients who had no rights, deciding who to help and how. Given meager
budgets, many would also continue to replicate a piecemeal approach to helping the poor. And many would fail to recognize that the poor should have a
hand in determining the way benets were administered. State agents clearly
41. On family insurance, see Estadstica Chilena 18, no. 12 (1945): 688. On Bermans
plan see, Boletn de la Confederacin Regional de Aspirantes a Colonos de la Zona Devastada
(Concepcin), Oct. 1939, 2. For other plans to reform the CSO, Reforma de la ley
nmero 4054, Mensaje, Cmara de Diputados, 10 June 1941, cited in Boletn Mdico-Social
de la Caja de Seguro Obligatorio 8, nos. 79 82 (1941); Noticiario Sindical, Aug. 1951, 6 9; and
Cmara de Diputados, 23 Nov. 1950, 8a. sesin extraordinaria (sesiones extraordinarias,
1950 51, I, 515 30). See also CTCh, 22 Aug. 1945, 7. The quotation is from Vida Sana
(Temuco), second period 1, no. 5 (1941): 5.
578
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saw women and the indigent as dependents who did not have the right to
demand entitlements or reject patronizing forms of charitable assistance.
For instance, Rina Schiappacasse Ferretti, a social worker for the CDN,
had little more than charitable aid to offer M. Q., a domestic servant whose
child attended the day care center where Schiappacasse Ferretti worked.
M. Q. could not support her nine-year-old son and her six-month-old infant
on her paltry salary. Yet, although Schiappacasse sympathized enough with
M. Q. to nd her a higher paying job as a cook, the social worker could not
offer M. Q. assistance that would allow her to maintain a home for her two
children. Indeed the social worker could do no more than solicit the help of a
benevolent ex-employer, who purportedly cared deeply for M. Q.s son and
agreed to take in the boy. M. Q., who had no rights in this situation, would
have to content herself with the vow Schiappacasse had extracted from the
ex-employer: the patrn swore to clothe and feed M. Q.s child, treat him like
a son, see that he nished primary school, and assure that he acquired an adequate occupation.42
Likewise, single mothers who were lodged at the state-sponsored Hogar
de la Mujer, a boarding house for unmarried and abandoned women with
children, found that despite their own belief that the state should ensure
their well-being and that of their offspring their stay in the Hogar did not
constitute a right. According to Zarina Espinoza Muoz, a social worker at the
Hogar, the women interned there were timid and submissive, despite the fact
that they carry within themselves the rm belief that the state is obliged to
attend to their cases. With this temperament, after a few days, they demand
rights to which they believe they are entitled such as: free support without
their contribution, by contrast, cooperation with their work. In this manner,
they ignore the benets they have received and sometimes they turn
ungovernable and querulous; this happens especially when one tries to inculcate new habits of hygiene, order, and discipline and work. Clearly, Espinoza
believed her clients were not entitled to make demands.43
42. Rina Schiappacasse Ferretti, El problema econmico de la madre soltera
estudiado en el Centro de Defensa del Nio (Memoria, Escuela de Servicio Social,
Ministerio de Educacin Pblica, Concepcin, 1946), 58 61.
43. Zarina Espinoza Muoz, La Direccin de Auxilio Social y la labor desarrollada
por la asistente social en los sectores Pila y Estacin Central (Memoria, Escuela de
Servicio Social, Ministerio de Educacin Pblica, Santiago, 1947), 23. For the argument
that recipients of charity saw it as a right, see the essays in Peter Mandler, ed., The Uses of
Charity: The Poor on Relief in the Nineteenth-Century Metropolis (Philadelphia: Univ. of
Pennsylvania Press, 1990).
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579
More generally, institutions like the CDN and the Hogar were poorly
funded and their clients generally single, widowed, or abandoned women
and their children were not only destitute but also politically unorganized
and therefore marginal to the popular-front project. As a result, reformers
employed in these agencies found it difcult to build the kind of alliances with
clients that might have allowed them to improve the social services they provided. The organization of mothers centers among institutions clients was a
top-down initiative that, in this period, did little to stimulate womens collective articulation of demands. And when women did organize autonomously,
they often found institutions hostile. In 1945 Tomy Romeo, a Left-leaning
social worker who worked at the CDN established contact with Communist
women in a local consumer league. But Romeos superiors were so opposed to
her political ties that Romeo was eventually forced to resign. As she put it in a
1993 interview, The Consejo de Defensa del Nio was a very right-wing
thing. Her working-class allies had no powerful organization akin to the
Confederacin de Trabajadores de Chile (CTCh, Confederation of Chilean
Workers) willing and able to pressure more conservative state ofcials to
accept their collaboration. The CDN, unlike the CSO, which encouraged
workers to organize, apparently saw popular mobilizations as threatening.44
Without the ability to confront poverty, and womens poverty in particular, in a more concerted manner, state ofcials as whole concentrated on doing
the best they could for their individual clients. More often than not, that
meant enforcing male responsibility toward women and children. As social
worker Delia Arriagada Campos wrote of her own efforts to elevate both the
esteem and the economic condition of poor single mothers she encountered at
a Gota de Leche milk station in Talcahuano: I tried to change the mistaken
ideas of the woman of our pueblo, who thinks that because she is poor, her
honor has no value. . . . I also taught her that having a well-constituted home is
a right of every woman, regardless of her social condition. This, then, was the
principal right women had. If institutions such as the Hogar assisted women
who could not count on a reliable breadwinner for support, they did so not
because women had in any way earned state assistance but rather as a temporary, stopgap measure.45
44. Tomy Romeo, interviews by author, Santiago, 4 June 1993 and 28 July 1999.
45. Delia Arriagada Campos, Accin de servicio social en la Gota de Leche
Almirante Villarroel de Talcahuano (Memoria, Escuela de Servicio Social, Ministerio de
Educacin Pblica, Concepcin, 1947), 32 33.
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Reforming the Reformers
In contrast to most women and the indigent, formal sector workers generally
had organizations that could press for the reform of state services. Increasingly, those organizations xed their sights on the CSO. However, the alliance
between CSO ofcials and organized workers emerged slowly. As noted above,
in the 1920s and early 1930s, worker organizations had greeted the CSO, like
state regulation of labor relations in general, with ambivalence. Specically,
workers objected to the reduction in wages that their required monetary contribution to the CSO would entail, and anarchists predictably resisted the
expansion of the purview of the state. Members of the pro-Communist Federacin de Obreros de Chile (FOCh, Federation of Chilean Workers) were
split on the utility of state welfare. Some argued that revolutionaries should
not allow the state to expand its purview, and they underscored that reform
laws had been passed in an illegitimate fashion after the military intervention
of 1924. Other labor leaders suggested that social laws were the revolutionary
conquest of the working class and that labor and the Left should support
reforms insofar as they allowed the working class to persevere in the class
struggle. These conicting positions persisted at least until 1926, when a faction of workers again sought the repeal of the law that had created the CSO.46
But soon thereafter, labor debate over the merits of the CSO seemingly died
out.
When the popular fronts took hold of the executive branch in 1938, many
workers still viewed the CSO with suspicion: they saw services as lacking and
CSO professionals like traditional charity workers as often overbearing
and condescending. However, inuential sectors of the labor movement
increasingly deemed the CSO a friendly institution they might easily sway and
saw CSO ofcials as potential allies. The Rights staunch opposition to CSO
head Labarca and its later opposition to Kulczewski undoubtedly strengthened
the alliance between workers and CSO ofcials. By 1938, as ofcials more
attuned to popular demands ooded state agencies, worker support for state
intervention and worker pressure on the state mushroomed. Workers
came to see state services as a way of curtailing demeaning, charitable
approaches to welfare and augmenting their own jurisdiction, and they no
longer feared bureaucratic misappropriation of their contributions. Instead, as
popular-front ofcials appointed labor leaders to advisory positions within the
46. Morris, Elites, Intellectuals, and Consensus, 244 46; Rojas Flores, La dictadura de
Ibez, 61, 130 31.
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581
state, laborers insisted that their nancial support of the CSO entitled them a
say in the running of the agency.47
Workers preferred state welfare to private and public charity and corporate welfare because they could more effectively control the former. The
union at the El Teniente copper mine, for example, complained bitterly about
the social worker hired by the mining companys welfare department, saying
that she humiliated workers and their families with disproportionate demands
and with prodigious investigations. Yet union leaders were relatively powerless to make the social worker change her ways or to force the company to re
her. Apparently, workers at the Tarapac and Antofagasta Nitrate Company
felt that their ability to pressure their bosses was limited as well. Dissatised
with the medical care provided by the company doctor, they directed their
complaints to CSO ofcials. The CSO, they insisted, should revoke its contract with the company and take direct charge of health care in the mining
camps. As workers surely understood, state agents might not be any less intrinsically condescending than company medical employees, but they were more
vulnerable to criticism and hence less able to withstand laborers complaints.48
An incident that occurred in the mens wing of the Benecencia-run San
Jos Sanatorium, where CSO-insured workers received treatment for tuberculosis, revealed workers distrust of public charities, such as the Benecencia,
over which they had less control. It also exposed the efcacy of worker pressure on public ofcials who understood health care as a right of workers.
According to Sergio Llantn, a patient interned at San Jos, the hospital did
not provide the sort of medical care to which patients were entitled. He told
reporters at the Communist Frente Popular that there were no toilet facilities in
the sanatorium and the food was lousy. Perhaps more important, the institutions social workers had no interest in helping patients and treated them
really badly [remal ]. Social workers refused to run errands for patients who
needed rest and made patients wait endlessly for appointments. If anyone
dared to complain, the visitadoras insulted and ridiculed him.49
47. Accin Social, no. 113 (1942): 5 7; Revista de Asistencia Social 13 (1944): 435, 438,
440; Boletn Mdico-Social de la Caja de Seguro Obligatorio, nos. 117 119 (1944): 205 13;
Morris, Elites, Intellectuals, and Consensus, 206, 243 47; and Illanes, En el nombre del pueblo,
del estado y de la ciencia (. . .), 187 91, 224 29.
48. El Despertar Minero (Sewell), 5 June 1941, 1 2; Partido Socialista, I Congreso
Regional del Partido Socialista en la provincia de Tarapac: Resoluciones adoptadas
(Santiago, 1939), 12, 49. See also Servicio Social 11, no. 4 (1937), 229. On worker opposition
to corporate welfare, see also Klubock, Contested Communities.
49. Frente Popular, 5 May 1940, 2.
582
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The patients organized a committee to protest. But when their leader was
discharged from the sanatorium, 35 other San Jos residents staged a
patients strike and left the facility. The patients returned to the hospital
only when the minister of health, who the patients sought out, offered them
improvements. We believed the minister, Llantn told a reporter. We know
he is not tricking us. The hospitals director was, unfortunately, less reliable.
Once the patients had returned, he not only refused to meet their demands
but also prohibited them from leaving San Jos during a period of two weeks
and denied them permission to visit the womens wing. Horried at this retribution, the striking patients attempted to phone the minister of health and the
press. Hospital staff withheld access to the phone. Llantn was then forced to
travel to the Santiago ofces of Frente Popular to tell his story.50
In reporting this dispute, Frente Popular demanded further intervention
on the part of state ofcials, calling on the Caja which paid for the care of
insured workers in Benecencia hospitals to intervene in the matter.
Emphasizing the worthiness of the patients, Frente Popular also noted that they
were insured workers.51 The minister of health, like Frente Popular, seemed
to recognize the deserving nature of the San Jos patients when he granted
them an interview and intervened in the matter. And if CSO ofcials acted on
the patients behalf, they would presumably enforce workers rights as well.
Llantn and his allies clearly believed that unlike company welfare departments or public charities such as the Benecencia, these popular-front
authorities would heed worker demands for efcient and dignied treatment.
And the minister of healths intervention likely persuaded workers that
although state services did not always fulll their needs or expectations, problems could be corrected with the help of sympathetic state ofcials.
Workers generally found that CSO-controlled services were particularly
sensitive to their demands and open to popular pressure. The presence of
worker representatives on the CSO governing board assured workers that
their demands would be heard by government authorities. On a national level,
representatives of the CTCh labor confederation sat on the CSO board. The
Government of the Left, the Socialist newspaper La Crtica noted, has partially supplied workers with the ability for their representatives to intervene in
everything that is related to giving the insured every guarantee. The provincial branch of the CTCh in Antofagasta agreed, asserting, It is appropriate
to say, when we speak of the Caja de Seguro Obrero, that Mr. Luciano
50. Ibid.
51. Ibid.
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583
Kulczewski, currently its administrator, has given its services the social character it had lost in the last years of the previous government. Hence when
comrade Gardguilla was appointed as the CTCh representative on the CSO
regional board of directors in Antofagasta, the leaders of the regional CTCh
believed that they would properly control this service and proceed to the
aid of insured workers whenever necessary.52
Thus CSO ofcials efforts to inspire condence in workers apparently
succeeded to a degree. The Antofagasta CTCh noted that the CSO medical
professionals fullled a vital need of workers and that physicians and the
medical corps in general were aware of the mission of their generous and
appreciated profession; in this aspect, the worker has [found] in them a
teacher, a comrade, who is in the end his or her best friend. It further sustained in relation to the CSO, As a way of collaborating with the Popular
Front, we have the obligation of elevating its [the CSOs] prestige, development and performance, without this meaning that we fail to criticize the bad
procedures that we discover, [procedures that] mortify the blue-collar imponente, on the part of the medical corps and the administration. We will scout
out the bad functionaries, which hopefully are few in number.53 Workers thus
argued that CSO doctors were friends, that the agency needed gentle prodding, and that paternalistic professionals were few. Clearly, the CSO had
become an important nexus in the popular-front alliance between middle-class
reformers and the organized working class.
Unfortunately, workers organizations too rarely suggested that nonworkers and workers in the informal sector, including dependent family members
of the insured, merited the same dignied treatment as insured workers themselves. While the CTCh strongly supported the extension of CSO benets to
family members of the insured, Caja beneciaries who demanded improved,
CSO-controlled services also differentiated themselves from the indigent.
CSO beneciaries complained, for instance, that both the indigent and the
insured received inadequate hospital care at Benecencia hospitals. But instead
of insisting that the Benecencia improve services for all, La Crtica suggested
that labors representatives on the Cajas Consejo should struggle in particular
so that the insured receive care in their own hospitals, and not, as is now the
case, in public hospital rooms where workers are cared for as if this care con52. La Crtica, 13 May 1942, 1; 17 May 1942, 4, 5; and 18 May 1942, 4; Ceteche
(Antofagasta), second fortnight July 1938, 3; and 7 Dec. 1939, 1. On increasing worker
inuence within the CSO, see the proposal in CTCh, 24 Mar. 1943, 4.
53. Ceteche (Antofagasta), rst fortnight Dec. [1939?], 2.
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stituted charity and not an acquired right. Workers had a right to proper
medical treatment, La Crtica put forth, because they made Chile great
through their work. For the unproductive indigent, charitable care by the
Benecencia would apparently sufce.54
Toms Socialist newspaper contributed to this divisive and exclusionary
approach. Thereand throughout the region between Concepcin and Chilln
affected by the 1939 earthquake the Benecencia, the CSO, and the Direccin General de Sanidad joined forces, providing care for both the indigent
and the insured. This led a Socialist journalist to wonder whether abuses were
taking place: posing as indigent, anyone, including white-collar workers who
had a separate system of health care subsidies, could have access to medical
care nanced by the CSO. Eschewing solidarity with those who were not
CSO-insured, these leftist and labor leaders insisted instead on the right of
insured workers to separate, CSO medical care.55
The Socialist Youth of Chilln took a more generous and inclusive but
less frequent stance. Praising the fusion of CSO and non-CSO medical services in the region between Concepcin and Chilln, they refuted the notion
that the CSO-insured were making a disproportionate nancial contribution
and receiving inferior services. State agencies other than the CSO were contributing nancially to medical services in the region, they pointed out. They
countered insured workers who complained that the quality of service had
declined after the unication of medical services by undertaking a study of the
matter. Complaints, they found, had actually declined. Quality medical services, according to this view, could be provided by institutions other than the
CSO and to Chileans who were not insured workers. These young activists
thus rejected distinctions between worthy workers and undeserving others
and between rights-based and charity-like services. Implicitly, they undermined the gendered link between entitlement and work.56
Conclusion
By the time the popular fronts took power, the gendered contours of the welfare state had already been established. The popular fronts transformed that
legacy by democratizing services, at least to a degree, and by expanding them
greatly. Abetted by popular and Left organizations that encouraged demo54. La Crtica, 17 May 1942, 5. See also CTCh, cited in Illanes, En el nombre del
pueblo, del estado y de la ciencia (. . .), 352.
55. Liberacin (Tom), 20 May 1939, 2.
56. La Crtica, 12 May 1941, 8.
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585
cratic participation and entitlements principally for workers, the popular-front

governments deepened the gendered cleavages within the state. Physicians
promoting a social approach to medicine made friends with workers, and the
increased state resources they controlled made this alliance possible and
attractive. Those resources also convinced workers that it was necessary and
useful to struggle over how and by whom services would be provided.
Organized workers had effective tools for dealing with state authorities
and state agencies. It was the political mobilization of these workers, both
before and during the popular-front era, and their alliance with progressive
professionals that prompted the democratization of CSO services. At the same
time, worker politics propped up a charity-rights dichotomy that sustained differences between respectable workers and others, subordinated dependent
family members, and reinforced a view of the CSO as a special agency serving
privileged citizens. Within this widely accepted worker discourse, there was
little room for recognizing the rights of those who were not reputable, productive, manly workers. This had concrete consequences for women, the indigent, and the informally employed all presumably unproductive Chileans
who had access to fewer entitlements and less say in how those entitlements
would be administered. Still, the alliance of workers and middle-class reformers around the extension of state services did not completely stie the ability of
those who were not (male) workers or family heads to assert their rights. The
belittling of childrearing, housework, and informal labor limited the ability of
many Chileans to make demands. Yet it did not stop them from using the discourse of rights to claim the entitlements they believed they deserved.57
57. Daniel James argues similarly that Peronist discourses limited womens ability to
make claims but only to a degree, in his Tales Told Out on the Borderlands: Doa
Maras Story, Oral History, and Issues of Gender, in The Gendered Worlds of Latin American
Women Workers: From Household and Factory to the Union Hall and Ballot Box, ed. John D.
French and Daniel James (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1997).
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Charity, Rights, and Entitlement Gender, Labor and Welfare in Early 20th Chile

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Charity, Rights, and Entitlement Gender, Labor and Welfare in Early 20th Chile

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HAHR 81.

Charity, Rights, and Entitlement:

In 1939 the Caja de Seguro Obligatorio (CSO, Obligatory Insurance Fund),

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who deserved both to share in the economic benets of development and

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Charity, Rights, and Entitlement

inducements helped secure working-class support for the popular-front

The popular fronts unique and contradictory blend of popular empowerment,

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Charity, Rights, and Entitlement

Company, supported legislative changes, a great many others feared that

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demonstrations fueled by rapidly deteriorating economic conditions brought

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Charity, Rights, and Entitlement

At the same time, the popular fronts furthered capitalist development.

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Moreover, the prominent participation of Socialists and Communists in

Though Chileans of modest means generally beneted from the popular-front

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Charity, Rights, and Entitlement

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Charity, Rights, and Entitlement

Table 1: Womens Workforce Par ticipation

Source: Chile, Direccin General de Estadstica, X censo de la poblacin efectuado el 27 de

Some working-class activists echoed this logic. A front-page article in the

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Charity, Rights, and Entitlement

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Charity, Rights, and Entitlement

Table 2: Women in the Manufacturing Workforce

Female Factory Workers

Table 3: Women in Domestic Ser vice

Female Domestic Servants

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