Review

General Books

As Hutchison notes in her introduction, none of the basic studies of Chilean laborers written in the past generation, including my own, paid much attention to women. She decided to correct this omission. The period she surveys, basically the first quarter of the century, was one of rapid urbanization. Driven by the export of nitrates, the Chilean economy grew and began to industrialize seriously. In a pattern common with other Latin American nations, economic activities, especially manufacturing, became concentrated in a primary city--the capital. Hutchison provides a basic description of Santiago's expansion and the fate of its working women. A good part of her work retells the general conditions affecting working people, their living and working conditions and the increasing public concern expressed about the urban poor. Political radicals, Catholic reformers, legislators, and journalists wrote and pronounced on what Chileans politely called, "the social question." Essentially, Hutchison gives us the way women workers lived and how they fit into these discussions.	1
The author demonstrates what several of us older historians believed, that women were not a major component of labor radicalism. She also shows, however, that women participated in labor movements and even printed their own feminist newspapers in the first decade of the century. In their articles, the feminists took strong stands against poor wages and sexual exploitation; but they lacked any basic ideological orientation, reflecting instead a melange of ideas that came from anarchists, liberal reformers, and non-Marxist socialists. In an interesting excursion into early state action, the author gives an account of vocational schools for young women. Despite the patriarchal platitudes of officialdom, Chilean politicians of the era had few qualms about having young women acquire some domestic and manufacturing skills and go to work.	2
The most interesting portion of the book, Part Two, deals with how reformers of various stripes depicted women's working conditions and proposed to remedy them. As she shows, few remedies were actually enacted and those few were rarely enforced. Still, Hutchison has looked into sources not usually touched by Chilean social historians. She takes us into the Labor Office, where we find one of its early inspectors, Elena Cafferena, a feminist and socialist by the 1930s who also is a centerpiece of other studies. She has carefully culled the minutes of reforming associations and numerous newspapers. Hutchison provides portraits of Catholic women's groups who seek to uplift women workers, save them from sin and from joining socialist or anarchist movements. She traces the thinking of such prominent legislators as Malaquias Concha about how women could be helped in the work place. As she shows, reformers concentrated not only on saving the virtue of young women but also combating the conditions that were killing one out of every three infants. She highlights the link in public thinking between a social vision of proper maternity (and one assumes, infancy) and the protection of working mothers.	3
One wishes that the author had paid closer attention to the larger swings in the political economy and especially inflation which explains the basic cause of labor anger. How did women absorb rising prices on such low wages? And what did they do about this constant pressure? Specialists on Mexico have demonstrated that women's radicalism is often best studied not in the work place but in the street where issues of consumption are fought out. They have linked women militants to rent strikes, for example. None of this appears in Hutchison's study, but we do know that violent protests and demonstrations took place in Santiago, not only in the first decade of the century, as she mentions, but after World War I--the famous hunger meetings. Were women not involved in any of this?	4
While the writing seems somewhat mechanical at times, Hutchison has produced the best single study we have of Chilenas in the work place. It is one of the few historical portraits we have of urban working women for any country and should fit well into surveys about Latin American women, the history of Chile, and general courses on the region. This is a pioneering account of working women in Chile. It is graced throughout by appropriate illustrations, running from photographs of women in factories and in the market to reproductions of their early newspapers. Future studies of Chilean women workers now have a place to start.	5
University of California, San Diego Michael Monteón

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