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 magazineRumbo. The social security system, read the advertisement,

tries to replace the denomination of indigent with that of taxpayer [impo-

nente], 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 benefits wouldsuppress 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 first of three Radical

party members elected as standard bearers of Center-Left, popular-front coali-

tions. The first popular-front coalition was formed in 1936 and was formally

composed of the Socialist, Communist, and Radical parties. This and succes-

sive Center-Left coalitions won presidential elections in 1938, 1942, and 1946.The alliances persisted in some form until around 1948, when cold war rival-

ries 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 Caulfield 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 81:34

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Hispanic American Historical Review

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who deserved both to share in the economic benefits of development andto have a recognized political voice. Along with promoting industrial self-

sufficiency and economic development, the coalitions championed the eco-

nomic 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 benefited 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 benefits that were seenas rights. Characterized as temporary aid given in times of need, CSO-admin-

istered disability and health benefits did not imply worker dependence on the

state. And since workers helped finance these benefits, worker organizations

consistently demandedand obtainedparticipation 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. Womenwho were for the most part housewives or

nonindustrial workersas well as unemployed and informally employed men

had fewer rights and little, if any, say in the operation of the agencies that dis-

pensed aid to them as indigent. State officials 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 benefits thus

simultaneously furthered and limited democratization. For workers, material

entitlements and the right to help determine how those benefits would be

administered became a palpable manifestation of broader citizen rights. Those

556 HAHR / August and November / Rosemblatt

2. On the popular fronts, see Toms Moulian, Violencia, gradualismo y reformas en

el desarrollo poltico chileno, inEstudios sobre el sistema de partidos en Chile, ed. Adolfo

Aldunate, Angel Flisfisch, and Toms Moulian (Santiago: FLACSO, 1985); Paul W. Drake,

Socialism and Populism in Chile, 19321952 (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1978); Thomas

Miller Klubock, Contested Communities: Class, Gender, and Politics in Chiles El Teniente Copper

Mine, 19041951 (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1998); and Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt,

Gendered Compromises: Political Cultures and the State in Chile, 19201950 (Chapel Hill:

Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2000).

3. I define formal-sector workers as those workers who are subject to labor contractsand/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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inducements helped secure working-class support for the popular-frontalliances. At the same time, the popular fronts circumscribed the claims of

women, nonworkers, and workers outside the formal sector all of whom

received fewer benefits and had less say in how benefits 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 justified political and economic entitlements by acknowledging

(male) workers productive contributions to the nation and by linking therights 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 popu-

lar fronts not only failed to recognize the importance of the labor performed

by those outside the formal sector. They also advanced the rights of presum-

ably productive workers by asserting their masculine privilege and power vis-

-vis nonworkers and dependents.

Formal sector workers on balance benefited from state-administered ben-

efits as well as from the recognition of their authority over dependent family

members and disreputable men. As a result, they generally reinforced the gen-

dered hierarchies that undergird the construction of state policies. Like popu-

lar-front officials, 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 influence of formal sector

workers. But they also defined entitlement in ways that limited the rights and

the citizen influence 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-

Charity, Rights, and Entitlement 557




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Hi i A i Hi i l R i


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cated an enhanced role for the state in mediating labor disputes, mitigatingcapitalisms worst excesses, and directing economic development. Yet given

traditional elites aversion to social reform and popular organizations contin-

uing reservations about top-down state policies, none of the governments of

192038 successfully implemented its project. The popular fronts would, by

contrast, succeed in reforming economy and polity by recognizing and mobi-

lizing existing popular organizations.

During the first two decades of the twentieth century, Chiles traditional

ruling elite had tried to combat communism through a combination of char-ity, repression, and scattered social legislation. Yet it failed to discourage labor

organizing or stifle 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 rela-

tions and bettering workers living and working conditions. To solve the coun-

trys social problem and avoid the costs associated with the repressive poli-

cies of the oligarchic state, he and his followers advocated legislation that

mandated health, social security, and disability insurance for blue-collar work-

ers; provided for state recognition of labor unions; and set up tripartite concil-

iation and arbitration boards.5

Significant segments of workers and employers opposed Alessandris pro-

posals. Alessandri alienated organized labor by calling on troops to put down

striking mine workers at the San Gregorio nitrate office in 1921. More impor-

tant, worker organizers feared the reforms he proposed would allow employ-

ers and the state to co-opt their until-then illegal organizations. Mutualists

rejected control of pension and health funds, which workers would help

finance, by bureaucrats or the wealthy. Luis Emilio Recabarren, at the time acongressional 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 pro-

posals 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, Enel nombre del pueblo, del estado y de la ciencia (. . .): Historia social de la salud pblica, Chile

18801973 (Santiago: Colectivo de Atencin Primaria, 1993), 18791; Peter DeShazo,

Urban Workers and Labor Unions in Chile, 19021927 (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 thatreforms 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 September1924

, Con-gress acceded to legislation that regulated the formation and financing of labor

unions, the right to strike, and the establishment of conciliation and arbitra-

tion 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 official, government-spon-

sored labor movement. Given employer hostility to unionization, many labor

leaders saw alliance with state officials 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, andwelfare. Several of the middle-class reformers who would later found the

Socialist party in 1933 held office 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 Alessan-

dris attempt before his, ultimately proved unsuccessful. In 1931 massive street


7. On Braden Copper Company support for legislation, see Klubock, ContestedCommunities, 74. On employer lockouts, see DeShazo, Urban Workers and Labor Unions,

18894.Revista de Asistencia Social1 (1944): 436, 438, 440.

8. Jorge Rojas Flores,La dictadura de Ibez y los sindicatos (19271931) (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 broughtIbez down, and by 1932 the Right had recaptured the presidency. Yet Liber-

als and Conservatives could not hold on to power either, in part because they

were divided on issues of social reform.9As 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 Antofa-

gasta, a traditional stronghold of the labor movement, for instance, popular-

front candidates obtained over 68 percent of the vote in each of the three pres-

idential 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 benefited from popular-front rule. Working-class organizations gained

direct access to spheres of political decision-making, as they had begun to dur-

ing Ibezs years as president. However, because popular-front elites fre-

quently quarreled amongst themselves and because the popular fronts, unlike

Ibez, eschewed repression, labor now had greater leverage. Middle-classmembers of the coalitionsespecially Radicals and to a lesser extent the

Socialistsbenefited from the extension of state services, which provided

attractive employment opportunities within the bureaucracy. They also sur-

mounted the subordinate status they had inevitably assumed in prior govern-

ing 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),5012, 53132, 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 par-

ties 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 redefined 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 stifle

popular militancy, co-opt working-class organizations, or disregard popular

demands. Indeed, popular classes gained significant material advantages during

the popular-front era. According to the best figures 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 mobi-

lization allowed popular groups to grow and to maintain a degree of autonomy.

As state officials 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, 18181969 (Santiago: Ed. Jurdica de Chile, 1971), 74.

12. On the Radicals, see Jaime Reyes Alvarez, Los presidentes radicales y su partido:

Chile, 19381952, 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 (19271929-100). SeeAnuario

estadstico, ao 1950: Finanzas, bancos y cajas sociales(Santiago: n.p., 1954), 74; andEstadstica

Chilena23, no. 12 (1950): 709. I calculated the former index by deflecting 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 toofficial 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. SeeRevista del Trabajo12, nos. 7 8 (1942):378. 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 inthe popular-front governmentsa feature that distinguished the Chilean

popular fronts from national-popular coalitions in Argentina, Mexico, or Brazil

provided popular organizations with distinct venues of influence. Members

of the Socialist party secured positions within the bureaucracyuntil 1947

Communists sought to maintain their independence by avoiding ministerial

appointments and both Socialists and Communists embraced electoral poli-

tics. 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 work-

ers 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 benefited 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 legis-

lation that created the Corporacin de Fomento (CORFO, Development

Corporation), the motor of state-led industrialization, right-wing politiciansdemanded that rural unionization be stopped. The exclusion of women was

more subterranean. Yet women were denied full political rightsand other

restrictions on suffrage such as literacy requirements continuedbecause

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, 19461976(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, inEveryday 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).

p





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would cause political dislocations. The popular fronts position on the familywage system, which defined 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 ideo-

logically, making it difficult for women to make independent political or

economic claims. Male industrial workers made concrete gains as a result.

Depressed rural wages benefited 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 con-

structed by relating the type of labor believed to promote progressparticu-

larly industrial and mining workto political entitlement and by associating

entitlement with hegemonic forms of masculinity. Because industry and min-

ing 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, campe-sinos, and informally employed workers gained less political influence and

fewer economic benefits because popular-front governments, and the worker

organizations that supported them, continued to see workers as exception-

ally consequential actors and to define women and nonindustrial workers as

nonworkers. As I discuss below, this gendered political economy reaffirmed

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 per-formed informal or unproductive work or who did not work were seen as

dependent and feminized. As a result, industrial workers affirmed their supe-

riority 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 ofPolitics 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 partdiscriminate based on gendered criteria. Despite widespread claims to the con-

trary, many formal sector workers labored outside manufacturing and mining,

and all workers, even purportedly unproductive rural workers and domestic

servants, could receive CSO benefits if they had labor contracts. Even self-

employed workers could qualify for CSO benefits 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 benefits. However, even as popular leaders and political elites

argued for the formal extension of benefits, they justified entitlements by

equating formal sector work with industrial labor and masculinity. In so doing,

they reinforced normative gendered definitions of worker and undermined

the claims of those who did not fit those definitions.

In regards to women, political elites and labor activists together circum-

scribed womens rights by rejecting paid labor for women and by defining full-

time homemaking as the only proper feminine activity. Politicians and activists

also downplayed the importance of both womens work within the home andinformal forms of employment, activities that were deemed similarly unpro-

ductive.

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 itswhite-collar women employees when they married, and the Postal and Tele-

graph Service sought both to exclude married women and to set quotas bar-

ring 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 offi-

cials defended mens positions as breadwinners even when that meant openlydiscriminating 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), 4142; and Memoria presentada al

Segundo Congreso Nacional del MEMCh [1940], Archivo Personal Elena Caffarena

(hereafter APEC) A1 4. See alsoFrente Popular, 26July 1940, n.p.





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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 totrap 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, benefiting workers homes, at the same time it would oblige

those hasty financiers, who have made an enormous market of our patria, to

curb a bit their overflowing profits. Believing that women took jobs away

from men who really needed them, thereby undermining the male-headednuclear family and the prosperity of the patria, this article called for the exclu-

sion of women from paid labor. In a similar but more misogynistic vein, when

Socialist mayor of Santiago and womens movement activist Graciela Con-

treras 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 unproduc-tive, private work performed within the home. The contributions of house-


17. Tribuna (Puerto Natales), 6Mar. 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,

19001930 (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, forthcoming).

Table 1: Womens Workforce Participation

Year Men Women Total Workers % Women

1930 1,116,513 290,961 1,460,474 20

1940 1,362,275 432,903 1,795,178 24

1952 1,616,152 539,141 2,155,243 25

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

noviembre de 1930, 3vols. (Santiago: Imp. Universo, 1935), 3:xviii, 1718; Chile, XI censo

de poblacin, 1940,Estadstica Chilena19, 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 de1952 (Santiago, 19561958): 2057.

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 fixed incomes.





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wives and mothers to the patria were deemed at best indirect: they would raisethe future citizens of the nation and facilitate the productive labor and political

participation of male family members. Within working-class organizations, a

significant (but not necessarily widespread) discursive strand defined 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 Com-

munist municipal councilor from the coal mining town of Coronel, touted the

importance of miners labor to the nation even as she praised her women con-

stituents for supporting their men family members and refusing to work out-

side 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-of-

living 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 flour so that her com-

paero could go down into the mine and to find 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 makeso many sacrifices 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 flour doesnt go down, were going to put

out our stoves.

Here, Torres drew on a long tradition of portraying womens protest as moti-

vated 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 well-

being of the nation, their wives actions were not.18

Similarly, voicing the notion that womens political participation was aux-


18. 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 nitratecamp, 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 refigured womens political involvement as unity

with and aid to family members. Like Torres, she echoed a discourse that dis-

counted womens political contributions to the nation and therefore limited

womens claims to full citizenship.19

Popular-front officials sometimes recognized the importance womens

homemaking and mothering and granted certain limited benefits to mothers

and wives. Yet state benefits that rewarded womens work within the home

family allowances, widows pensions, and maternal health carewere gener-

ally provided to the wives of workers. Those benefits thus reaffirmed 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 impor-

tant 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. Simi-

larly, working-class activists who participated in a womens group in the nitratemining community of Ricaventura saw maternity care for the wives of CSO-

insured 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 benefits 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 con-

stitutes a recognition of the social value of the worker as a family head.20


19. Fresia Gravano, interview by author, Santiago,17June 1993.

20.El Despertar Minero (Sewell), 15Mar. 1941, 3; Servanda de Liberona, Elsa Orrego,

Ana Liberona y Custodia Moreno de la Oficina 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 impor-tant contributions to the nation, it is not surprising that popular-front officials

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 eco-

nomically 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 pol-

icy aimed toward those groups. In contrast, state agents only sporadically

found women jobsusually in domestic serviceand rarely insisted on

womens right to support themselves and their children. The state thus rein-

forced 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 domesticservice 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 official tabulations never fully documented) were neither

well regulated nor recognized as socially useful. In 1935 the Consejo Superior

del Trabajoa state advisory board that included representatives of labor,

capital, and the stateproposed legislation that exempted domestic servantsfrom 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 ser-

vants into citizens who are incorporated into the benefits 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

inRevista del Trabajo5, no.3 (1935). Another proposal can be found in Cmara de

Diputados, 1June 1936, 5a. sesin (sesiones ordinarias, 1936, I, 247).





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answered himself with a rotund no. In short, women were identified 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 undeserv-

ing 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, whosefather worked at the Chuquicamata copper mine, distinguished her presum-

ably 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 1941workers 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,6Jan. 1934, 2; and Boletn Mdico-Social de la Caja de Seguro

Obligatorio, nos.9899 (1942): 44655, quotation on 450.

Table 2: Women in the Manufacturing Workforce

Year Female Factory Workers % of Women Workers

1930 90,756 31

1940 93,904 22

1952 131,850 24

Source:X Censo,3:xviii, xxviii 1718; XI censo, 54958, 564; andXII Censo, 2057, 269.

Table 3: Women in Domestic Ser vice

Year Female Domestic Servants % of Female Workers

1930 114,782 40

1940 172,975 40

1952 171,330 32

Source:X Censo,3:xviixviii, 1718; XI censo, 546, 564; andXII Censo, 2057, 269.

Note: For 1930 and 1940 domestic service includes classified and unclassified domestic

servants, laundresses, and cooks. Figures for 1952 include only domestic servants classified

as such.





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laborers who should be working for the company. Communist Volodia Teitel-boim, like other labor and leftist leaders, characterized nonworkers as effemi-

nate. In Teitelboims fictionalized 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 amplified 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 disor-

dered, 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 nonindustrialworkers 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 benefits 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 asso-

ciated with masculine respectability. Feminists and social workers, as well as

some labor and leftist activists, sought to extend and codify rights for womenand nonworkers. Socialists and Communists continued to organize rural


25. Carmen Lazo, interview by author, Santiago, 21Apr. 1993;El Despertar Minero

(Sewell), 11May 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, 19391950,International Journal of African Historical

Studies23, no. 1 (1990); Sonya Rose, Respectable Men, Disorderly Others: The Language

of Gender and the Lancashire Weavers Strike of 1878 in Britain, Gender and History5, no.

3 (1993); and Robert Connell, Gender and Power(Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1987),

esp. 18388. 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 Social12, no. 4 (1938): 16465.





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laborers and to seek material improvements in the countrysidealthoughwith limited success. Indeed rights that were first 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 citi-

zen 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, indus-

trial workers in tangible ways. The CSO was financed by worker, employer,and state contributions, and charged with providing health care, disability

insurance, and retirement benefits to blue-collar workers. Improved living

conditions, the reformist elites who first created the CSO believed, would

mollify disgruntled workers and stabilize the social order. Social welfare mea-

sures would also help create the kind of disciplined, hardworking laborer who

would increase profits for capital and raise Chile above its status as a second-

class nation. Like proponents of corporate welfare, reformist political elites

believed that traditional, repressive labor relations were ineffectual becausethey precluded cooperation between labor and capital. Yet because only a

minority of Chiles presumably selfish 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 first years following the passage

of the law, both employers and workers continued to fear that state-adminis-tered benefits would reduce their control over welfare benefits, and state offi-


27. 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 benefits for rural workers or domestic servants see, for example,

Boletn Mdico-Social de la Caja de Seguro Obligatorio, nos. 9899 (1942): 44655;Accin

Social9, no. 78 (1939): 1011; andAccin Social9, no.79 (1939): 1 3. For leftist

publications, seeEl 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, 19201964 (Chapel Hill:

Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1996).





18/32

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 beneficiaries was entrusted to the Beneficencia 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 con-

trol of medical and other services. In 193536 it began to expand its benefits.

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, andbetween 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 financial position, had a very substan-

tial budget. Unabashedly publicizing its own economic clout, the CSO pro-

claimed in a 1942 advertisement: The Caja de Seguro Obligatorio has a cashflow 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): 57;Revista de Asistencia Social13 (1944): 435, 438;

and Boletn Mdico-Social de la Caja de Seguro Obligatorio11, nos. 117119 (1944): 20513.

30. Ibid. On state expenditures, seeAnuario estadstico, ao 1935: Finanzas, bancos y cajas

sociales(Santiago: n.p., [1937?]), 25 ;Estadstica Chilena23, no. 12 (1950): 703. On state

employment, see Urza Valenzuela and Garca Barzelatto, Diagnstico de la burocracia

chilena,74. On CSO expendituresAccin Social12, 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 Social20, no. 1 (1940):44; Servicio Social16, nos. 1 2 (1942):73,

76; Isabel Norambuena Lagarde, El servicio social en la CSO (Memoria, Escuela de

Servicio Social, Junta de Beneficencia, Santiago, 1943), 2, 1112; and Boletn Mdico-Social

de la Caja de Seguro Obligatorio12, nos. 125127 (1945):178.





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advertisement. The billion-peso figure included both income and expenditures

(and even then the real figure 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 signif-

icant 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 operateda 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 responsi-

bilities: 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-fifth and one-thirdof all children under the age of two.32

Through CSO health and welfare programs aimed at improving working-

class 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, andthe 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 fromEl Siglo,4July 1942, 9. For budget figures, seeEstadstica

Chilena18, no. 12 (1945): 678, 683.

32. The quotation is from Boletn Mdico-Social de la Caja de Seguro Obligatorio2, no.

19 (1935): 4. On the CSOs power, see also Norambuena Lagarde, El servicio social en la

CSO, 2. On CSO programs, seeAccin Social12, no. 113 (1942): 914;Accin Social, no. 12

(1933): 7;Accin Social4, no. 51 (1936): 35; Boletn Mdico-Social de la Caja de Seguro

Obligatorio11, 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

Preventiva8, no. 3 (1946):149; andRevista Chilena de Higiene y Medicina Preventiva5, 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 benefits for workers and to court their support accel-

erated 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, pro-

gressives argued, were an essential part of national well-being, and in recom-

pense the state should collaborate with workers in order to ensure their healthand well-being. CSO medical care was, a 1942 agency publication stated, a

right, which gives the contributor motive to demand efficiency from an organ-

ism created with his own contributions.34

During the popular-front years, the CSO not only provided important

benefits to workers but also sought the backing of workers by fostering work-

ing-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 asstimulating 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 permit-

ted to leave the house during the evenings, an exception was made for union

meetings. In fact, residents of the Center were actually encouraged to partici-

pate 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 occurreddespite the condescending nature of the Centers social worker who deemed

her charges big children. It was the political ethos of the CSO, and not sim-

ply the inclinations of particular state officials within it, that facilitated collab-

oration 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, 193958). Foran indication of other Socialists who held high ranking positions in the CSO, see Tribuna,6

Mar. 1941, 2.

34.Accin Social12, no. 113 (1942): 4.

35. Vida Sana (Valparaso) 1, no. 2 (1942): 6; Servicio Social16, nos. 3 4 (1942):

195202.





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horizontal, less coercive relations between workers and medical staff. The

head of the CSOs social service division saw social workers medical interven-

tions as essentially pedagogical. Similarly, the CSO health publication Vida

Sana saw its role as purely educational and declared itself open to collabora-

tion 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 officials 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 writ-

ten 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 recog-

nized environmental conditions, including poverty, as important causes of ill-

ness. 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, in1939 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 appli-

cation 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 individu-

als, from the moment that there are rich and poor, compensates for class dif-

ferences.38

After 1938Allende and other progressive physicians affirmed that a socialmedicine could not prosper if the dominant classes control over medical


36. Boletn Mdico-Social de la Caja de Seguro Obligatorio, nos. 117119 (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 Obligatorio2, 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, 18801940,Journal of Latin American Studies

25, no. 2 (1993); Eduardo Zimmerman, Racial Ideas and Social Reform: Argentina,

18041916,HAHR72 (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, contin-

ued. Private and public charitable initiatives, they argued, simply individual-

ized and pathologized the poor. Allende criticized the Beneficencia Pblica

because it did not exercise a social function. According to Allende and other

progressive professionals, the Beneficencia 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 mis-

ery. Thus, in 1942 the socialistLa Crtica paraphrased the 1935 article quoted

by Allende saying, Tuberculosis, a social disease, needs a corresponding socialhygiene, 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 officials, 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. Theyalso opposed the Cajas contracting of agents to study unionization in six

provinces. And they were surely irritated by projects such as the Centro Val-

paraso. As early as Labarcas administration the Right responded to progres-

sives within the CSO by seeking to put CSO investment decisions directly in

the hands of Congress. Later, near the beginning of the first popular-front

presidency, right-wing politicians allied with certain members of the Radical

party to launch a virulent campaign against alleged Socialist misuse and mis-

management of CSO funds, a campaign that led to the removal of CSO headLuciano 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 physi-

cian carrying out a campaign against venereal disease.40


39. Ibid.; andLa Crtica,5 Sept. 1942, 3.

40. For a right-wing criticism of state agencies favorable to popular sectors, includingthe CSO, seeLa Voz de la Provincia (Valdivia), 1944. On congressional attempts to control

the CSO, seeAccin Social4, no. 51 (1936): 35. On the Rights accusation of Luciano

Kulczewski, seeRumbo, 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 Obligatorio6, nos. 6061 (1939): 71.





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Welfare for Nonworkers

Although the Caja often spoke of its actions on behalf of Chiles poor, in real-

ity, 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 beneficiaries chose to do so. Socialists pushed for the extension of free

benefits to family members, but until 1952were largely unsuccessful. In Octo-

ber 1938, Socialist deputy Natalio Berman proposed a social solidarity insur-

ance scheme, under which all the countrys inhabitants would have access to

public health care. Yet this initiative did not prosper, and when the first popu-

lar-front minister of health, Socialist party member Salvador Allende, intro-

duced legislation that would have extended health insurance to workers fami-

lies, 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 rentistasand 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 officials 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 Direc-

cin General de Sanidad, the Beneficencia, 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 themselvesoften 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 help-

ing the poor. And many would fail to recognize that the poor should have a

hand in determining the way benefits were administered. State agents clearly


41. On family insurance, seeEstadstica Chilena18, 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 leynmero 4054, Mensaje, Cmara de Diputados, 10June 1941, cited in Boletn Mdico-Social

de la Caja de Seguro Obligatorio8, nos. 7982 (1941);Noticiario Sindical,Aug. 1951, 69; and

Cmara de Diputados, 23 Nov. 1950, 8a. sesin extraordinaria (sesiones extraordinarias,

195051, I, 51530). See also CTCh,22Aug. 1945, 7. The quotation is from Vida Sana

(Temuco), second period 1, no. 5 (1941): 5.





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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 find 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 abenevolent 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: thepatrn swore to clothe and feed M. Q.s child, treat him like

a son, see that he finished primary school, and assure that he acquired an ade-

quate occupation.42

Likewise, single mothers who were lodged at the state-sponsored Hogar

de la Mujer, a boarding house for unmarried and abandoned women withchildren, found thatdespite their own belief that the state should ensure

their well-being and that of their offspringtheir 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 firm 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 benefits they have received and sometimes they turn

ungovernable and querulous; this happens especially when one tries to incul-

cate 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), 5861.

43. Zarina Espinoza Muoz, La Direccin de Auxilio Social y la labor desarrolladapor 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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More generally, institutions like the CDN and the Hogar were poorly

funded and their clientsgenerally single, widowed, or abandoned women

and their childrenwere 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 difficult to build the kind of alliances with

clients that might have allowed them to improve the social services they pro-

vided. The organization of mothers centers among institutions clients was a

top-down initiative that, in this period, did little to stimulate womens collec-

tive articulation of demands. And when women did organize autonomously,

they often found institutions hostile. In 1945 Tomy Romeo, a Left-leaningsocial 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 officials to

accept their collaboration. The CDN, unlike the CSO, which encouragedworkers to organize, apparently saw popular mobilizations as threatening.44

Without the ability to confront poverty, and womens poverty in particu-

lar, in a more concerted manner, state officials 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 mistakenideas 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 tempo-

rary, stopgap measure.45


44. Tomy Romeo, interviews by author, Santiago, 4June 1993 and 28July 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), 3233.





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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. Increas-

ingly, those organizations fixed their sights on the CSO. However, the alliance

between CSO officials 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. Specifically,

workers objected to the reduction in wages that their required monetary con-

tribution to the CSO would entail, and anarchists predictably resisted the

expansion of the purview of the state. Members of the pro-Communist Fed-

eracin 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 conflicting positions persisted at least until 1926, when a fac-tion 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 professionalslike traditional charity workersas often overbearing

and condescending. However, influential sectors of the labor movement

increasingly deemed the CSO a friendly institution they might easily sway andsaw CSO officials 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 officials. By 1938, as officials more

attuned to popular demands flooded state agencies, worker support for state

interventionand worker pressure on the statemushroomed. 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, aspopular-front officials appointed labor leaders to advisory positions within the


46. Morris,Elites, Intellectuals, and Consensus,24446; Rojas Flores,La dictadura de

Ibez,61, 13031.





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state, laborers insisted that their financial 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 corpo-

rate 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 power-

less to make the social worker change her ways or to force the company to fire

her. Apparently, workers at the Tarapac and Antofagasta Nitrate Companyfelt that their ability to pressure their bosses was limited as well. Dissatisfied

with the medical care provided by the company doctor, they directed their

complaints to CSO officials. The CSO, they insisted, should revoke its con-

tract 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 intrin-

sically 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 Beneficencia-run SanJos Sanatorium, where CSO-insured workers received treatment for tubercu-

losis, revealed workers distrust of public charities, such as the Beneficencia,

over which they had less control. It also exposed the efficacy of worker pres-

sure on public officials 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 CommunistFrente Popular that there were no toilet facilities in

the sanatorium and the food was lousy. Perhaps more important, the institu-tions 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 visitadorasinsulted and ridiculed him.49


47.Accin Social, no. 113 (1942): 57;Revista de Asistencia Social13 (1944): 435, 438,

440; Boletn Mdico-Social de la Caja de Seguro Obligatorio, nos. 117119 (1944): 20513;

Morris,Elites, Intellectuals, and Consensus,206, 24347; and Illanes, En el nombre del pueblo,

del estado y de la ciencia (. . .),18791, 22429.48.El Despertar Minero (Sewell), 5June 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 Social11, no. 4 (1937), 229. On worker opposition

to corporate welfare, see also Klubock, Contested Communities.

49.Frente Popular,5May 1940, 2.





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The patients organized a committee to protest.

Documents

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