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Gender and political economy: Recent work in Latin

American labour history
Lara Putnam
Published online: 05 Nov 2010.

To cite this article: Lara Putnam (2003) Gender and political economy: Recent work in Latin American labour history,
Social History, 28:1, 88-96, DOI: 10.1080/0141987032000032990

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 06 SHI 28-1 Review Art (JB/D) Page 88 Monday, March 31, 2003 11:23 AM

Social History Vol. 28 No. 1 January 2003

REVIEW ARTICLE

Lara Putnam

Gender and political economy: recent

work in Latin American labour history
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John D. French and Daniel James (eds), The Gendered Worlds of Latin American Women
Workers: From Household and Factory to the Union Hall and Ballot Box (1997), viii + 320
(Duke University Press, Durham and London, $59.95, paperback $19.95).
Thomas Miller Klubock, Contested Communities: Class, Gender, and Politics in Chiles
El Teniente Copper Mine, 19041951 (1998), xiii + 363 (Duke University Press, Durham
and London, $59.95, paperback $19.95).
Ann Farnsworth-Alvear, Dulcinea in the Factory: Myths, Morals, Men, and Women in
Colombias Industrial Experiment, 19051960 (2000), xvi + 303 (Duke University Press,
Durham and London, $59.95, paperback $19.95).
Daniel James, Doa Maras Story: Life History, Memory, and Political Identity (2000), xv
+ 317 (Duke University Press, Durham and London, $54.95, paperback $18.95).
Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt, Gendered Compromises: Political Cultures and the State in
Chile, 19201950 (2000), xv + 346 (University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill
and London, $59.95, paperback $19.95).
In a 1991 essay Micaela di Leonardo laid out the lessons of two decades of research in the
anthropology of women. Various approaches had been tested and abandoned. The Marx-
istevolutionist equation of capitalism with the world-historical defeat of the female sex had
proven untenable, as had structuralist attempts to divine a universal symbolic logic underlying
womens subjugation. In the end . . . the careful attempt to discern the meanings of gender
in other cultural worlds and the bringing together of ethnographic, historical, and political-
economic knowledge of particular populations seem the most fruitful modes of feminist
anthropological practice.1 Di Leonardo called the emerging line of enquiry feminist culture
and political economy, noting its close connection to the culturally informed political
economy championed by William Roseberry and others.2 Rather than search for universal
truths about womanhood, anthropologists working in this vein emphasize the socially
constructed character of categories perceived as natural by their protagonists. Gender relations

1Micaela di Leonardo, Introduction: gender, edge: Feminist Anthropology in the Postmodern Era
culture, and political economy: feminist anthrop- (Berkeley, 1991), 148, quote 17.
ology in historical perspective in Micaela di 2 William Roseberry, Political economy,

Leonardo (ed.), Gender at the Crossroads of Knowl- Annual Review of Anthropology, XVII (1988), 16185.

Social History ISSN 0307-1022 print/ISSN 1470-1200 online 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/0307102032000032990
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January 2003 Gender and political economy 89

reflect historically specific institutions and ideologies, they argue, and cannot be understood
without reference to the multiple other forces which have shaped those particular institutions
and ideologies over time. That is, in order to understand Mathare Valley shantytown womens
lives . . . one has to understand the political-economic process of the development of shanty-
towns in third-world states, prevalent kinship structures, and Kenyan state policies.3
The shift di Leonardo described within feminist anthropology responded in part to
developments in social history (such as E. P. Thompsons writings) and scholarship on Latin
America (especially Eric Wolf and Sidney Mintzs version of Marxist anthropology). It is not
surprising, therefore, that out of the same intellectual moment out of a tradition that claimed
the same foundational thinkers and had participated in the same debates there emerged what
could be called the gender and political economy school of Latin American history. Historians
adoption of this paradigm was anticipated by a wealth of studies of women in development
in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s which applied a similar optic, often to rural
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communities or informal economies.4 Among historians, however, it has been students of

urban industrial labour who have embraced this materially grounded approach to the study
of gender.
Writing in 1989, historian Emilia Viotti da Costa lamented the absence of women from
scholarship on Latin American labour history.5 A long decade later the omission has been
remedied with a vengeance. The 1990s saw intense attention to both women and gender
among historians researching working-class life and politics in Latin America. Half a dozen
monographs have been published in the past few years as a result, and others will be appearing
shortly. The authors share a set of implicit postulates about how culture, power and social
change work. Experience and structure are not alternative paradigms; rather, they are inex-
tricably linked. In Roseberrys words, What requires stressing is the unity of structure and
agency, the activity of human subjects in structured contexts that are themselves the product
of past activity but, as structured products, exert determinative pressures and set limits on future
activity.6 Both discursive parallels and material connections link the realm of intimate power
(between lovers or within families) to the realm of public power (across classes or within states).
At the same time, work itself matters, and the way work is organized reflects not only local
dynamics and national institutions but also global patterns of trade and capital flows. In sum,
what unites the works under discussion here is a multilevel research agenda which reflects a
particular vision of how gender works. But what distinguishes the works at hand is less their
theory of gender than their applied craft. The sources the authors seek out, and the way they
combine and interpret them, permit them to describe aspects of working-class life in Latin
America about which very little was known.
In 1997 The Gendered Worlds of Latin American Women Workers, edited and with an exemplary
3 di Leonardo, op. cit., 14. Tin Mines (New York, 1979), and Mara Patricia
4 Cf. works discussed in June Nash, Gender Fernndez-Kelly, For We are Sold, I and My People:
issues in Latin American labor, International Labor Women and Industry in Mexicos Frontier (Albany,
and Working-Class History, XXXVI (Fall 1989), 1993).
4450, and Florence E. Babb, Women and work 5 Emilia Viotti da Costa, Experience versus

in Latin America, Latin American Research Review,
XXV, 2 (1990), 23647. Some of this literature did
deal with industrial workplaces, such as June Nashs
extraordinary ethnography We Eat the Mines and the
Mines Eat Us: Dependency and Exploitation in Bolivian
structures: new tendencies in the history of labor
and the working class in Latin America What do
we gain? What do we lose?, International Labor and
Working-Class History, XXXVI (Fall, 1989), 324.
6 Roseberry, op. cit., Political economy, 1712.
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90 Social History vol. 28 : no. 1

introduction by John French and Daniel James, showcased the budding research.7 Most case-
studies in the volume focus on the early to mid-twentieth century, an era in which industrial
output grew rapidly in certain Latin American cities. The authors bring together an unusually
wide variety of sources, most notably oral history interviews, local judicial records and company
archives, as well as newspapers, pamphlets and the archives of government ministries. With this
they fill important gaps in our historical knowledge of womens lives (such as employment life
cycles, voting trends and union participation) and mens lives (such as patterns of domestic
authority, household labour and claimed sexual rights).
The role of waged labour over the course of womens lives varied by city, industry and era.
Mirta Lobato analyses the experiences of women workers in the Armour meatpacking plant
of Berisso, in La Plata, Buenos Aires, from the 1920s through to the 1940s. The women of
Berisso moved back and forth between factory employment and domestic labour over the
course of their lives. The aging women Lobato interviewed expressed contradictory ideas about
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female obligations, united in the concept of necessity. They agreed with turn-of-the-century
elites that loving motherhood was womans ideal role, but explained that circumstances often
obliged women to help their husbands by earning wages. Lobato argues that this particular
vision of female employment carried costs for women both at home and at work, where the
gendered division of labour within the factory justified marked wage disparities.
Barbara Weinstein suggests that in So Paolo both employers and educators contributed to
a pattern in which young womens waged labour did not translate into lifelong careers. When
founded in 1911, the Female Professional School prepared its students for artisanal trades like
dressmaking, needlework and hat making. Increasingly, however, elite reformers packed the
curriculum with hygiene, nutrition and infant care scientific improvement for future
housewives and mothers despite the fact that students enrolled far more eagerly in the
vocational courses. Even as the proportion of women among adult industrial workers dropped
in the 1940s and 1950s, female youths continued to make up more than half of minors
employed in factories. In effect, it had become natural for a working-class girl to take a
semiskilled factory job with few prospects for advancement, and it had also become natural
for her to give up factory work once she reached marriageable age (84). Theresa Veccia targets
the same city in the same era, using interviews to create an ethnographic portrait of womens
work which complements Weinsteins top-down account. The stories she has recorded, of
surreptitiously shared crackers and unjust dismissals, are a window onto the narrative creation
of working-class consciousness. So Paolos market for the labour of girls and young women
drew families from rural areas, and indeed for a while some textile mills had informal systems
of family labour not unlike the arrangements on coffee plantations. Although arduous, factory
labour was understood to be less of a danger to young women than the closed doors and
intimate pressures of domestic service. Though some women left the mills when they married,
a minority remained at the looms throughout their lives, combining factory work with
pregnancy and domestic scrounging, child care and husband care.
How did local gender roles fit with political or union activism? John French and Mary Lynn
Pederson Cluff explore womens political participation in So Paolo in the late 1940s.

7 In addition to the essays discussed here, the overlap with material later published in the mono-
book contains chapters by Daniel James, Ann graphs reviewed below.
Farnsworth-Alvear and Thomas Klubock, which
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January 2003 Gender and political economy 91

Neighbourhood associations unofficially linked to the Communist Party were a vital site of
community organization, and one in which housewives played an active role. In the face of
carestia (the high cost of living), and in the context of campaigns for social justice, political
participation could seem fully coherent with traditional female responsibility for family welfare.
Women voted in large numbers in the hotly contested elections of 1945 and 1950, strongly
supporting Getlio Vargass populist Workers Party. Overall, the authors argue, the broader
assertion of a common class identity served to lessen resistance to innovation and changes in
consciousness, including ideas about gender (190). Yet in other settings, womens labour
activism carried profound costs, as Deborah Levenson-Estrada underlines in her careful account
of the experiences of one union organizer in Guatemala City in the 1970s. Sonia Oliva began
work at the ARICASA thread factory in 1974 and led the drive for unionization there during
an era of extraordinary state violence.8 As urban unionists joined with peasant groups in
demanding reform in the late 1970s, labour leaders (including women from ARICASA) were
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arrested, kidnapped, beaten, forced into exile and disappeared. The heightened stakes did not
erase internal contradictions. Working women disputed the value of day care; working men
trumpeted union virility but recognized the costs of thinking with your balls. Whether
confronting state terror or sexual harassment, neither women nor men act only out of gender.
Activism stems from the multiplicity of their being, of which gender is a part (227).
Heidi Tinsman brings together court records and oral history interviews to analyse wife
beating and sexual control in Chile. Redistributive agrarian reform from 1964 to 1973
reinforced male privilege in rural households, for co-op and union membership were open
only to household heads (almost all male) and full-time estate employees (more so). In court
complaints of the era, women said men beat them to police social interactions, while men
justified violence as appropriate punishment for transgression of female duties. Neither men
nor women described a domestic sphere of female authority similar to that which other scholars
have found in urban areas: here it was assumed that el hombre manda en la casa (men give the
orders at home). Then Pinochets neo-liberal reforms reconcentrated rural resources and
upended labour markets. Men found themselves unable to provide for their families, while
women were hired en masse as temporeras (temporary workers) for the compressed harvests
required by fruit exporters. As the socio-economic basis for male dominance eroded, Tinsman
argues, mens blows became a desperate attempt to retain an authority the economic structure
no longer reinforced.
As Tinsmans essay underlines, one cannot assume that progressive governments will directly
benefit women, or that improved female labour market position directly translates into more
egalitarian domestic lives. A fundamental strength of the research under review is that the
authors eschew teleological assumptions about when and how gender relations change, or
about how far one can project backwards or forwards in time (or across social groups) any
particular finding about gender roles or the ideologies which encompass them. The authors
treat these as empirical questions, about which targeted sources of information must be sought.
Working women and middle-class feminists, unionized and non-unionized men, modern
daughters and aging mothers: all may have defined virtue, dishonour, obligation and justice in
starkly different ways. Like the New Cultural Historians of two decades ago, these labour

8
See the same authors devastating account: Terror: Guatemala City, 19541985 (Chapel Hill,
Deborah Levenson-Estrada, Trade Unionists against 1994).
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92 Social History vol. 28 : no. 1

historians use close textual analysis to get at shared understandings. However, the historians
discussed here are far more wary about just how widely shared those understandings were. In
essence they are facing up to the consequences of our recognition that culture is a matter of
contested, overlapping and power-laden systems rather than bounded and homogenous units.
In practice, this means that far more research is required in order to establish the extension and
chronology of beliefs or practices and that ultimately, much more accurate descriptions of
subjects experiences and actions are produced.
This is particularly evident in the full-length monographs under review, which apply a
similar research agenda to longer time periods with empirical density and interpretive care. In
Contested Communities, Thomas Klubock pulls together company archives, company publica-
tions, local judicial records, oral history interviews and government correspondence to explore
the evolution of working-class home and communal life in a US-operated mining enclave.
The early years of expansion drew itinerant male labourers to the mines, alongside female
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entrepreneurs selling liquor and other services. After the First World War company strategy
came to focus on stabilizing the mine workforce in order to reduce turnover, disruptive
sociability and labour unrest. Corporate welfare policies promoted male-headed nuclear
families and female domesticity. By the 1930s these policies had indeed led to the formation
of a stable community of mineworkers, but one with a militant class consciousness that Braden
managers had never intended. The left-leaning Popular Front coalitions that governed Chile
from 1938 to 1947 emulated nationally the corporate moral reform programme in projects
intended to shore up the working-class family as the foundation of proletarian morality.
Klubock argues that these top-down reformist projects generated varied responses. Recov-
ering miners jargon, habits and legends from oral testimony and contemporary accounts, he
describes a communal male culture which celebrated drinking, fighting, gambling and illicit
sex. Yet miners also flocked to the company-sponsored social clubs, vocational school and
soccer teams. Meanwhile, some women still sought sexual and economic autonomy through
informal alliances with multiple men. But pressure from the companys regulatory regime made
formal marriage and domestic dedication an increasingly attractive option. Klubocks interviews
provide wonderful material on the nuances of family roles and peoples own appraisals of the
contradictions and trade-offs that respectability versus loose living entailed. As Klubock
observes, the Chilean copper workers and their wives may have favorably received the
messages that a familys social mobility was accessible through cultural improvement, education,
moral behaviour, hard work, and the organization of gender relations to conform to an ideal
of domesticity, but conditions in the mines and in the camps prevented workers families from
fulfilling these newly ignited desires (174). Sustained strikes in the late 1940s prompted massive
dismissals and arrests. The legacies of this era were mining communities with a long history of
solidary action and strong ties to the political Left a mix Klubock suggests had profound
implications for the course of Chilean politics in the decades that followed.
In Dulcinea in the Factory, Ann Farnsworth-Alvear puts together a similar set of sources to
paint a panorama that likewise encompasses workplace and home life, class consciousness and
political participation. The textile mills of Medelln offer an unusual case-study, for in their
early decades jobs in the largest factories were relatively privileged and well paid, and entry
into this local aristocracy of labour was not restricted by either race or sex. At mid-century
Colombia was one of the few places in the world where women earned more than 80 per cent
of mens wage levels (20). The early workforce was largely young women drawn from the
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January 2003 Gender and political economy 93

countryside. Catholic and progressive discourses alike equated factory work with moral danger,
so elite women formed the Patronato de Obreras to ensure workers chastity and femininity,
providing a dormitory, lecture society and leisure outings. However, the obreras themselves had
other ideas. Young workers accepted the free meals and dry goods Patronato ladies offered,
but skipped the moralizing lectures. They also spearheaded a strike in 1920, denouncing
supervisors sexual harassment and demanding better wages. Farnsworth-Alvear combines
personnel records with interviews to provide a dense description of daily shop-floor life in the
mills first decades. She describes a system of personalized hiring, training and authority which
created cross-cutting ties between owners, supervisors, female guards, skilled workers and
apprentices. The boisterous and confrontational culture of the streets outside permeated this
mixed-sex workplace.
The years 1935 and 1936 brought violent strikes, in the context of a growing Leftist labour
movement. In response, industrialists embraced bureaucratic paternalism as part of an anti-
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communist, anti-union project. Wages and benefits increased, as did shop-floor moral enforce-
ment. Fighting, flirting or pregnancy out of wedlock became cause for suspension or dismissal.
As Farnsworth-Alvears respondents recount, women workers by turns endured, evaded,
ignored or themselves enforced the normative strictures of La Moral. Company paternalism
depended on the high returns guaranteed by tariff protection, and, as the national and
international context changed, so too did local labour arrangements. In the 1950s the practices
of La Moral were replaced in a Taylorist reorganization by US consultants, who spurred a
decisive shift to an all-male labour force.
Farnsworth-Alvear continually asks about experience, expression and meaning. From her
discussion of the 19356 strikes we learn that street politics of the era were not only a mixed-
sex affair, but allowed even relied on strategic combinations of gendered proprieties and
improprieties. One interviewee recalled a rally at which anti-strike demonstrators threw stones
at Communist orator Mara Cano (126):
And so there was this seora coming down Caracas street, carrying, like a, maybe a tray,
covered with a white cloth. [Chuckles.] She was coming down and we were going up
[away from the demonstration], but of course we were laughing, laughing because wed
all had to run. So we were going along and laughing and here comes the seora and she
says What happened honey? Is the strike over? and I said, no, its not over yet, we left
cause theyre throwing lots of rocks and [she says], Thats where Im going, to throw
rocks .
This of course is the punch line of the tale, for who would have expected a rock-throwing
militant to use a cloth-covered tray to carry her rocks. Farnsworth-Alvear contrasts multiple
accounts of the strikes to suggest the ways participants rendering of events has been shaped by
the intervening years of La Moral and Medellns strikes of the 1960s.
Attention to narrative and memory becomes the primary focus in Daniel Jamess Doa
Maras Story. Doa Mara Roldn found work in the meatpacking houses of Berisso in 1944
and soon became a union organizer, shop steward and political activist. On 17 October 1945
she delivered a speech in the Plaza San Martn before tens of thousands of workers who had
massed to demand the release from prison of the then-secretary of labour, Colonel Juan
Domingo Pern. She remained both an ardent Peronist and an ardent unionist throughout
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94 Social History vol. 28 : no. 1

Perns rise to the presidency, his attacks on labour leaders, his shift to the right, his political
downfall and the eventual resurrection of the Peronist party.
The books format responds to issues of representation and voice raised by anthropologists,
oral historians and critical theorists. James reproduces Doa Maras narrative as a whole,
including his own questions and their exchanges. This narrative includes vivid descriptions of
the Berisso community, meatpacking work, the unionization drive and Doa Maras political
beliefs. The transcript is followed by separate topical essays which simultaneously address
theoretical issues of narrative and memory and particular issues of Argentine political history.
James follows the lead of Alessandro Portelli and others in seeing oral history not simply as a
source of information about the past, but as a privileged methodology for the study of working-
class consciousness. One chapter focuses on anecdote and performance. Through triumphant
authority tales, Doa Mara presents herself as a rebel who gains respect and benefits for those
she represents. But in another set of repetitive and patterned stories she describes a series of
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political betrayals, as Pern replaced the Partido Laborista with the Partido nico and then the
Partido Peronista, acting to reduce autonomy of organized labour in general and the laborisistas
led by Cipriano Reyes in particular. James compares Doa Maras several retellings of these
bitter tales, noting the narrative contortions which cover the indigestible truth of Perns
rejection of participatory governance.
Next James reads for gender. Doa Mara describes herself as a good wife, and a lucky one,
whose husband supported fully her political and union activities. Was the fusion of womanhood
and labour activism really so rosy? James uses interviews with others in the community to make
visible erasures in Doa Maras story, and to sketch for us the evolving communal context in
which Doa Maras life was lived. Berissos internal ranking was expressed in part through
judgements about gender roles a younger and wealthier woman recalls with patronizing scorn
Doa Mara striding along and her little husband running at her side (227). James also
demonstrates the weight, within working-class stories about the role of women, of popular
religious imagery defining justice, suffering, sacrifice and shame. In doing so he sheds new light
on the symbolic impact of particular gestures for which Eva Pern was revered. Finally, James
analyses a poem Doa Mara composed in 1947 upon the death of a friend from tuberculosis.
He places this cultural artefact in the context of its literary contemporaries: the representations
of working women and female bodies which animated the socially conscious poetry and
melodramas of the era. While both Marxist rhetoric and public health policies equated female
factory work and prostitution, he argues, Doa Maras poem for Clarita refuses to sexualize
material deprivation and physical suffering.
In Gendered Compromises Karin Rosemblatt aims to show how gender constructed the
personal and political agency of both popular classes and professional and political elites . . .
[and] how gender conditioned the Chilean popular-front state of the 1930s and 1940s (3).
Unlike the other works under review, with their optic trained on a single factory, community
or life story, Rosemblatt works on a national scope at the level of institutions and their leaders.
This is not a history of everyday life or an exploration of intimate practice. It is about public
debates over public policies. Rosemblatt attends to disciplinary discourses as well as to
institutional change, organizational strategies and shifting alliances. The main groups she focuses
on are national popular-front leaders; Left (e.g. Communist and Socialist) political activists;
feminists associated with MEMCh (the Movement for the Emancipation of Chilean Women);
and welfare professionals (doctors and social workers) employed by the state. Detailing the
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January 2003 Gender and political economy 95

tension between vanguardism and democracy within the mobilizing strategies of each of these
groups, she argues that their efforts simultaneously constrained and empowered working-class
actors.
The stable, nuclear family was at the core of popular-front leaders visions of class harmony
and national progress. One component of this project was the institution of a family wage
system, firmly supported by organized labour and many working-class women and men.
Another component was educative and disciplinary, aiming to legalize family ties and mitigate
marital disputes through health and social security apparatuses and their social work and public
health interventions (45). While some feminists within MEMCh rejected the family wage
ideology, with its assumption of female economic dependence, both feminists and welfare
professionals embraced the moral reform projects. Rosemblatt argues that gendered definitions
of citizenship shaped state institutions and welfare policy. (Female) social workers created
paternalist structures of assistance targeting women and minors, while (male) physicians built
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more democratic delivery systems for providing services to which (male) workers were
entitled by their labour. Social workers and physicians alike consistently used persuasive rather
than punitive strategies. In this as in other areas, the Chilean popular fronts tenuous rule forced
actors, out of necessity and weakness, to listen to each other (274).
Thanks to the works under review we know much more than before about what the men
and women of Latin America did, in their kitchens and bedrooms and on shop floors and in
company towns; how they justified it; what they argued over; who they argued with; and
when it all changed. We also know more about the working of memory within communities,
and about the contradictory nature of individuals ideas of manhood and womanhood. Our
new knowledge centres on working-class actors in large cities. It is to be hoped that other
scholars will be inspired to ask a similar range of questions regarding gender in rural com-
munities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a topic about which much is assumed
and little is known.9
If there is a common weakness in the works under review, it is that the intensive case-study
method, so well suited to unravelling complex webs of local meaning, contains few means of
testing claims about impact. For instance, one conclusion proposed by many of the authors
under review is that gender shaped public politics. Readers who are not convinced of this
beforehand may emerge equally unpersuaded. Without structured comparison, it is difficult to
know whether something that was present in a given situation actually affected its outcome. Thus,
the claim that gender shaped politics is certainly descriptively correct if we mean that public
political contests employed rhetoric about manly virtue, filial obligation and moral purity, and
included acts (such as carrying rocks on a fabric-draped tray) which got their symbolic impact
from the way they played with assumptions about decency and domesticity. Did gender also
shape politics in the sense that formal political outcomes would have been different if local
gender dynamics had been different, or if gendered rhetoric and gestures had been differently

9 But see Michael Jimnez, Class, gender, and
peasant resistance in central Colombia, 19001930
in Forrest Colburn (ed.), Everyday Forms of Peasant
Resistance (New York, 1989); Heather Fowler-
Salamini and Mary Kay Vaughan (eds), Women of
the Mexican Countryside, 18501990: Creating Spaces,
Shaping Transitions (Tucson, 1994); Heidi Tinsman,
Partners in Conflict: The Politics of Gender, Sexuality,
and Labor in the Chilean Agrarian Reform, 19501973
(Durham, 2002); and Lara Putnam, The Company
They Kept: Migrants and the Politics of Gender in
Caribbean Costa Rica, 18701960 (Chapel Hill,
2002).
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96 Social History vol. 28 : no. 1

employed? Or is it possible that the outcomes in question were determined by other,
exogenous factors? We do not know, and it will take a different sort of enquiry to tell us. This
fact does not detract from the engrossing contribution of the works at hand.
Centro de Investigaciones Histricas de Amrica Central,
Universidad de Costa Rica
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