Workers Like All the Rest of Them

Front matter

Workers Like All the Rest of Them

Domestic Service and the Rights of Labor in Twentieth-Century Chile

Elizabeth Quay Hutchison

CHAPTER 5 Women's Rights, Workers’ Rights: Military Rule and Domestic Worker Activism 128 CONCLUSION The Inequities of Service, Past and Present 155

Notes 167

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1.1 Elba Bravo, 2004 2 Figure 1.2 Father Bernardino Piñera, circa 2010 3 Figure 1.3 Aída Moreno Valenzuela, 2004 4 Figure 1.4 Young empleadas in Rancagua, 1929 9 Figure 1.1 Sasso Oil advertisement, 1913 30 Figure 2.1 Pedro Aguirre Cerda with empleadas, Conchalí estate, c. 1940 61 Figure 3.1 Father Piñera, circa 1950 73 Figure 3.2 Father Piñera and Federation leaders, circa 1953 76 Figure 3.3 Celebrating ten years of the Santiago Hogar, 1960 77 Figure 3.4 Empleadas in the Hogar kitchen 78 Figure 35 Pamphlet, Chile’s Young Catholic Worker, 1958 79 Figure 3.6 Empleadas marchingin the JOC Festival of the Worker, 1956 87 Figure 3.7 Santa Zita, “Exemplary Lives” pamphlet cover, n.d. 89 Figure 3.8 National Day of the Domestic Worker, 1961 91 Figure 3.9 ANECAP folkloric dancers, 1965 91 Figure 3.10 Surge cover, 1961 94 Figure 4.1 Directorate of ANECAP Concepción, circa 1970 108 Figure 4.2 ANECAP Concepción beauty contest, circa 1970 110 Figure 4.3 Day of the Empleada, Concepción, 1971 111 Figure 4.4 ANECAP Santiago anniversary celebration, 1970 113

Figure 45 ANECAP Santiago membership cards, 1980s 116 xi xii Illustrations

Figure 4.6 Socialist Deputy Carmen Lazo 120 Figure 5.1 Religious service, ANECAP retreat, n.d. 140 Figure 5.2 ANECAP training pamphlet, 1984 143 Figure 5.3 Teatime at an ANECAP training, 1985 149 Figure 5.4 Meeting of feminist and domestic worker groups, August 1981 150

Figure 5.5 ANECAP leadership training, 1988 152

ABBREVIATIONS

AAS

ANECAP ARNAD

CEM

CSO

CNCD

CNCS CONSTRACAP

ILO

JOC MEMCH PDC RITHAL

SINTRACAP UP

Archivo del Arzobispado de Santiago

Asociacién Nacional de Empleadas de Casa Particular Archivo Nacional de la Administración

Centro de Estudios de la Mujer

Caja de Seguridad Obligatorio

Congreso Nacional, Cámara de Diputados Congreso Nacional, Cámara de Senadores Comisión Nacional de Sindicatos de Trabajadoras de Casa Particular

International Labor Organization

Juventud Obrera Católica

Movimiento Pro-Emancipación de la Mujer Chilena Partido Demócrata Cristiano

Red de Investigaciones sobre el Trabajo del Hogar en América Latina

Sindicato de Trabajadoras de Casa Particular Unidad Popular xiii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

If this book is by now old enough to be a teenager, the original idea for it is ready to get a teaching job. Thirty years ago, during one of many meetings with the Chilean feminist and historian Alicia Frohmann to discuss my dissertation research, Alicia asked me: “Why focus on women industrial workers, when it’s the empleadas (domestic workers) who are the real key to understanding Chile’s history?” Shaken by Alicia’s challenge, I have never forgotten it, and now—after more than thirty years of investigation, presentation, consultation, and publication—that question has led me to this book. Along the way, I have accumulated more than a few debts, and it is well past time that I acknowledge the many people and institutions that have helped me complete this book.

World events of 2020—particularly the COVID-19 pandemic—have turned the world upside down, so I will do my part to set it upright by reversing the usual order of things. Rather than thanking friends and family last (who decided that?), I will thank them first, since it is really the case that nothing is possible without their love and support. My partner, Regina, and our sons, Dante and Pasqual, along with our comadre Betsy (Tita), make up our noisy, nurturing pod, and Hutchisons and Manocchios spread far and wide celebrate our successes: Victor, I hope you enjoy this book, too! But without Betsy’s Martha, and Ezra Jude, the precious third brother in our Albuquerque family, we are forever changed. I am grateful to my family for their steadfast support.

Since challenges like writing a book are best faced in teams, I have to thank my closest, bestest friends for spurring me on and catching me when I fall: Kymm Gauderman, co-conspirator in all struggles; Linda Garber, guardian of my younger soul; Margy Hutchison, such a good friend I forget you are my sister; Amy Levi, administrative mentor extraordinaire; Soledad Zarate, fellow survivor of the Chilean gender wars; Maria Angélica Rojas Flores, hermana; and Miguel Kaiser, hermano imprescindible y solidario para toda una vida. Along this often dark road we call the academic life, I have been fortunate to encounter fellow travelers with flashlights: Eileen Boris, Heidi Tinsman, Nara Milanich, Jolie Olcott, Sam Truett, Jason Scott Smith, Ericka Verba, Krystyna von Henneberg, and the amazing Ann Blum, gone too soon. Margaret Randall, whose

XV xvi Acknowledgments oral histories with women and Christians first drew me to Latin America, has offered inspirational friendship as our lives converged in Albuquerque. Books may be shelved and forgotten, but the patience and kindness of friends and family will never be.

I thank the many colleagues who have supported this work by buying me coffee, hosting me in their homes and offices, collaborating on panels and publications, and inviting me to share my work with their students and colleagues. My career has been indelibly marked by the sisterhood of Latin Americanist gender historians, including (but not limited to) Heidi Tinsman, Nara Milanich, Jolie Olcott, Ann Blum, Rebekah Pite, Brenda Elsey, Ricardo López, Tom Klubock, Jadwiga Pieper, and Lara Putnam. I am also deeply indebted to those Latin American scholars who have regularly encouraged my work, including Thelma Galvez and the Chilean historians Maria Soledad Zarate Campos, Alicia Frohmann, Iván Jakšić, Sol Serrano, Julio Pinto, and Jorge Rojas; in Buenos Aires, Silvia Hirsch, Isabella Cosse, Lila Caimari, Mariano Plotkin, and Graciela Quierolo have received me with unfailing generosity. Inés Pérez and Joan Casanovas, who arranged for Fulbright to carry me all the way to Mar del Plata and Tarragona, respectively, deserve special mention for their warm hospitality, intellectual generosity, and more than a few lively meals. It has been my great honor to work with students of gender and history in the Universitat Romiro I Virgili and the Universidad de Granada in Spain, as well as the Instituto de Desarollo Económico y Social (IDES), Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata, and the Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires in Argentina, who always gave as good as they got. The recent surge in interdisciplinary research on domestic work has also fostered a new community of committed scholar-activists, the Red de Investigacién sobre Trabajo del Hogar en América Latina (RITHAL), led by the indefatigable Erynn Masi de Casanova. The University of New Mexico, my institutional home for over twenty years, is much more than the place I work: there I treasure History and Latin Americanist colleagues, the many students I have been privileged to teach, brave leaders in faculty governance and administration, the UNM staff who challenge us to be better, my colleagues in Faculty SAFE UNM, and the good trouble team in the Division for Equity and Inclusion. It is truly a privilege to call these folks— from Albuquerque to Mar del Plata and Berkeley to Barcelona—my beloved community.

Turning now to those who quite literally made it possible for me to write this book, I must start again with las imprescindibles: the domestic worker activists, past and present, whose struggles have marked Chile’s twentieth century and

Acknowledgments xvii continue in the twenty-first. Among the many leaders who received me in their offices, told their stories and showed me their archives, I am most grateful to Aida Moreno and Elba Bravo. Fathers Bernardino Piñera and Mauricio Hourton were generous with their time and boundless in their enthusiasm for this history. Also indispensable for their help with archival research, transcription, and processing were the assistants who have gone on to greater things: Carolyn Watson, Fernanda Caloiro, María Soledad Zárate Campos, Scott Crago, Carson Morris, and Lucrecia Enriquez. The historian and translator Jacqueline Garreaud has never failed to render my English into even better Spanish, helping me contribute to Latin American debates on gender and history.

Tam also grateful to the many institutions that have funded this research over the past two decades. At the University of New Mexico, I have received generous support from the Department of History; the Feminist Research Institute; the Faculty Senate’s Research Allocation Committee; the College of Arts & Sciences; the Latin American and Iberian Institute; and the Division for Equity and Inclusion. My writing has been supported at critical junctures by a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend; a Fulbright Senior Scholar Award for work at the Instituto de Desarollo Económico y Social (IDES) in Buenos Aires; and a residential fellowship at the Women's International Study Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Invitations from colleagues around the world have allowed me to discuss my ongoing research, parts ofwhich I have presented in Chile at the Universidad Alberto Hurtado and the Universidad Nacional Andrés Bello, and in Argentina at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata, the Universidad Nacional de San Martin, and the Universidad de San Andrés. I have also received valuable feedback from colleagues at the Newberry Conference on Labor History, the Duke University Latin American Labor History Conference, the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, the Latin American Studies Association, the Jornadas Nacionales de la Historia de las Mujeres (Argentina), the National Women Studies Conference, and the International Conference of Labour History (Austria). These associations gave me access to a broad range of critical perspectives and relevant scholarship, without which this would have been a very different book.

Finally, I am grateful to Duke editorial director Gisela Fosado, who—like the indomitable Valerie Milholland before her—believed in this project and encouraged my scholarly life beyond The Chile Reader. Alejandra Mejia and Ihsan Taylor shepherded the manuscript’s transformation to a book with care, and Dylan Maynard helped me create the index for it. My anonymous readers provided many excellent suggestions for revision, and I am (again) deeply indebted xviii Acknowledgments to Nara Milanich, who told me, with great precision and kindness, how to make this a better book. Parts of this work have been previously published in Labor, Hispanic American Research Review, Nuevo Mundo/Mundos nuevos, and two edited collections, Mujeres (LOM) and Towards a Global History of Domestic Workers and Caregiving Workers (Brill).

After a harrowing year of pandemic, which has again exposed the inequality and precarity that shapes domestic workers’ lives, it seems fitting to dedicate this work to the memory of Aida Moreno Valenzuela, who passed away at age eighty-one in June of 2021. Dofia Aida’s unfailing energy and leadership spurred the extraordinary mobilization for domestic workers’ rights in Chile, and her written history of this movement—painstakingly researched in newspapers and national archives and distributed in grainy mimeographed copies during the dictatorship—inspired this project. Aida’s spirit, as well as the domestic workers’ movements she helped foster, live on in this book.

INTRODUCTION i Í Y RESEARCH INTO THE history of domestic service in Chile started in 2000 with the archives; or rather, the archives started with me. On several trips through the gray streets of downtown Santiago,

as the sun barely broke through the layers of the afternoon’s winter smog, domes-

tic worker activists guided me to the leaning, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that housed archives of many decades’ work from Chile’s two most important organizations for domestic workers: the union SINTRACAP (which dates, through several organizations, back to 1926) and the Catholic association ANECAP

(which emerged from groups formed in 1947). Eager to delve into any uncata-

logued records of this long history of the domestic workers’ movement in Chile,

I soon realized that it was the living archive—members and retired leadership of

these organizations—who could help me tell this story. Workers Like All the Rest

of Them maps out stories culled from workers’ life histories—filtered through memories of half a century and the realities of Chile in the twenty-first—within domestic workers’ century-long struggle for dignity and rights.

Unfailingly generous in the midst of the many challenges of organizing work, these leaders made sure I got in touch with veteran activists of their movement. In meetings at the headquarters of the Asociación Nacional de Empleadas de Casa Particular (ANECAP or the National Association of Household Employees), some of the activists present at the group’s founding over five decades prior huddled near paraffin stoves in the group’s main office, a small room with a bookshelf stuffed with albums and pamphlets on one wall, and file cabinets holding decades’ worth of material on the other.’ It was in this room, lit almost entirely by dim light edging through a wall of windows, that I sipped the first of many black teas with Elba Bravo, one of the domestic workers who helped to found, recruit for, and lead the original Federación Nacional de Empleadas (National Federation of Empleadas) in the 1950s. Already in her early seventies, hunched over photo albums and clothed in the empleada’s blue starched cotton uniform, Dofia Elba’s eyes sparkled and her hands leapt about her face as she

FIGURE 1.1. Doña Elba Bravo, September 2004, ANECAP, photo by author described her early days building the empleadas’ movement in the 1950s and os. As the struggle to maintain the organization intensified in the early 2000s, Doña Elba was always eager to meet, happy to share her stories of other, equally challenging but clearly invigorating times, many decades before.

Even at her advanced age, Doña Elba did not limit her storytelling to any office, or even the historic buildings on Tocornal Street, built in the 1950s with domestic workers’ own funds to shelter and educate domestic workers. In our very first meeting, Dofia Elba looked up from the albums and documents spread out on the room’s large table with a suggestion that was at once a command: “To learn about this movement, you must meet Don Bernardino.” So off we went, following Dofia Elba’s swift pace through narrow side streets in the deepening dusk and cold, smoggy air, to arrive at a side door of the Iglesia San Francisco, one of Chile’s oldest churches, which sits high on Santiago’s main avenue, the Alameda. Rushing down long corridors and up grand staircases to the vast, chilly, dimly lit living quarters of the former convent, Doña Elba eagerly clasped Don Bernadino’s hands in both of hers and urged him to tell me, a historian from the North, the story of how, as a young Catholic priest in the 1940s, he worked with a handful of domestic workers to establish one of the most enduring and

FIGURE 1.2. Don Bernardino Piñera, circa 2010, from Mensaje (July 31, 2020)

influential Catholic associations of empleadas in the Americas. Don Bernadino, by then white-haired and moving stiffly in his eighties, was more than happy to oblige, on this and many other occasions, always stressing how he valued his work with empleadas over all else: more than his religious career as bishop of several Chilean cities; public opposition to the military regime’s human rights abuses; or membership in one of Chile’s most distinguished families (his nephew, Sebastián Piñera, would in 2010 begin his first of two presidential terms). In meetings arranged at first in Church offices and cafes, and much later at a residence for retired priests, Don Bernardino proudly offered up his stories about the origins, challenges, and evolution of the domestic workers’ movement over the last half century.

In those days I also interviewed the enduring leader of Chilean domestic workers’ movements, Aida Moreno Valenzuela, whose warmth, sharp wit, and love of history has made her one of the most sought-after spokespersons for the Chilean domestic workers’ union movement since the 1970s. Younger by ten years than her colleague Dofia Elba, Aida, too, got her start in the Federacién de Empleadas in the 1950s, but from the start she also participated in the Sindicato de Trabajadoras de Casa Particular (SINTRACAP or Household Workers’ Union), rising to leadership positions at the national and international levels in the 1960s. Active in elected positions in the 1980s, Aida Moreno nurtured the movement's alliance with Chilean feminists in the struggle against the military dictatorship, a network that would later sustain her participation in regional and international domestic workers’ movements and inspire her businesses that sold cleaning products and services to the public. Moreno’s close friendship with

FIGURE 1.3. Dofia Aida Moreno, 2004, Barrio Santa Rosa, photo by author the US anthropologist Elsa Chaney, and the international travel and activism through which it was nurtured, also elevated Aida Moreno’s historical research on Chilean domestic workers to an international and academic audience. Moreno’s long engagement in domestic worker politics, along with her skills as an amateur historian, broadened the horizons of this study, beyond the realm of Catholic mobilization in the 1950s, to the world of domestic worker activism under socialism and dictatorship.

Meetings with lifelong activists and their allies, along with my research in the organizations, ministries, and courts that recorded the lives and activism of domestic workers across the twentieth century, has inspired and shaped the conceptualization of this book. Like the long struggle for visibility by domestic workers’ movements themselves, Workers Like All the Rest of Them pushes back against the continued invisibility of a certain kind of “women’s work”—paid domestic labor—that has been as ubiquitous as it was necessary in Chilean households throughout the twentieth century. As elsewhere in Latin America, much of the dominant discourse about “la empleada” portrays her as a fixture of Chilean family life, the living legacy of a long tradition of service that confounded and crossed class boundaries through affective relations, as women from rural or working-class origins cared for the homes and children of wealthier families.’

Domestic worker activists and their political allies, however, began to seriously confront and disrupt this traditional view by promoting labor legislation and feminist analysis of domestic service in the 1970s and '80s.* In recent years, the Chilean government has gone on to grant empleadas critical labor rights, devoted Cabinet-level programs to addressing their concerns, and begun to implement the requirements of the 2011 International Labor Organization’s Convention 189 on domestic workers, ratified in Chile in 2016.’ Despite these changes, many Chileans continue to insist on the power of more traditional representations of empleadas, revealing how history, culture, and trenchant inequality continue to shape employers’ expectations, even as the legal and political context for paid household labor has continued to change.

What we already knew about the history of domestic service in Chile has long been embedded in a trenchant nationalist narrative of Chile tradicional, a saga of rural paternalism, national integration, and economic modernization that remains a source of powerful, if conservative, social norms in Chile today. This af fection for an idealized rural past, as well as specific gender and racial hierarchies that sustained it, has been reinforced time and again by the representation of servants and servitude in Chilean arts and popular culture. Chile’s high literary canon includes iconic “servant” figures, from the subservient but indispensable characters of Blest Gana’s Martin Rivas (1862) to those that populate the declining noble households preserved in José Donoso’s Coronacién (1957). The criollista tradition in Chilean arts is rife with examples of these static “historical” portrayals of social hierarchies expressed and affirmed through master-servant relations. Stereotypical and melodramatic representations also informed popular poetry and song, which invariably showed female domestic workers as passive agents, exploited both physically and sexually by their masters.* Subsequently, as Chilean society confronted the challenges of development, political instability, and social change by mid-century, empleadas appearing as characters in radio, film, and television dramas illustrated the change and uncertainty in Chilean social relations across class, racial, and gender lines. In iconic characters from radio and stage to television and movies, representations of domestic workers have been critical to Chilean struggles over national identity and progress in the twentieth century.

This investigation began, then, as a study of the hidden history of domestic service that lies beneath those divergent perspectives, a history that documents not only workers’ agency but also how class, race/ethnicity, and gender were constructed through domestic service relations across time. Although the vast majority of the Chilean women employed in domestic service never participated in a labor union or encountered a state inspector, for example, their choices about where and for whom they would work shaped modernization, class formation, and political development in Chile as fundamentally as labor history’s more celebrated copper and nitrate workers. Although countless Chilean scholars warned me that the historical sources for such a study simply do not exist, by starting with the activists’ own accounts of migration, work, and activism I was able to identify a wide range of relevant archival sources, including newspaper accounts, law and social work theses, archives of domestic workers’ associations, and the many songs, plays, and scripts that have portrayed domestic workers in popular culture.

These abundant oral and archival sources demonstrate that the purported “invisibility” of domestic workers is, like so many stories people tell about the past, a kind of myth that can be used to justify their continued exclusion from labor rights and from history itself. In addition to restoring domestic workers to the histories of Chilean labor and politics, this book explores the historical constructions of labor and gender that allowed the Chilean state to systematically deny labor rights to so many women (and some men), further rendering them hidden from history. In the process, I show how the efforts of priests and feminists, inspectors and legislators, state and international officials—and, most significantly, domestic workers themselves—made Chilean empleadas visible as “workers like all the rest of them” over the course of the twentieth century.’ From the earliest associations for domestic workers formed in the 1920s, through the expansion of those unions and the creation of Catholic associations after World War II, to the diverse non-governmental and international organizations that exist today, for more than one hundred years Chilean domestic workers have collectively and simultaneously defended both the labor rights and dignity of workers in their profession.

Workers Like All the Rest of Them recounts this long struggle for domestic workers’ recognition and rights, a history familiar to domestic worker activists in contemporary Chile but one that has remained largely ancillary to scholarly histories of labor in Chile and beyond. On the one hand, this history has been obscured by categories of labor and citizenship that relegate domestic service to the private realm, where it is ostensibly sheltered from the gaze of both the state and organized labor. But domestic workers were not hidden from history: on the contrary, they were everywhere, shaping among other things the organization of families, rural-urban migration, and state welfare policy throughout the twentieth century. Moreover, the fact that domestic workers mobilized earlier and more extensively in Chile than in other parts of Latin America has left an important record of their experience and agency, a record that challenges their exclusion from Chilean history and reveals how and under what conditions domestic workers were able to mobilize for change.

At the heart of this continuing movement has been, in Chile as elsewhere, the struggle by some domestic workers and their allies to name their employment as “work,” and those who perform it as “workers.” Although women’s historians in particular have long examined domestic service as a key site for women’s labor, domestic workers and their allies have continued to struggle for their formal recognition as workers deserving of labor rights. Why, and how does this matter? Why would cleaning, childcare, cooking—activities that, when they take place anywhere else besides a private home, are simply “work”—ever be considered something else? Why does the location of work, or the private arrangement between employer and domestic worker, result in the exclusion of so many women workers from protective legislation, union mobilization, and the history of labor?? And why has it taken so long for an inter-governmental body like the International Labor Organization, which has intervened in so many different labor relations since the early twentieth century, only recently created an international convention on domestic work?” This book approaches these questions from a local and historical perspective: the case of twentieth-century Chile, where a small union movement grew into a vibrant and visible movement for domestic workers’ rights at midcentury."!

In that country, as in other places throughout the Americas, families and individuals have relied on the work of “servants” to organize the work of the household, who perform a wide range of duties from cooking and cleaning to childcare. Once a phenomenon limited to wealthier families, in the twentieth century domestic service proved crucial for the operation and well-being of middle-class households, among other things providing the reproductive labor that allowed middle-class professional women (and men!) to work outside the home.!? In Chile throughout the twentieth century, women’s domestic service labor remained critical to both the reproductive work of Chilean households and the economic survival of poor families, particularly in the rural sector. According to the Chilean population census, roughly 40 percent of economically active women were employed in domestic service (higher than the regional average), and women in turn comprised over four fifths of that occupation.'* Despite employers’ frequent assertions that domestic workers are “part of the family” because they perform caring work, the persistence of poor treatment and low wages tells a different story. It shows the erstwhile “kin” speaking out, organizing, and seeking recognition in their struggle for change, often in ways that reflect the same ideological diversity, strategic differences, and political ties evident in the political struggles of workers in other sectors.

On the workers’ side, of course, the significance of domestic service as a source of income, and sometimes dignity and financial security, is also undeniable. Women and men, young and old, rural migrants and urban residents have worked to sustain themselves and their families through paid domestic service, often traveling far and sacrificing attention to their own families to do so. In Chile, their story has been told elsewhere, and in multiple ways—literature, song, film, testimonials, news reports—but to date no one other than the activist Aida Moreno has told this story of the Chilean empleadas’ struggle for recognition and protection as workers.'* For Chilean activists, this global struggle is grounded in a local history of domestic activism and alliances, where workers continue to confront social prejudice and racial and gender discrimination in their quest for labor rights.

AS IN MUCH OF Latin America, throughout the twentieth century women’s domestic service labor remained critical to both the reproductive work of Chilean households and the economic survival of poor families, particularly in the rural sector. But by the 1980s, women domestic workers remained as marginal to formal labor organization as they were essential to Chilean social relations, family economic organization, and childhood education. Particularly when compared to today’s domestic service sector—dominated not only by day laborers but also characterized by women of diverse education, rural/urban origins, and nationalities'*—most paid household labor in Chile’s earlier decades was performed by poorly educated women who migrated as teenagers from southern communities to find live-in work in urban households.'*

The personal stories of many empleadas form part of a larger story of Chile’s rural sector, a story rife of extreme poverty, unstable employment, cultural and economic domination, and political exclusion.” But there is certainly more to this story: instead of dichotomous renderings of pastoral family life versus urban labor exploitation, domestic workers pursued survival and independence through domestic service work. Particularly in light of the range of representations of empleadas that dominated public discourse in this period—from criminal elements to suffering victims and everything in between—it is vital that we appreciate the kinds of experiences, choices, and limitations faced by so many empleadas, then as well as now. Workers Like All the Rest of Them begins by centering the stories I collected in interviews between 2002 and 2005 with over a dozen Chileans who were involved in Catholic associations and the secular union in the 1950s through the 1980s. Their memories of migration, city life, sociability, religion, employment, and sometimes romantic and family life,

FIGURE 1.4. Young empleadas, Rancagua, 1929, photographer unknown. Photograph provided by María Angélica Rojas Flores from a family collection.

inform the central narrative of this book, which begins—as they did —with the deepening poverty that drove so many young women to leave their families in the countryside to seek better wages and situations in Chile's growing postwar cities.'* In what follows below, we learn about these transformations through the experience of Elba Bravo, whose personal narrative of rural poverty and migration, household employment, urban opportunities and dangers, as well as her path to religious and labor militancy, reflect a common pathway traversed by women who became leading activists in Chile’s domestic workers’ movements. Dating back to the early years of the Republic, Chilean systems of landholding and agricultural labor have remained central to the country’s economic growth and social organization, evolving in the decades after independence to an enduring system of large private estates that relied on the inquilinaje system—in which rural men and some women were paid, mostly in kind and access to land on the edges of large estates—and progressively thereafter to one that by the 19508 depended mostly on the waged, temporary labor of a migrant male labor force. Even though women participated in rural labor systems—as workers as well as landowners—attention to rural labor by the Catholic Church, Chilean state, and political parties typically privileged the subject of the exploited migrant male workers whose political participation was at first repressed, then recruited, especially as populist and revolutionary parties shifted their attention to the countryside in the 1950s and 60s. However, women’s role in the rural sector, from their participation in izquilinaje to their labor in male-headed households, reveals characteristics that help explain how and why so many young women chose to migrate to urban areas for domestic work, and did so with increasing frequency by the 1930s.

Although women had often engaged in rural labor—usually through milking and care of animals—by the 1930s the mechanization of the dairy industry and the increasing monetarization of wages meant that most rural employment and land contracts were made by men, and that more and more of the available waged labor in the rural sector was performed by men, relegating women to unpaid work for their families or, where family income could not sustain them, migration to urban areas in search of work. But there was an intermediate step that young, unmarried women in the campo frequently passed through before migration: a contract to perform domestic service in the home of their family’s rural patrón, through which some women became attached to families that later relocated to the capital.