Feminist Policymaking in Chile

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Preface

This project began almost twenty years ago. After graduating from college I spent two years as a community organizer in rural Chile, working with women’s cooperatives in relatively isolated communities near Los Andes, north of Santiago. It’s hard to remember now what I imagined the experience would be like, but as anyone who has done volunteer work can attest, the reality is almost always more challenging, more humbling, and ultimately more transformative than one expects. My two strongest memories from that time are of being overwhelmed by the generosity of my Chilean neighbors and of being taken aback by the political engagement and sophistication of people living such a rural existence.

I arrived in Pocuro at the end of 1990, shortly after the transition to democracy. The silos and fences around my house were still covered with graffiti from the 1988 plebiscite on General Pinochet’s regime. Despite their isolation, the people in the village where I lived suffered significantly under the military government, particularly in the first years after the 1973 coup. Many of my neighbors had relatives who had been exiled abroad, or had spent time in prison, or had been tortured. Finally free to speak openly about their experiences, they poured out stories of the chaos of the Allende years and of the brutal repression that followed the coup.

I was initially shocked by the harsh conditions in which these women lived: dilapidated housing without heating, telephones, or, in many cases, indoor plumbing. Daily tasks like laundry were done by hand. Paid employment was scarce, and many men left for weeks at a time to work in mining or at the ski resorts, effectively leaving the women sole caretakers of the home and children. Yet many of the women made time to attend the cooperative meetings, where they spoke with great insight about their common struggles: of the need for better health care and birth control, of practical advice for defending themselves against domestic abuse (which was endemic in the area), of their inability to make the most basic financial decisions without the permission of their husbands, of the need for legal divorce. On multiple occasions women who by all appearances conformed to the role of traditional rural wife and mother argued passionately for the need for abortion “in extreme cases.”

These were not women who had internalized or acquiesced in the limitations of their social roles. Many could clearly articulate their inequality but felt trapped not only by a machista culture but by laws that failed to guarantee their socioeconomic and political equality. I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to these women, who first opened my eyes to the reality of women’s lives in Chile and whose tremendous hospitality and lasting friendship sustained me there and remain with me today.

In the years after my return to the United States, feminist representatives in the Chilean Congress introduced legislation to criminalize domestic violence, establish salary equity for women workers and day-care centers for their children, give married women more control over their salaries and property, and legalize divorce. Their early enthusiasm for policy reform waned, however, in the face of staunch political opposition. Sernam, the National Women’s Service, established itself as a center for policy development on women’s rights, but not without controversy—both from feminists outside the state and from political conservatives opposed to reform. The Chilean women’s movement, which had played a central role in fighting for a return to democracy, struggled to redefine its mission and its relationship with the government.

My work with the women’s cooperatives, together with the fledgling projects of the new democratic government, prompted me to consider whether, and how, women might change the inequalities that were so much a part of their lives. Could women effectively combat the cultural beliefs that limited their potential? How impenetrable were the structural factors—particularly the lack of legal protections to ensure women’s equality—that sustained and perpetuated these beliefs? This book is my attempt to investigate the extent to which women in Chile have found political strategies to challenge discriminatory laws and to create the legal framework that will improve the concrete conditions of their lives.

© 2010 Penn State University

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