The gendered nature of citizenship in Chilean politics



Franceschet, Susan. "Gendered Citizenship in Chile: An Overview", pp. 19-33 and "Gendered Citizenship and the Future of Chilean Democracy", pp. 167-176. Women and politics in Chile. Boulder, London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2005.

Franceschet argues that women have played a significant role in Chilean political history, but have remained marginalized from formal politics due to the gendered patterns of citizenship, also pervasive in Chile's processes of democratization. This has to do with the historical construction of formal politics as masculine and with the fact that the expansion of social rights in Chile has linked citizenship with one's identity as a worker (in the formal labor market). Both left and right discourses in this sense, have articulated their political projects departing from the idea of a male-headed household with women as dependants of male workers, deeming the rest of them —defined as "abandoned women"— as objects of charity. Even after women gained the right to vote in 1949, gender ideologies still linked women to their maternal role and mobilized them around their caretaking responsibilities (as in the Centros de Madres).

Gender ideologies under the dictatorship stressed women as bearers of the Fatherland's values, drawing a constant analogy between the family and the country as a whole. In this way, women were used —in discourse and practice— to consolidate authoritarianism. Women under dictatorship were successful in organizing around the need to democratize not only the country, but to address gender relationships altogether, but because of the incomplete and negotiated nature of Chilean's transition, these demands for political citizenship have been overshadowed. The dictatorship's legacy of fear of conflict and pathological search for consensus has thus narrowed the possibilities for women to negotiate their political and social rights. On the other hand, women's movements have demanded their rights on the grounds of their identities as mothers, mobilizing existing gender ideologies to their benefit,instead of effectively challenging them.

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