The little nazi inside all of us: militarized women in Chile

Bunster, Ximena. “Watch out for the little nazi man that all of us have inside: The mobilization and demobilization of women in militarized Chile”. Women’s Studies International Forum, Volume 11, Issue 5, 1988, Pp. 485-491.

The way women were involved in resisting and denouncing the military dictatorship has been a large focus of attention, but the ways that women also collaborated and lent their support to the regime has been an issue avoided by Chilean feminists. Bunster argues that it is crucial for feminists to examine gender ideologies contained in the doctrine of national security, and how femininity is mobilized to promote military values. At the core of this doctrine women are interpellated as mothers and bearers of the moral values of the Fatherland, ideas that previous governments —both right-wing and Popular Front— had used in their rhetoric as well. However, the military mobilized the image of "a patriotic, self-sacrificing mother whose “apolitical-feminine-private” social behavior develops solely within the territorial boundaries of her home" (p.488).

Through Cema Chile and Secretaría Nacional de la Mujer —the main institutions used by Pinochet for this purpose —women were politically activated under to perform volunteer work as an extension of their work at home: through this work, women become public mothers. This ideology rejects the notion of politics and political activity, which are deemed dangerous and a threat to the nation. Militarization as a process, then, requires the spread of a particular set of rigid ideas about femininity. However, this set of ideas had roots that go way before the military regime itself, in the historical antecedent of upper and middle-class culture of maternalistic charity.