Respectable workers, decent housewives.


Rosemblatt, Karin Alejandra. Gendered Compromises. Political Cultures and the State in Chile, 1920-1950. Introduction pp. 1-25. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

This book revolves around the argument that the modernizing project in Chile during the first half of the twentieth-century was formulated as a gendered project, in which the state drew a line between respectable men (workers), respectable women (housewives and mothers), and the undisciplined "other". Moreover, they opposed rationality —linked to modern citizenship— to uncontained sexuality. This was in turn linked also to the racialized aspect of the national project: the whitening of the nation. Thus, trough the control over sexuality the racial boundaries of the nation were to be sustained.

Rosemblatt analyses diverse sources, such as state documents and fiction, to document the project of the popular front (the center-left coalition that governed in Chile between the 1920's and the 1950's). This project was immersed in the logic of progress, modernization and evolution that influenced most Western processes of nation-building. The state looked for rationality and science to become the grounds for social intervention. Professionals were indoctrinated in the idea of the educating state, and introduced a gendered professional practice, where women were incorporated as the 'social hygienists'. A healthy and well-constituted family were deemed as a requirement for the nation's advancement. Antagonist political projects all claimed the family as their ideal model of national conviviality and kinship. A gendered citizenship was promoted by policies and wage systems operated over the idea of the nuclear heterosexual male-headed family.


Rosemblatt looks at the processes of nation building as centered on the state as a site of contestation and negotiation of meanings with social and political actors. However, she recognizes that there are power structures at place that do not make this an equal bargain. State policies were shaped during this period both by the disciplining effort of the elites and by the ways that subaltern subjects negotiated with the state within these restrictions. That is, says Rosemblatt, there can be agency without autonomy. The state is not a monolithic entity either, but rather an heterogeneous body that reaches hegemony instead of complete control or domination.

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