Historical approaches on gender: Miller Klublock and Gabriel Salazar

In "Writing the History of Women and Gender in Twentieth-Century Chile" Miller Klubock points out that we can identify two strands of gender history writing in Chile: one that pursues the recuperation of the role of women in Chilean society, and a second one that aims to analyse history from the perspective of gender ideologies and their effects in the constitution of historically specific gendered subjectivities. In this chapter, I focus on feminist historical analyses that belong to this second category. This responds to the very reason that Miller Klublock outlines as the difference between these two approaches: while the first one assumes a certain continuity of the category of ‘women’ throughout history, the second one understands this same category as historically contingent and constructed. Thus, the need to move from the history of women to the analysis of “the historical organization of gender relations and systems that determine both femininity and masculinity” (503). Authors reviewed such as Rosemblatt, Tinsman, and Hutchinson focus on the ways that gender ideologies shape state discourse and action, and as a consequence, regulate the ways that gendered identities can be articulated in specific historical contexts. One of the main advantages of this approach is that it illuminates the multiple and many times contradictory effects of state discourse and action in reproducing and reinforcing a patriarchal order: “throughout the twentieth century in Chile the state empowered women in some ways and restricted male behavior and patriarchal prerogative as it extended its own patriarchal authority into the most distant corner’s of men’s and women’s everyday lives.” (Klublock, 514)

In a similar vein, in Historia contemporánea de Chile, Tomo IV. Hombría y feminidad, Gabriel Salazar (2002) points out at two central points to have in mind when looking at the history of gender in twentieth-century Chile. First, that we cannot speak about women “in general” but only “in particular,” as the history of women develops differently depending in their position in economic, social and cultural matrices; consequently their interests are not general or transversal but are fractured by the inequalities of a capitalist structure. Secondly, that the process of formation of the state in its social action role and as a nation-building process was gendered since its inception: Between 1920 and 1960, the development of a state bureaucracy oriented to social action was indeed the institutionalization of what had formerly been the action of elite women and their ‘civic maternalism’ during the nineteenth century. In that sense, the state itself grew through “a series of public roles of female specialization (...), an emergent national project for middle-class women” (Salazar 165). These included mainly women teachers, social workers, nurses, doctors and midwives. For example, in 1925 the School of Social Service was founded to transform the charity of elite women into a technical and professional public service.