Feminism in Chile
Feminism in Chile
Hello, friends. When I first wrote about Santiago, I shared a photo of posters about working women’s rights made by Chilean girls.
Seeing that exhibit sparked some questions for me. What was the state of women’s affairs in Chile? How did Chile’s recent history—almost two decades of military rule under Pinochet and then almost two decades of peaceful, left-leaning democracy—impact social progress, particularly on feminist issues? I had to find out.
I already spend some part of every day thinking about women and their role in civil and social life. My passion and interest in that area is what made me come up with a series on this blog I’d call “herstories,” where I’d interview and profile women with notable achievements, inspiring missions, or interesting stories to tell. I haven’t fully executed on that version yet, due both to my subpar Spanish (there’s no way I could conduct an interview in all Spanish right now) and the fact that I’m not really spending enough time in any place to (a) identity someone I want to write about and (b) get them comfortable enough to have a good interview (or wasn’t, until I got to Puerto Natales, but then my days were consumed fighting bedbug infestations and I had no time to find interview subjects) (jokes) (kind of). But until I can write about individuals, I can research (read journals, go to museums, have casual conversations) the general state of women and women’s issues in a country, which is what I’ve been doing throughout my month in Chile.
My initial hypothesis for Chile, buoyed by seeing such a left-leaning exhibit in a prominent museum, was that it would be a fairly progressive country when it came to gender equality. I knew its economy was growing1, its infrastructure was thoughtfully, centrally planned2, and it had elected Michelle Bachelet—a separated, agnostic, socialist physician and military leader who also happens to be a woman—not just once, in 2006, making her the first female president of Chile and the first female president in all of Latin America to be elected without any help from a politician husband, but again in 20143.
I expected to see a full embrace of feminism.
I was throughly wrong.
It was early evening, and I was sitting on Mariscal’s family friend’s patio, drinking mint tea and spreading palta (avocado) onto toasted bread, nodding my head every couple of minutes whenever I understood the gist of the conversation. My bathing suit was wet underneath my romper from our afternoon at the beach, and I slid my seat into the sun.
“What I don’t need to see is women breastfeeding in public,” said Paula, the family friend. Paula, who was gorgeously made-up for an afternoon of drinking wine with family, looked straight of out The Real Housewives of Oakland County: beautifully blown-out brown hair, platform sandals worn with a black tennis dress, glossy lips and a cloth napkin to pat them with after every sip.
This part of the conversation stood out to me, not only because I recognized the word for breast (pecho—it would’ve been hard not to, what with Paula patting hers and looking at me to make sure I understood), but because I had been looking for a way to unobtrusively ask my questions about public opinion on feminism, and I was pleasantly surprised to see the conversation go there naturally.
Turns out that everyone but me agreed that women shouldn’t breastfeed in public—that some things were better done in private, and that public displays of affection between lesbian or gay couples were another one of those things. “It’s not that I don’t like gays—it’s that I don’t want to see them cavorting around in public,” was Paula’s view. Mariscal and Javier agreed: “Just keep it to yourself.”
My ire sparked my Spanish skills and I got in a couple sentences: “But it’s her choice—her body. Just like it’s their choice—their bodies, their love–their freedom.” Everyone looked at me with a mixture of secondhand embarrassment and disagreement, as if I’d been chewing with my mouth open. Paula and Marisol ignored me and went on to discuss “those crazy feminists” who were always making a big deal of things. I sank into my seat and listened.
I’ve heard similar comments and had similar conversations half a dozen times in the last month. Tomás, my boss at the hostel, told me that it made him sad to see American and German businesswomen shaking hands and caring about their careers because it ruined their beauty and made them appear like men. A few Chilean women at a friend’s barbecue clucked over my solo travel plans and urged me to find a boyfriend along the route who could carry my heavy pack and protect me. The receptionist at a hostel I stayed at hold me that her boss liked to only hire women employees, since he could pay them less. A Chilean guy I met at a bar propositioned me, and then when I said I’d like to just chat as friends, pointed out my jumpsuit and told me that’s not what friends wear.
I don’t think any of the people I’ve met are deeply malintentioned. And to be clear, I’ve also met many people who treated me and spoke of women with complete respect. But this current of non-equality thrums throughout the country, and I think, that if confronted with the definition of feminism—the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes, and advocacy towards it—and asked if they considered themselves a feminist, the overwhelming majority of people would say no. (Everyone I’ve asked so far, aside from a few students at the University of Concepción, haven’t been willing to put that term to their beliefs, at the least.)
Why is that? What is Chile’s relationship with feminism, both its mission in general and the word itself?
Scholar and professor Margaret Power, writing in ReVista, the Harvard Review of Latin America, helped me parse the idea of economic freedom (which Chilean women clearly have some of, what with their constantly-increasing presence in the labor force—over 50% of women now work4, the second-highest number in Latin America) from social or political freedom (which you’d see in things like representation in government, reproductive rights, or how family responsibilities are shared):
The Pinochet dictatorship, like many preceding governments, pledged to modernize Chile. For the military dictatorship, modernization meant neoliberalism and the privatization of the Chilean economy. These policies (which subsequent governments have basically followed) signaled the termination of state subsidies to industry; Chile’s intensified insertion into the world economy; and substantial changes in production, such as the increased growing of fruit and wine for export and the introduction of computers. These changes led to a rapid decline in men’s traditional sources of employment, along with the trade union movement that had defended them. They opened up new areas of work, many of which women now occupy. Thus, while the military regime’s patriarchal discourse defined women as dependent wives and mothers, its economic policies either forced or allowed them to take on new roles as wage laborers, in some cases as the sole financial supporter of their families5
That made sense to me, up to a point—yes, repressive social policies and traditional-family-roles propaganda were necessary to keep the status quo during the dictatorship (and were pretty minor on the scale of Pinochet’s human rights violations), and women’s contributions to the economy were there, but unacknowledged. And then, even as they became more economically important, their political and social value wasn’t counted.
But Chile hasn’t been under Pinochet’s dictatorship for almost 25 years now. And women, individually and in feminist coalitions, contributed to the downfall of the dictatorship. I found one of the most powerful examples of women’s protest against the dictatorship to be the women who started performing Chile’s national dance, the cueca, alone, to highlight the absence of their disappeared family members.6 (Sting sang about the phenomenon in his song “They Dance Alone.”) They began performing like this publicly in 1978, five years into the dictatorship, and still do it every year during the national holidays to call attention to the 30,000 people Pinochet’s regime disappeared.
Women were a visible part of bringing Pinochet’s regime to an end and electing the first of what grew into almost 20 years’ worth of left-leaning presidents (not ending until conservative populist Piñera was elected in 20107, who was also just elected again and will serve his second term 2018-20228). So why didn’t women’s political and social value grow as a result?
Political scientist Marcela Ríos Tobar has a fascinating theory: despite electing four liberal presidents in a row, Chile actually hasn’t been left leaning since Allende’s regime; Concertación, the coalition that took over after Pinochet, incorporates and, for most of the period, has been led by, a centrist Catholic party, the Christian Democrats, that is heavily influenced by Catholic social doctrine9. The most visible feminists, up until the election of Bachelet, were the militant feminists who took positions in the newly-formed democratic government, distancing themselves from socially radical ideas in order to keep their new positions of power within the coalition.
Tobar explains:
The close association that part of the traditional left has established with the Christian Democratic Party has meant that many key feminist demands have gone unaddressed or unrecognized during its time in government, and this can largely explain the dramatic lack of progress on strengthening women’s sexual and reproductive rights to this day…By supporting the democratic project promoted by the Concertación and fostering close links with the state, feminists have tacitly supported a center-left coalition that has committed to support social welfare and equal opportunity but has refused to address issues that might provoke internal conflicts, such as reproductive rights.
Bachelet led differently as president, like my initial hypothesis assumed she would have, including by appointing the first ever gender-parity cabinet (50/50 men/women) and spearheading changes in the Ministry of Health’s sexual education and contraception offerings. But her eight years in control weren’t enough to change long-rooted cultural machismo, or a sense of male bravado and superiority, for good, or to fully change stereotypes of what women’s full participation in social, political, and economic roles look like.
While her two terms as president didn’t completely change the game, they certainly were better for women’s equality in Chile than the previous or upcoming presidencies of Piñera have been or will be. I’ll leave you with a quote of his from December 2011, when he was on a state visit to Mexico and explaining the difference between politicians and women:
When a political says ‘yes’ he means ‘maybe,’ when he says ‘maybe’ he means ‘no’ and when he says ‘no,’ he’s a politican. When a lady says ‘no’ it means ‘maybe,’ when she says ‘maybe’ it means ‘yes’ and when she says ‘yes’ she is not a lady.10
In my most optimistic of daydreams, Piñera and Trump will sit next to each other at Davos, hear an incredible speech from a badass lady politician about the role of women in a nation’s economy and identity, and rededicate their lives and legacies to women’s equality. In real life, they’ll probably continue to say and do misogynistic things with absolutely no consequences.
I’m looking forward to seeing what the state of women’s issues are in the other Latin American countries I’ll be in over the next few months. As always, if you have a different view, or reading recommendations, or anything and everything in between—let’s talk!
One more piece that really influenced how I thought about feminism and women’s rights in Chile, but that didn’t make it into my footnotes for this post: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0094582X15570884