Right-Wing Women in Chile: Feminine Power and the Struggle against Allende, 1964-1973 (review)

Sandra McGee Deutsch

Hispanic American Historical Review, 83:4, November 2003, pp. 769-771 (Article) Published by Duke University Press

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lives. Tinsman is concerned with the ways in which government policies, church projects, the union movement, and the ideological polarization of national politics changed, or failed to change, relations between men and women in rural Chile. She concludes that although the agrarian program of the Christian Democrats beneted women in a number of ways, their model of family uplift translated gender inequalities and sexual hierarchies into national policy as natural facts (pp. 207 8). The subsequent Unidad Populars patriarchal stance toward women coexisted with visionary plans to revolutionize female roles ( p. 219). Tinsman is clearly correct that the literature on the Chilean agrarian reform, the rural labor movement, and the breakdown of the Chilean political system in 1973 has neglected the role of women. Likewise, there is no question that policy makers and analysts were little concerned with patriarchy and what makes it tick. Her study leaves no doubt that womens activities mattered to the agrarian reform and that many women beneted from it, despite the simultaneous reinforcement of certain aspects of traditional, patriarchal gender relations. More generally, Tinsman creatively tells an untold story: the many ways that agrarian reform changed gender relations and how these changes reverberated in national and local politics and society. What is not convincingly demonstrated is that these two Chilean governments attempted to refashion gender relations as Tinsman suggests: that their agrarian reforms had a gendered mission, either to reinforce existing gender relations or to revolutionize them. Most Chileans, including government ofcials and policy makers, did not associate agrarian reform with changing family relations or questioning patriarchy. In fact, one reason that Tinsmans work is so welcome is that government ofcials and union leaders rarely mentioned women ( p. 8), as is also true for most previous research on the agrarian reform.

brian loveman, San Diego State University

Right-Wing Women in Chile: Feminine Power and the Struggle against Allende, 1964 1973. By margaret power. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002. Photographs. Illustrations. Maps. Tables. Appendixes. Bibliography. Index. xxii, 311 pp. Cloth, $65.00. Paper, $25.00. Womens critical role in the 1973 ousting of Salvador Allende has long been recognized, but their actions, motivations for participation, and foreign ties remained obscure. Many believed that only privileged women, manipulated by rightist men, mobilized against Allendes government, but Margaret Powers examination of the gendered aspects of rightist political participation and electoral campaigns answers these questions and dispels the myths. In the nineteenth century, women pressed for suffrage in order to protect the church against liberal anticlericalism. Once women attained the right to vote, they were mobilized by rightists attempting to attract a popular base. The 1964 electoral alliance between the rightist Partido Nacional (PN) and the centrist Christian Demo-

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crats (PDC) used the Scare Campaign convincing women that a leftist victory would mean destruction of the family to help defeat Allende. The PN used this strategy again in 1970, but Allende won the three-way race. Power demonstrates that the United States covertly supported the Scare Campaign and Chilean rightist women. The United States had already encouraged both Operation Peter Pan, which sent the children of anti-Castro Cubans to the United States, and the womens mobilization against Brazilian president Joo Goulart. These campaigns tactics and rhetoric about gender and the family heralded those of Chilean activists. PN women were among the rst to denounce Allendes triumph. They joined with women of the PDC and other opposition groups to organize the famous March of the Empty Pots and Pans to protest Fidel Castros visit in December 1971. In early 1972 they created Poder Femenino (PF), which demonstrated and petitioned against the government, aided the striking copper miners of El Teniente, and helped meld the anti-Allende forces agitating in favor of a military coup. Observers have assumed that PF members spurred military ofcers into action by questioning their manhood, but Power suggests that their actions may have been part of an opposition plan to legitimize a golpe that was in the works. In fact, PF had already weakened Chilean democracy by denigrating politics and exalting its apolitical role. The military regime it helped bring to power disbanded PF because it had accomplished its mission and represented an autonomy that the generals did not want women to exercise. PF insisted that women could transcend class ( p. 172) to unite the nation. Indeed, it recruited some lower-class women, partly through the Centros de Madres established in impoverished communities by the Frei administration. Many poor women agreed that Unidad Popular policies kept them from feeding their families and joined the anti-Allende cause. Yet upper-class prerogatives and assumptions infused PF: its afuent members equated the national interest with their class interests, and they relied on their telephones, servants, cars, and access to money and powerful men to push forward their agenda. The gold pots-and-pans pins of elite anti-Allende activists distinguished them from the less-privileged women who wore copper pins. It is telling that wealthy PF members could supply Power with names of their upper- and middle-class colleagues but could not recall the names of working-class ones. PF shared many characteristics with rightist women in other Latin American countries and time periods. Most such groups have presented themselves as apolitical mothers motivated by the desire to protect their families against leftist assault. They defended existing gender roles, although their activities may have subtly challenged them. Leftists have claimed that rightist men manipulate their female allies, ignoring the possibilities of womens agency and the genuine appeal of rightwing platforms. Some rightist movements have recruited women to help them attract a multiclass following. Rightist women have also cited Catholicism as a motive, yet religion did not inuence PF to the same degree as the rosary-carrying

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Brazilian women who marched against Goulart. Furthermore, PF seemed more combative and tolerant of violence and torture than rightist women in other contexts, except for Somocista and Contra women in Nicaragua. Future research is needed to explain these differences and pinpoint other variations between rightist womens movements in the region. Scholars will appreciate this studys rich detail, extensive documentation, and careful examination of diverging interpretations and the pitfalls of memory. The discussion of background issues, portraits of activists, and anecdotes gleaned from interviews make the book accessible to students. Both audiences will appreciate Powers insights into womens history and Chilean politics in a crucial period.

sandra mcgee deutsch, University of Texas at El Paso

Children of Facundo: Caudillo and Gaucho Insurgency during the Argentine State-Formation Process (La Rioja, 1853 1870). By ariel de la fuente. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. Tables. Figures. Bibliography. Index. xiii, 249 pp. Cloth, $54.95. Paper, $18.95. In 1863, Domingo Sarmiento commissioned a photograph of the defeated followers of Angel Vicente Chacho Pealoza, leader of one of the last Federalist insurrections in the Argentine interior. By the time the blurred portrait of some 70 bedraggled gauchos was taken, the Unitarian governor of San Juan province had already ordered the execution of their leader and exhibited his head on public display. Doubtless Sarmiento, biographer of Juan Manuel de la Rosa (the other famous caudillo from that troublesome province), found in the picture of barefoot peasants, seemingly impotent without their charismatic hero, conrmation of his hope that this act of exemplary violence by a new generation of liberal state builders had nally closed the chapter on local warlords and prepared the path for national unity. This evocative photograph graces the cover of Children of Facundo, a pioneering exploration of the popular experience of state-formation. Focusing on 1860s La Rioja, de la Fuente analyzes the mobilization of rural inhabitants of this povertystricken province in what would be a nal challenge to political centralization as they defended their homegrown version of federalism. Nineteenth-century liberal historiography frames many of the central questions of this work. Yet, while those historians triumphed the achievements of nation building and thus were only too willing to dismiss and criminalize the rural fanaticism that hindered their goals, this study examines agrarian power relations, the culture of patronage, and provincial folklore in order to comprehend the fervent loyalty of local people to their chosen leaders. In La Rioja, party conict and identity were nurtured by land tenure patterns. Examining tax and census records from the 1850s, the monograph presents a closely