Partners in Conflict: The Politics of Gender, Sexuality, and Labor in the Chilean Agrarian Reform, 1950-1973

Abstract

Partners in Conflict examines the importance of sexuality and gender to rural labour and agrarian politics during the last days of Chile's latifundia system of traditional landed estates and throughout the governments of Eduardo Frei and Salvador Allende (1964-1973). Heidi Tinsman analyses differences between men's and women's participation in Chile's Agrarian Reform movement, considering how conflicts over gender shape the contours of working-class struggles and national politics. Tinsman restores women to a scholarly narrative that has been almost exclusively about men, recounting the centrality of women's labour to the pre-Agrarian Reform world of the hacienda during the 1950s and recovering women's critical roles in union struggles and land occupations during the Agrarian Reform itself. Providing a theoretical framework for understanding why the Agrarian Reform ultimately empowered men more than women, Tinsman argues that women were marginalised not because the Agrarian Reform ignored women but because the Agrarian Reform, under both the Frei and Allende governments, promoted the male-headed household as the cornerstone of a new society. Although the Agrarian Reform's emphasis on gender co-operation stressed that men should have more respect for their wives and funnelled unprecedented amounts of resources into women's hands, the reform movement defined men as its protagonists and affirmed their authority over women. This is the first monographic social history of Chile's Agrarian Reform in either English or Spanish, and the first historical work to make sexuality and gender central to the analysis of the reforms.