Workers Like All the Rest of Them: Domestic Service and the Rights of Labor in Twentieth-Century Chile

Abstract

For several decades, labor history has been a key part of Chilean history. Anyone entering the field will read about miners, rural laborers, artisans, and industrial workers, to name a few. Throughout her career, Elizabeth Quay Hutchison has focused on women, a group often left out of the standard narrative. In her first book, Labors Appropriate to Their Sex: Gender, Labor, and Politics in Urban Chile, 1900–1930 (2001), women workers took center stage, and a rather different history of Chile came to light. In this new book, Hutchison homes in on a figure so omnipresent in Chilean society yet also lacking coverage in recent scholarship: domestic workers. This is not to suggest that there is a total absence of scholarship on domestic workers, but Hutchison argues that the limited literature tends to think of them as marginalized and oppressed, not active agents of change themselves. Instead, Hutchison brings out the voices of domestic workers, their histories of migration and organizing, and how they—in conjunction with other parts of society, such as the Catholic Church, labor unions, and social workers—helped to shape the contours of twentieth-century Chilean history.Built on research in archives, periodicals, and interviews, Workers Like All the Rest of Them brings the reader into the lives of domestic workers with extraordinary care. Drawing from interviews conducted between 2002 and 2005, Hutchison makes the reader feel the conversations, as though they had taken part in them, and in turn become more involved in the narrative. These interviews are surely one of the book's high points.Over the course of the book, the reader traverses a century of history, beginning with shifts in rural economies that pushed women into domestic labor and to migrate to cities. Here Hutchison is careful to point out that some women embraced the move to a larger city, seeing in it new possibilities and space away from the family. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the category of domestic worker (a category that undergoes repeated name changes) shifts away from including both women and men to one identified almost entirely with women. Domestic workers were simultaneously marginalized and included through different presidential administrations and new labor laws. Hutchison makes it clear that throughout the decades, domestic workers were themselves also organizing for improvements in their working conditions and for greater inclusion by and involvement in the state. That she sees this as a history of state formation is no coincidence, and one can find a similar line of inquiry in the work of Chilean historians María Angélica Illanes and Juan Carlos Yáñez Andrade.This history of organizing is one of connections to the Catholic Church. Part of this has to do with social Catholicism and the desire to do social work, as well as some of the more traditional Left ignoring domestic workers. Hutchison details the ins and outs of the different Catholic organizations and their relationship to more formal labor unions. Although at times the shifts and overlaps are confusing for the reader, this is probably also a consequence of the nature of these organizations.One of the more fascinating parts of the book comes in chapter 4, when Hutchison discusses the Socialist deputy Carmen Lazo's proposal of a bill on domestic workers and their rights. Domestic workers met in the early months of 1971 to discuss it, only to return a more radical bill. To quote Hutchison's take on it: “In contrast with the more paternalistic framing of Lazo's presentation, the revised text of the bill situated domestic workers' exploitation within the larger frame of class struggle and revolutionary transformation” (pp. 120–21). The revolutionary moment of Popular Unity and liberation theology meant that domestic workers and their allies put forth the double liberation of domestic workers, as women and as workers. The momentum for the bill, however, was cut short by the military coup of September 1973.To close out the book, Hutchison argues that while some domestic workers were targeted during the dictatorship, it was nowhere nearly as bad as the targeting of those tied to traditional left-wing labor unions and parties. They did not face as much repression and were allowed a certain amount of political space due to the protection of the church and a level of “invisibility” compared to other unions (p. 129).Workers Like All the Rest of Them touches on important themes in twentieth-century Chilean history while showing how domestic workers were part of many of these conversations and movements. Hutchison opens the book by mentioning that many told her that the source material for such a history did not exist. While at times I did wonder about the possibility of more sources—of different archives, more interviews, other periodicals, and more connections to recent scholarship—Hutchison did indeed prove them wrong.