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In Workers Like All the Rest of Them, Elizabeth Quay Hutchison recounts the long struggle for domestic workers’ recognition and rights in Chile across the twentieth century. Hutchison traces the legal and social history of domestic workers and their rights, outlining their transition from slavery to servitude. For most of the twentieth century, domestic service remained one of the key “underdeveloped” sectors in Chile’s modernizing economy. Hutchison argues that the predominance of women in that underpaid, underregulated labor sector provides one key to persistent gender and class inequality. Through archival research, firsthand accounts, and interviews with veteran activists, Hutchison challenges domestic workers’ exclusion from Chilean history and reveals how and under what conditions they mobilized for change, forging alliances with everyone from Catholic Church leaders and legislators to feminists and political party leaders. Hutchison contributes to a growing global conversation among activists and scholars about domestic workers’ rights, providing a lens for understanding how the changing structure of domestic work and worker activism has both perpetuated and challenged forms of ethnic, gender, and social inequality.

In a summer 2018 interview conducted for this special issue of RHR, the US-born lesbian feminist artist, activist, and scholar Margaret Randall reflects on the Cuban Revolution’s achievements and shortcomings in the arena of women’s and sexuality rights. What have women and sexual minorities contributed to Cuba’s experiment in radical equality, and what remains to be done? How has feminism—in all its variety—shaped the aspirations of Cuban men and women, and what have US feminists learned from their efforts? What makes gender justice happen, and who or what constitutes barriers to change?

The regulation of labor relations and social rights substantially changed workers’ lives over the course of the 20th century. Domestic service, however, was only poorly and belatedly protected under labor law, and its incorporation proceeded in a slow, ambiguous, and nonlinear manner. The specific ways in which domestic service regulation emerged in Chile and Argentina, respectively, offer insight into this process and also present some important contrasts, despite the nations’ geographic proximity. In Chile, although the rights recognized for household workers were limited, the Labor Code of 1931 included an article on domestic service. In Argentina, the first comprehensive regulation for this sector was a special statute sanctioned by decree in 1956. In both cases, the “special” nature of such regulation was attributed to the place of domestic service in family life. As domestic labor was reconceptualized through legislative reform in each country, household workers gradually came to enjoy some, but not all, of the rights guaranteed to other workers.

This article examines the unique history of household workers’ activism in Chile from the 1950s to the 1990 transition to democracy, drawing on archival and oral sources to argue that key alliances with the Catholic Church, Center and Left parties, and feminist organizations transformed the legal, social, and political identities of Chilean empleadas (servants). Building on associations formed by the Young Catholic Worker in the early 1950s, household worker activists forged key political alliances in their struggle for increased labor protection prior to the 1973 military coup. Under dictatorship, household worker activists kept a low profile until a new alliance with Chilean feminists reinvigorated their activism in the struggle against dictatorship.

This article reconstructs the origins and effects of radical Catholic activism on the expansion of household workers' associations in Chile during the Cold War. Joining the efforts of local priests affiliated with the Juventud Obrera Católica (JOC) in the 1950s, a generation of live-in household workers in Santiago and other urban centers nurtured a sizable movement for empleadas domésticas that was unique in the Americas—the JOC de Empleadas—which joined housing and vocational services with a lay Catholic movement to advance empleadas' labor rights. Impacted by both the radicalization of their religious leadership and the revolutionary politics of the period, the Catholic household workers' movement of the 1960s turned increasingly to union organizing and legislative reform to advance its agenda, pressing for greater recognition and regulation of domestic service as a matter of labor rights. Through its focus on the Catholic Church as a transnational and hegemonic actor in the mobilization of household workers, and on the changing discourse of domestic service as “labor,” this article challenges the persistent stereotype of Latin American Catholicism in relation to workers' movements prior to Vatican II.

This article examines the phenomenon of female prostitution in early-twentieth-century urban Chile through the lens of the labor press, in which the growth of female prostitution was consistently linked to industrial employers and their factories. Labor movements appropriated the symbol of the working-class prostitute for the rhetoric of class struggle and buttressed organizers' promise of a future in which women sold neither their labor nor their bodies for economic survival. Labor's primary concern was not with prostitutes themselves, but with the prostitution of labor: the usurpation of masculine roles and responsibilities by the agents of industrial capitalism.

The Chile Reader makes available a rich variety of documents spanning more than five hundred years of Chilean history. Most of the selections are by Chileans; many have never before appeared in English. The history of Chile is rendered from diverse perspectives, including those of Mapuche Indians and Spanish colonists, peasants and aristocrats, feminists and military strongmen, entrepreneurs and workers, and priests and poets. Among the many selections are interviews, travel diaries, letters, diplomatic cables, cartoons, photographs, and song lyrics. Texts and images, each introduced by the editors, provide insights into the ways that Chile's unique geography has shaped its national identity, the country's unusually violent colonial history, and the stable but autocratic republic that emerged after independence from Spain. They shed light on Chile's role in the world economy, the social impact of economic modernization, and the enduring problems of deep inequality. The Reader also covers Chile's bold experiments with reform and revolution, its subsequent descent into one of Latin America's most ruthless Cold War dictatorships, and its much-admired transition to democracy and a market economy in the years since dictatorship.

Sources for the study of the history of women in Latin America’s national period grew exponentially in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, both in the English-speaking world and, to a lesser extent, in Latin America itself. Fueled by women’s movements and the growing presence of female scholars in the humanities and social sciences in the 1960s, early research on Latin American women focused on women, religion, and the family in colonial period—partly in a search for the “origins” of gender inequalities evident in the present day. Studies of women in the national period, by contrast, emphasized women’s participation in family, economy, and politics, documenting women’s contributions to social change in Latin America and the Caribbean, particularly in the arenas of female employment, education, and suffrage. At the height of the cold war, scholarly attention focused predictably on women’s (and feminists’) extraordinary presence in antiauthoritarian struggles and the promise of socialist revolutions for greater gender equality, generating considerable interest in questions of gender identity and state–society relations in the process of state formation and national development. Finally, a wave of North American scholarship inspired by the questions and methods linked to gender analysis in the 1990s made the study of women and gender an intrinsic part of broader historiographical concerns with Latin American economic, political, and cultural development in the national period. One result of this development is that works not centrally concerned with “women’s history” regularly incorporate women as historical subjects and consider the importance of gender relations to the broader topic under examination, often in research ranging from US–Latin American relations and the history of medicine to agricultural production and historical memory. Women’s history has, in this respect, become ubiquitous, particularly in the English-language scholarship on modern Latin America. This North–South imbalance, as well as the greater distribution of English-language compared to Latin American publications, is certainly reflected in this bibliography, which privileges research by US scholars. This selection also documents the relatively lesser attention scholars have granted to the relationship between gender and racial/ethnic hierarchies as well as female religious identity and participation in the modern period. This bibliography nevertheless builds on this rapid and diverse historiographical development to offer a selection of significant historical works for the study of Latin American women after independence.