Struggles in the Countryside: Gender Politics and Agrarian Reform in Democracy and Dictatorship

This essay looks at rising conflicts between women and men that accompanied Chile's tumultuous and extensive agrarian reform between 1964 and 1973. It goes on to examine rural women's proletarianization as fruit workers under military dictatorship. The essay argues that during the agrarian reform peasant women supported the overall goals of redistributing land and improving rural wages, but their expectations were often bitterly disappointed by the agrarian reform's focus on empowering men. Ironically, it was during military rule that women's roles as breadwinners and their involvement in the resurgent labor movement enabled greater gender parity in rural families.