The Rearguard of The Vanguard

Gender & History ISSN 0953-5233
Alfonso Salgado, ‘The Rearguard of the Vanguard: Women, Home and Communist Activism in Chile, 1930–73’
Gender & History, Vol.32 No.2 July 2020, pp. 393–410.
The Rearguard of the Vanguard: Women,

Home and Communist Activism in Chile,
1930–73
Alfonso Salgado
Chile’s Ana González became a symbol of the struggle against the Augusto Pinochet
dictatorship in the late 1970s after losing her husband, two sons and a daughter-in-
law at the hands of the secret service. Few families suffered more than hers. Few
women protested as loudly and courageously as she did. Her political activism had
deep roots. González had become a communist when she was young, in the early
1940s, a few years before falling in love with and marrying communist worker Manuel
Recabarren, who was himself the son of a communist father. Curiously, the young
couple had a difficult time getting married because they faced unexpected opposition
from Recabarren’s father. González recalled the attitude of her future father-in-law in
a 2009 oral history interview: ‘He didn’t want me to marry his son, because I was a
troublemaker [revoltosa]. I was the only woman among a hundred men. [ . . . ] I don’t
know, it was strange: even though he was a communist, he was so conservative.’1
Women like González have often been hailed as standard-bearers of the Com-
munist Party of Chile (Partido Comunista de Chile – PCCH) and families like hers –
composed of a politically active husband, a politically active wife and several politi-
cally active children – have come to be seen as the epitome of communist activism.
And yet, women like González are undoubtedly exceptional. It is one of the main
contentions of this article that the iconic status of women like González and of families
such as hers has distorted our understanding of the relationship between women and
communist activism in twentieth-century Chile. The PCCH was, for the greater part of
the century, a party of workingmen, most of whom married non-communist women.
In this article I will argue that, given the structure of Chilean society, the attitudes of
working-class men, and the very choices made by the PCCH leadership, communism
often ended up producing quite unequal partnerships between public-minded husbands
and domestic-focused wives.
My contribution acknowledges the structural forces that led to the proliferation
of unequal partnerships within Chilean communism – the country’s socioeconomic
structure, the masculinist character of its public life and shared cultural expectations
regarding gender roles – but it focuses on two other, agency-related factors: communist
© 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

394 Gender & History
men’s fears of outspoken public-oriented women such as González and a tendency to

choose traditionally minded female partners; and the PCCH’s decision to accommodate
male anxieties and promote a vision of women as potential homemakers and helpmates.
As this article shows, communist men had rather ‘conservative’ attitudes toward
marriage and gender roles, to use González’s words. González might have been the
ideal communist woman, but that did not necessarily make her the ideal communist
wife. A large number of communist men, especially working-class men, understood
both wage work and public affairs as their exclusive domains, and they showed little
interest in letting their partners have careers outside the home or be politically active.
Many of these men reaffirmed their sense of manhood not only by demonstrating their
power publicly and demanding respect from employers, but also by demonstrating
their capacity to provide for the home and demanding respect from wives and children.
The PCCH delivered a mixed message. While it often called on women to take
to the streets and be more politically active, it addressed women first and foremost
as housewives. Well-known representations of women as class-conscious warriors
and firebrand activists coexisted – and often overlapped – with equally prominent
representations of women as diligent housewives and self-sacrificing partners. This
should not be understood as a lack of interest (or failure) on the part of the party
in appealing to working women or creating a pool of skilled female activists such
as González, but rather as a strategy for further organisational growth. Instead of
demanding that every woman work outside the home and be a fully fledged activist,
the party chose to reap political benefits from the gendered division of labour and
called on women to be their husbands’ helpmates.
The article’s title, ‘the rearguard of the vanguard’, is a shortened version of a saying
that I learned from oral history interviews. Equating the home with the rearguard, the
saying held that the vanguard of the working class (i.e., the Communist Party) needed
the help and commitment of the rearguard in order to operate effectively. I use this
politically charged metaphor to make apparent the crucial yet subordinated role of
women for Chilean communism.
This article spans the period from the 1930s to 1973, a time historians of Chile
have characterised by the emergence of mass politics and a democratic welfare state
predicated on a fragile compromise between labour and capital. The formation of
Marxist left-wing parties, such as the PCCH (1922) and the Socialist Party (1933),
which linked themselves successfully to an increasingly powerful labour movement,
heralded the beginning of a more democratic era. Yet, the process of political inclusion
progressed slowly, punctuated by electoral reforms that encouraged greater civic par-
ticipation and by periods of political persecution and electoral disenfranchisement. In
many ways, the government of Salvador Allende (1970–73), supported by a coalition
led by communists and socialists, signalled the climax of this peculiar epoch in Chilean
history.2
The literature on Chilean communism has burgeoned in recent years.3 Unfortu-
nately, the number of studies that use gender as a lens of analysis is not particularly
significant. These studies tend to focus on the 1960s and early 1970s, an emphasis
that can partly be explained by the greater success of the PCCH during these years
and the increase in the number of women within it.4 Spanning a larger period of time,
this article builds on and engages with these studies. Several of them have already

Women, Home and Communist Activism in Chile, 1930–73 395
acknowledged and criticised the ‘conservative’ stance of communism regarding gen-

der relations. Nevertheless, they tend to assume that the PCCH simply ‘reproduced’
the gender conventions of the era, which consigned women to the home.5 This arti-
cle argues that the PCCH chose to use these social conventions and used them quite
instrumentally in order to broaden its appeal among Chilean women, many of whom
shared these cultural expectations, and to enable the activism of male communists,
whose dedication to the cause relied heavily on the unpaid domestic labour and the
understanding (and forgiveness) of their female partners. In other words, the discourse
of the ‘housewife’ and the ‘great mother’ through which the PCCH tried to attract non-
activist, working-class women to the polls, well documented for the 1970–73 period,
played an important role within the party itself.6
As for the experience of women, this article shifts the focus from the small number
of well-known and well-studied female leaders to the large number of anonymous and
understudied women who played less prominent roles in the historical development
of Chilean communism. The PCCH’s principled commitment to gender equality and
its conscious attempt to promote certain women in order to showcase its stance led
to the existence of half a dozen publicly prominent female leaders at the national
level (Julieta Campusano, Mireya Baltra, Gladys Marı́n and so on), and several dozen
women played important roles at the regional and district levels. Unfortunately, the
existence of these, undoubtedly fascinating, women and the tendency of the communist
press to reproduce their voices has ended up making it difficult to grasp the experience
of ordinary communist women or the non-communist wives of communist husbands,
as most scholars interested in women and communism have either focused on female
leaders exclusively or at least refer to them when discussing broader trends.7 This
article operates under the assumption that these women were anomalous rather than
representative and contends that their very visibility has obscured the existence of
a significant number of Chilean women for whom communism was not precisely a
liberating or empowering experience.
The complex relationship between socialism and feminism in Chile has also re-
ceived some attention.8 The most important women’s organisations of the twentieth
century emerged during the early years herein studied, and the PCCH played an im-
portant role in the birth and development of the Movement for the Emancipation of
Chilean Women (Movimiento Pro-Emancipación de la Mujer Chilena – MEMCH),
arguably the most important of these organisations. Nevertheless, as Karin Rosemblatt
has shown, the relationship between the PCCH and the MEMCH was far from harmo-
nious. Communist women active in the MEMCH collided with progressive feminists
in a battle for control of the organisation. Whereas progressive feminists attempted to
reconcile class- and gender-based demands, communist women always put class first.
Indeed, communists were wary of the very idea of feminism, speaking dismissively of
‘bourgeois feminism’.9 The MEMCH, like most other women’s organisations in Chile,
disappeared shortly after the expansion of suffrage, in 1949. Noticing the withering
away of Chile’s once vibrant women’s movement, Julieta Kirkwood characterised the
period 1953–73 as one of feminist ‘silence’ and blamed left-wing parties, which were
uninterested and incapable of providing a space for women to think and act beyond a
rigid class framework.10
Several historians have built upon and expanded Kirkwood’s feminist critique
of the left. Be it working-class communists clashing with middle-class feminists or
Allende addressing female voters, the story is usually one of mutual incomprehension
and missed connections.11 In her path-breaking work on the mobilisation of women
against Allende, Margaret Power went a step further and forced left-leaning historians
to reckon with the crude fact that most women voted, and many publicly protested,
against the left.12 Her work begs the question: where were the women of the left?
My answer: not where we would have assumed they would be. Even though left-
wing parties did succeed in bringing some women to the streets, women’s greatest
contribution to left-wing politics lay at home. Indeed, left-wing activism depended on
it. As this article shows, the PCCH promoted the ideal of a politically conscious, highly
efficient housewife to enable the activism of their male partners and, to a lesser extent,
raise communist children. Just like the Communist Party of the Soviet Union did after
Joseph Stalin’s revolution, the PCCH sanctioned domesticity while trying to imbue it
with greater public consciousness.13
The following sections stress women as helpmates rather than mothers, partly
because of the sources used and partly because of my own assessment of the state of
the field of women’s studies and women’s history in particular. In the last three decades
or so, the literature has provided a vast and detailed reconstruction of the historical
association of ideas about womanhood and motherhood. Some of the most thought-
provoking concepts regarding the place of women in contemporary times, such as
‘maternalism’ and ‘republican motherhood’, have led the field in that direction.14 What
gets somewhat lost, however, are ideas about complementarity with, and subordination
to, men, which were intrinsic to many of the founding concepts of the field, such as
‘patriarchy’ and ‘gender’.15
The PCCH and women: An overview

For most of its history, the PCCH has endorsed electoral participation, political al-
liances and gradual reforms – a strategy relinquished only during periods of political
persecution. This institutional emphasis has allowed the PCCH to have representatives
in Congress and city councils and, occasionally, to join the cabinet in centre-left or
left-wing government coalitions.
Comparatively, the PCCH was – and still is – quite a successful communist party,
second only to Cuba’s in the region. Its significance as an actor in Chilean politics
dates from the mid- to late 1930s, when it adopted the popular-front strategy to defend
democracy against the threat of fascism and experienced its first noticeable surge
in membership. Starting in the 1940s, and for most of the period under study, the
party’s membership was in the tens of thousands, and its share of the national vote
comprised ten to eighteen per cent of the electorate. The only exceptions to this trend
occurred during 1948–58, when the PCCH was not allowed to compete and operate
openly, and during the 1970–73 Allende administration, when communism reached its
zenith of electoral support and membership. By 1973, the PCCH boasted over 200,000
card-carrying members and received nearly 600,000 votes.16
Male unionised workers in industrial, port and mining areas comprised the party’s
core constituency during the period under study, although there was a clear trend
towards diversification. Women became a valuable asset for every Chilean political
party in 1934 when they acquired the right to vote in municipal elections. There are no
reliable data on the number of female communist members for the 1930s and 1940s,
but the percentage of female communist voters – which can be assessed, because there
were separate ballots for men and women – during these years is far from impressive.
By 1947, after over a decade of efforts to attract women to the polls, the ratio of male
to female communist voters was approximately six to one.17 The 1949 law that gave
women the right to vote in congressional and presidential elections coincided with
a period when the PCCH was outlawed and thus banned from participating openly,
making it even more difficult to have accurate information on the party’s makeup and
electorate for the 1950s.
The PCCH renewed its efforts to appeal to women after recovering full legality
in 1958, challenged in part by the success of the centrist Christian Democratic Party
among working- and middle-class women. The number of female communist voters
grew steadily throughout the 1960s and so did the number of women within the organ-
isation. According to the PCCH’s own statistics, the percentage of female members
went from 26.0 per cent in 1965 to 29.4 per cent in 1969, the last year for which
there are reliable data before the 1973 coup.18 A similar trend toward the inclusion of
women is discernible if we look at the percentage of female members in the Central
Committee: 7.14 per cent in 1958; 11.11 per cent in 1962; 15.71 per cent in 1965; and
15.56 per cent in 1969.19
The PCCH’s 1958 decision to endorse the existence of women-only organisational
units within the party, which catered to women’s concerns and schedules, helps explain
this growth. Female leaders actively participated in recruitment campaigns targeting
women – which tended to coincide with electoral periods – and echoed the party’s offi-
cial line, even though this often meant appealing to women as mothers and wives rather
than autonomous individuals. Somewhat paradoxically, the strategy seems to have con-
tributed to the marginalisation of women within the party as a whole, as some already
functioning mixed-gender units were broken apart in order to create these women-only
units and several communist women were reallocated to staff them. Female leaders
often complained that overseeing the party’s women’s department confined them to
discussing so-called ‘women’s issues’ and further distanced them from the party’s
relevant decision-making bodies. Similarly, some female leaders felt frustrated with
their domestic-oriented peers – a feeling that sometimes led to contempt.20
Although the number of women who joined the PCCH is impressive in itself, we
should not lose sight that women were always a minority within the party (29.4 per
cent in 1969 is the highest percentage for the period) and that they were significantly
underrepresented at every level of leadership in the party’s hierarchy (15.71 per cent in
1965 is the highest percentage for the Central Committee). The many obstacles female
leaders faced are well documented by Yazmı́n Lecourt (lack of understanding from
their partners, difficulties balancing political activism and family duties, and gender
discrimination within the party), and these obstacles also contributed to relegating
thousands of other women to rearguard positions.21
The Communist press and the housewife

The communist press provided an important venue for the PCCH to appeal to, and
deal with, women. The focus here will be in the early years of the party’s official
newspaper El Siglo – published daily from August 1940 to July 1948 – and then
again from October 1952 to September 1973. This newspaper, sold legally throughout
the country, achieved a somewhat stable readership of 20,000–35,000 during its first
epoch. Staffed by about a hundred people, including printing press workers, journalists,
photographers and administrators, El Siglo devoted most of its attention to foreign
affairs, domestic politics, union matters and sport, conceiving of its readership in
traditional male terms. Nevertheless, the newspaper did appeal to women directly by
including a weekly women’s section, and it employed at least a dozen women in
its administrative and journalistic departments. Although a complete discussion of
communist women’s publications lies beyond the scope of this article, it should be
noted that the PCCH spent considerable effort to cater to women’s reading interests
and publish women’s magazines, the most prominent of which were Mirada (1959–
61) and Paloma (1972–73). These magazines discussed topics such as welfare benefits
for workingwomen, the care and education of children, and the joys and sorrows of
married life, alongside politics and current affairs.22
A careful reading of the first issues of El Siglo reveals an originally minor but
growing interest in women and their role as housewives. In its very first issue, published
on August 31 1940, the newspaper included a ‘Letter to the Working Woman’ – an
article written in the form of a letter, probably by a female staff member.23 The
following month the newspaper published so-called ‘letters’ to the ‘peasant woman’
and the ‘professional woman’, trying to reach a diverse female readership defined in
terms of their work outside the house.24 Letters and articles addressed specifically to
housewives only began to appear in October of that year. Soon, however, the housewife
became one of the most important female targets of the newspaper, as can be deducted
from the news published in November and December.25 More importantly, on 22
December 1940, El Siglo published for the first time what became one of its longest-
standing weekly sections, ‘The Woman and the Child’, later known by other, equally
revealing names: ‘The Woman and the Home’, ‘The Woman – The Child – The Home’,
and the like.26 As these names suggest, El Siglo’s women’s section was, in fact, a
women-and-children section, at least until October 1946, when it became two separate
sections: ‘The Woman’ and ‘The Child’. Notwithstanding the greater autonomy gained
by both female and young readers, the women’s section continued to include advice
about how to raise children. In fact, a column titled ‘My child and I’ soon made an
appearance in, and became a regular feature of, the women’s section. The inclusion
of a weekly women’s section was quite an innovation in the publishing tradition of
the PCCH. Bandera Roja (1931–36) and Frente Popular (1936–40), the communist
newspapers published before El Siglo, had nothing resembling one.
El Siglo’s women’s section struggled to transform women into efficient house-
wives and informed mothers. To quote the closing paragraph of a piece published in
June 1942:
The woman cannot forget that the home is a true laboratory, where the characters, the customs, the
health, and, in a word, the lives of the men and women of the future are modelled, and she cannot
forget that the responsibility of a woman in the task of running this laboratory is unlimited. [ . . . ]
She does not need to become a slave of the family, but she does have to be conscious of her duty
and fulfil it in the best possible way.27
As this excerpt suggests, housewives were assigned roles typical of modern mother-
hood, nurturing and educating future generations of citizens – in this case, communist
citizens.
El Siglo intended to politicise housewives and often called them to go beyond the
home into the public sphere. During municipal elections, for example, the women’s
section combined womanly advice with calls to register in the electoral rolls and vote
for the communist candidates. The emphasis on political struggles did not imply a
novel, more egalitarian understanding of domestic arrangements, however. This can be
appreciated in Judit’s ‘Letter to Our Female Readers’, a column published regularly
in the women’s section between January 1944 and June 1946. These columns were
most likely written by Hungarian exile Judit (or Judith) Vadja, wife of famous Jewish
Hungarian architect Tibor Weiner. The couple lived in Chile from 1939 to 1948, when
political hostility towards communists forced them to flee once again. Judit, who
joined the PCCH while in Chile, used her weekly column on a couple of occasions
to distinguish political ‘struggles’ (luchas) from family ‘fights’ (peleas). While the
former were necessary and praiseworthy, the latter were not. Judit explained that if a
woman went out of the house on Election Day to vote for the communist candidate,
she was helping the anti-fascist cause. On the contrary, ‘if you remain at home weeping
for having fought with your compañero because he said the coffee was bad and you
thought it was good – well, then you are doing a stupid thing, you are committing a
crime, a treason’.28
More commonly, the party leadership called on housewives to organise around
issues perceived to fall within the purview of women, such as food consumption and
housing standards. Indeed, the PCCH developed a significant interest in women’s
mobilisation around these issues during the early to mid-1940s, given the soaring
inflation caused by the Second World War. The escalating prices of rent and staple
foods were particularly important for working-class families, given that few of them
owned houses and food and rent accounted for a significant portion of their budget.
And while the PCCH already had a strong influence in labour unions thanks to its
male, working-class constituency, it lacked a say in the incipient social movements
that fell outside the realm of labour and production. El Siglo encouraged women to
protest against rising prices by publishing hundreds of news articles on the matter,
using headlines such as ‘Housewife: [Go] to the Street to Defend Your Children’s
Bread’ and ‘Housewives are at the vanguard of the struggle against the evictions’.29
These calls to action had mixed effects. Although the purpose of these articles was
to make housewives aware of the world that surrounded and affected their daily lives,
and to encourage them to engage in collective action, these articles could also make
women think that the home was their primary area of responsibility and their main
motive for political action.
The calls to action were themselves quite ambiguous. Take the case of milk as
discussed in another of Judit’s ‘Letter to Our Female Readers’, published in June
1944. Noticing the milk shortages and the excessive prices that prevented women from
buying it, Judit asked, echoing Vladimir Lenin: ‘What is to be done?’ The answer lay
in a combination of short-term solutions – to transform condensed milk into regular
milk – and long-term solutions – to join the National Committee to Lower the Cost
of Provisions. The problem is that the piece discussed short-term solutions at much
greater length than long-term ones. Collective action was important, but even more
important was coming up with practical solutions in the kitchen.30
The PCCH’s official mouthpiece came to resemble the commercial press in its
heterogeneity and suitability to different types of readers. Indeed, as time went by, the
newspaper came to focus not only on foreign affairs, domestic politics and union matters
but also on movies and theatrical shows, sport ranging from football to horseracing, and
local news from provinces outside Santiago. It even included an entertainment section
composed of crosswords, quizzes and cartoons. Women were subjects of persistence
interest. El Siglo never stopped publishing calls for working, professional or peasant
women to organise and mobilise, but its most regular feature addressing ‘women’s
issues’ became in practice the fashion, sewing, cooking and parenting advice of the
women’s section. Thus, women were often equated with wives and mothers, conceived
of as supporting rather than leading actors in the struggle to transform society.
Bringing communist men’s wives to the streets

The PCCH tried to build a more inclusive culture in private and public spaces, where
working-class men – again, the party’s main constituency – and their families could
enjoy themselves and defend their rights when needed. However, as the discussion
below illustrates, the communist attempt to develop an inclusive culture of social
leisure and political engagement was thwarted by the strength of the male breadwinner,
female housewife family model, as both an ideology and a social reality. The project
of building an inclusive culture was only partly realised, in no small degree because
the party leadership always had trouble thinking of women as autonomous individuals
and equally worthy activists. To the extent that the PCCH succeeded in bringing
party members with their spouses and children to the streets, it was because families
re-enacted in public the gender roles that structured the domestic sphere.
The PCCH organised many social and political events to appeal to both men and
women. Some of these events took place on special days of the year, such as the anniver-
saries of the party’s foundation, the Russian Revolution and party founder Luis Emilio
Recabarren’s death. Perhaps the most iconic of the family-friendly activities organised
by the PCCH was the annual celebration hosted in O’Higgins Park (formerly known
as Cousiño Park), Chile’s second largest public park, located in downtown Santiago,
which began sometime in the 1960s, inspired by the Fête de l’Humanité, in France, a
festival organised to fund the French communist newspaper L’Humanité. The Chilean
celebration in O’Higgins Park attracted thousands of all ages every year. Communist
members and sympathisers from across Santiago came with their families.31
Smaller celebrations took place throughout the country as well. In the small
southern city of Puerto Natales, for example, the PCCH’s local committee invited
‘workers and their families’ to a literary musical event in its headquarters in 1941 to
commemorate the Russian Revolution and issued the following command in 1943 to
celebrate the anniversary of Recabarren’s death: ‘All the members and their families
must come tomorrow Sunday at ten in the morning to the Party’s headquarters.’32 In
these two excerpts from Puerto Natales’s local communist newspaper, the subjects
alluded by the terms ‘workers’ (los obreros) and ‘members’ (los militantes) were
understood to be men. Yet, the organisers of these events expected to receive not
merely men, but married men with their families. And as the peremptory tone of
the 1943 command suggests, the party sometimes pressured members to fulfil these
expectations.
Other events took place with the sole purpose of bringing together communist
members and their families in a relaxed, joyous atmosphere. Puerto Natales’s Cell Nº 1,
for example, organised several tea parties and barbecues to entertain its loyal members
and welcome new ones, sometimes using these opportunities to collect funds. These
small gatherings around hot beverages and food took place in the organisation’s local
headquarters or in the home of a particularly welcoming communist member, likely
someone who had enough space to host the event and a partner sufficiently willing to
help – an issue that will be discussed more thoroughly below.33 In small, working-class
cities such as Puerto Natales, where the social and political life of workingmen revolved
around specific industries, tea parties and barbecues served the purpose of cementing
camaraderie between communist men while involving their wives and children in the
traditionally male-centred world of politics.
The PCCH sometimes went to great lengths to facilitate the participation of
women in social and political events. A mass meeting that took place in the 1940s
provides a revealing example. The party helped organise a huge anti-fascist festival in
the National Stadium on a beautiful December Sunday in 1942. The organisers put a
special emphasis in bringing families to this open-air event and, thus, in convincing
women to attend. ‘You have missed many festivals because you do not know where to
leave your children,’ a note about the event in the party newspaper El Siglo began. ‘The
Union for Victory is aware of this problem. To make it possible for every anti-fascist
to attend the festival on Sunday at the National Stadium, it will arrange for babies and
little children a BABY BAR [sic].’34 Supervised by twenty female volunteers, the so-
called Baby Bar – a sort of gigantic open-air nursery – included cots and playpens. As
the newspaper boasted after the event, the Baby Bar cared for more than 400 children
younger than one and hundreds of others between the ages of two and five, thus
allowing a large audience of several thousand men and women to attend. Ironically, as
this and other examples suggest, female activists and female volunteers were needed
to bring a greater number of women into the streets.35
The irony is not restricted to the issue of childcare alone. Something similar
happened with regards to cooking. As explained above, gatherings around food and hot
beverages were an important part of communist sociability. Some types of gatherings –
such as the above-mentioned barbecues of Puerto Natales – suggest that men did play
a role in cooking some of these meals, given the gendered division of types of cooking
in Chile, which assigned men a leading role when it came to barbecue meat cooking.
However, women did most of the work in most gatherings. Young female activists, for
example, were in charge of the buffets in the parties organised by the PCCH’s youth
wing, which was sometimes showcased by the communist press to attract a greater
public.36 Only rarely did party documents complain that ‘the use [of young women] in
the buffets is not always fair’.37 Equally telling, an interviewee born in 1950 – when
the party, outlawed, operated underground – remembered that her communist father
volunteered the family’s house for secret meetings and gatherings in the following
terms: ‘People arrived at night, and they all met there. And they spent all the day
[after that night] locked inside the house, and some women prepared lunch.’ When I
asked her more about these women, she explained that both men and women came to
meetings, but that only the women helped her mother (who was not a communist) cook
for all the attendants.38 As the cases analysed in this section suggest, the breadwinner
model underpinned the communist attempt to provide venues and activities for both
men and women, curtailing the possibilities of women to enjoy the benefits of social
life and become fully fledged political activists.
Recruiting communist men’s wives into the party

Communist men were tasked not only with bringing their wives into private and public
events but also with recruiting their wives into the party. This section studies the
PCCH’s curious attempt to expand its female membership by recruiting the wives of
male party members, the challenges this recruitment strategy faced and the peculiar
role some of these women ended up playing within the PCCH.
Starting in the mid-1930s, the PCCH began to pressure its members to recruit their
wives – a task most of them failed to fulfil. According to the party’s understanding
of the matter, the root of the problem lay in the fact that most working-class men
shared the ideal of the male breadwinner and the female housewife. A 1941 report by
party leader Andrés Escobar to the Comintern admitted that the party leadership had
underestimated the potential contribution of women to the revolutionary struggle, but
argued that party members bore most of the responsibility. Chilean men, according to
Escobar, shared the ‘bourgeois prejudice’ that viewed a woman as an ‘inferior being’,
unworthy of the same rights, and who ‘only ought to be a housewife’. ‘Unfortunately,’
Escobar added, ‘part of the communist membership still holds this prejudice and they
do not even organise their own wives and families [politically]. It is understandable
that with such a mentality in our own Party, the attempts to organise women have not
thrived.’39
As the report by Escobar suggests, the issue of whether women should work out-
side the home sparked discussion among Chilean workers. The contours of the debate
within the PCCH can be sketched by looking into pro-communist union bulletins. In
the railroad workers’ El Riel, for example, Manuel Gutiérrez penned a column instruc-
tively titled ‘Should women work outside the home?’ in 1944. Gutiérrez echoed the
party’s official line, arguing that women should work outside the home. According to
him, progressive men everywhere agreed on the matter. Nevertheless, Gutiérrez himself
took a moderate stance on the debate. He criticised the fascist countries for wanting to
force women into the home, but he was careful enough to distance himself from the
‘feminism without obstacles’ of the United States, ‘where women enjoy freedoms that
may seem excessive to us’.40
Gutiérrez’s piece suggests that there is some truth to Escobar’s report, but it bears
noting that the PCCH showed little political will to challenge the domestic arrange-
ments that prevented women from taking more active roles in public affairs. Female
activists interested in recruiting peers and building more equal domestic relationships at
home often faced opposition on the part of the (mostly male) rank-and-file membership
and indifference on the part of the (almost entirely male) leadership. Marta Vergara
and other communist women active in the MEMCH during the late 1930s could not
avoid feeling frustration when communist men prevented their wives from attending
meetings and ‘made an argument out of the “memchismo” of their compañeras’, as
she complained in her 1962 memoirs. According to Vergara, an eccentric middle-
class communist with feminist leanings, many die-hard working-class communists
had mixed feelings about their wives’ activism, whether in the MEMCH or the PCCH.
‘Like any bourgeois, they wanted to keep their wives in the back of the house.’ Ver-
gara argued that the communist leadership rarely intervened in these kinds of issues.
When extramarital affairs or other scandals could tarnish the PCCH’s reputation, party
leaders reacted promptly, but, as Vergara put it, ‘if the problem was just that a jealous

and overbearing husband kept his compañera more or less hostage [inside the house],
no one but us cared’.41
Male communist leaders felt much more pressure to recruit their wives than male
rank-and-file members. Take the case of Vı́ctor Contreras. He met his future wife Marı́a
Aguilera when he was already mayor of Tocopilla, sometime in the late 1930s. The
daughter of an artisan linked to the Conservative Party, Aguilera was a Catholic who,
according to Contreras’s 1981 memoirs, ‘did not have political concerns, besides –
Contreras makes a point of noting – voting for the communists in every election’.
Aguilera’s lack of interest in political activism does not seem to have bothered Contreras
very much personally, but he did feel pressure to register her into the communist
organisation. Female leader Julieta Campusano, for example, insisted that Aguilera
should joined the PCCH and once ventured that she had not yet done it because of
Contreras’s opposition – a potentially damaging accusation. The party was interested
in recruiting as many women as possible, and male leaders were supposed to lead by
example and convince their wives to join. Campusano and the female leaders in charge
of the party’s women’s affairs, for their part, had both personal and political stakes in
the campaign to recruit women. Aguilera tried to become an active party member in
one opportunity – mainly as a favour to her husband – but her lack of real political
commitment, coupled with the demands of communist activism, led her to relinquish
the idea. ‘Marı́a continued to respect the Party, but it was not possible to make her
reconsider and join its ranks.’42
Party president Elı́as Lafertte’s romantic life is a testimony to the difficulty of
finding the ideal life partner and to the fact that, from the revolutionary man’s point of
view, the ideal communist woman was not always the ideal communist wife, and vice
versa. Lafertte had three long-term romantic relationships. His first two relationships
were with women who actively participated in left-wing social and political activities.
Both relationships failed. The communist leader referred to each of these women
– Ilya Gaete and Leonor Rojas – several times in his 1957 memoirs, occasionally
acknowledging their help and personal sacrifices. His unwavering activism and constant
absences from the home seem to have added strain to these relationships. Rojas, in fact,
became tired of her husband’s activism and left him for another man while Lafertte was
in political confinement on Easter Island, causing the communist leader both ‘pain and
shame’. To add insult to injury, Rojas left him for an enemy, ‘but not just a class enemy,
an enemy of convictions or ideology, but a mercenary: he was, in fact, an intelligence
agent’. The leader discussed this mortifying issue, somewhat of a taboo in communist
circles, with these revealing words in his memoirs: ‘Leonor, my compañera of so many
years, of so many miseries, hardships and joys, had not had faith, had not been able to
wait, as other times, for the passing of the heavy and dark clouds of persecution. I’ll
say nothing more about this.’43
Lafertte’s longest relationship was with Laura Dı́az, whom he met outside the
party’s networks and who did not originally share his political ideas. They met in 1930
and were together until 1959, when she died. Dı́az was the only one of these three
women who withstood Lafertte’s long absences and unwavering activism. She joined
the PCCH in 1942, but she was never very active in the organisation. Taking care of
a husband like Lafertte was enough work already. When other communists asked her
what she did in the party, she used to reply: ‘I take care of the President! What more do
you want?’44 Lafertte only mentioned Dı́az twice in his 352-page memoirs, but several
other communists paid tribute to her endurance and resilience. The aforementioned
Vı́ctor Contreras, who lived with the couple in the 1930s, put it in the following terms
in his 1981 memoirs:
I think it is fair to acknowledge the fortitude of Elı́as’s wife. She was a woman who was content with
what she had, who never complained about anything, living always secluded, without the possibility
of having friends. She worked miracles to feed the family, to wash and starch his shirts [ . . . ] to
mend and iron the lustrous black three-piece suits of her compañero, and she always waited up for
him at night, no matter how late he arrived.45
Dı́az might not have been the ideal communist activist, but she was ‘the ideal
compañera’, or partner, as Elena González described her in a women’s magazine
published by the PCCH in 1961, when Lafertte died. González, a much more active
communist woman and soon-to-be Central Committee member, went on to remember
the words Dı́az had told her before dying, in 1959: ‘I think I’m going to die. And
the only thing I regret is that I’m not going to be able to make him his meals and
accompany him to the north in his campaign trips’.46
Communist journalists and party leaders had issued similar statements regarding
Dı́az’s subservient role when she died. A biographical piece on Dı́az published in a
communist magazine, for example, praised the deceased in the following terms: ‘Up
until her death, she never got tired of cooking, of washing don Elı́as’s white shirts, of
sewing their buttons, of taking care of the lawn, of waking up at six thirty in the morning
and making breakfast.’47 Political obituaries do not abound when it comes to women
such as Laura Dı́az. Much more frequent are those devoted to women such as Elena
González, whose main contribution to communism took place outside the home. Yet,
there was an army of women like Dı́az, whose contribution should not be understated.
In the funeral itself, a sobbing Lafertte thanked his wife for all her sacrifices, and
female leader Julieta Campusano assessed the deceased’s political contribution: ‘She
played an important role in the Party’s struggles – a role in the rearguard, because she
managed to create a happy environment in the president’s home that made his political
work easier.’48
Communist men’s wives’ grievances

Thus far, I have analysed how the PCCH addressed women and how it discussed
and understood their role, mostly during the 1930s and 1940s. This section focuses
on women’s experiences, using first-hand accounts. These sources allow one to gain
insight into the feelings of neglect experienced by many wives of communist men,
highlighting marital conflicts about time spent at home, money management and
distribution of household chores. These issues are exemplified in accounts by three
wives of communist cadres – admittedly, a small sample – from later decades, signalling
the historical endurance of unequal marital arrangements: Fresia Gravano, who married
in 1954 and had four children with her husband before his death in 1966; Alicia
(surname unknown), who married c.1968 and had two children with her husband by
the time she wrote the letter that will be examined below; and Mathilde del Canto,
who married in 1971 and had two children with her husband before his abduction and
disappearance in 1975.
Fresia Gravano won third prize in a short autobiography contest called ‘Why am
I a communist?’ organised for the fiftieth anniversary of the PCCH in 1972, and her
piece was published in El Siglo. It discussed at great length her childhood in the iconic
nitrate-mining town of Marı́a Elena, her father’s political imprisonment in Pisagua
in the late 1940s and the family’s subsequent resettlement in Antofagasta. Gravano
devoted less space to her own family life, but she had good words for her late husband
Floridor Parra, a communist cadre she met in Antofagasta who had also suffered
imprisonment in Pisagua. ‘What can I say about him? He made me a better person. His
abnegation, self-sacrifice, and selflessness were incredible. I have committed myself
to fight for the cause to which he gave his life, which is also mine and my children’s.’49
Gravano stayed true to her commitment. She remained active even after the 1973
coup and suffered political imprisonment in the early 1980s, just like her father and her
husband in the late 1940s. This prompted her to have an interview with a psychologist
linked to the human rights movement in 1982 where she expanded on her life and
feelings. In the 2000s, she agreed to make the transcripts of this interview public as a
way to share her testimony of struggle and suffering, determined to help society not
forget the atrocities of the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship. Gravano’s 1982 interview
is a fascinating source when read in dialogue with her 1972 autobiographical piece.
Gravano’s ideas about left-wing politics and about her late husband had not changed
much, but the format of the interview gave her more room to express her feelings.
When the psychologist asked her about her marriage, Gravano gave a more nuanced
response:
My marital life was good in terms of our coexistence because we understood each other and I could
go out and participate, but it was very problematic and distressing because my husband was fully
devoted to this business [of politics] and I was, practically speaking, the man and the woman of the
house.50
Gravano expanded then on her efforts to raise her children, take care of the house and
earn some extra money at the same time. She explained that her husband’s idealism and
generosity toward his comrades exacerbated the family’s precarious financial situation.
He often lent money he knew would not be repaid. ‘I took issue with that behaviour
and quarrelled with him.’ The availability of these different sources helps unravel some
of the complexities of the intersection of public discourse and personal subjectivity.
Gravano’s 1982 interview suggests that her husband’s abnegation, self-sacrifice and
selflessness, which she praised in her 1972 piece, were also the cause of marital
friction.51
Twenty-two-year-old Alicia vented her own frustrations in a letter to the editors of
the Young Communists’ magazine Ramona in May 1973. She had been married for five
years and had two children with a young communist cadre from Concepción, in south
Chile. Unlike Fresia Gravano, Alicia was a communist ‘sympathiser’, not an active
party member. She shared her husband’s political ideas and voted for the communists,
she explained in her letter, ‘but first, for me, comes my home, husband, and daughters,
whom I adore’. During the couple’s five years of marriage, her husband had already
given her hints that politics, not family, was his priority. ‘[H]e has gone to meetings,
seminars, congresses, etc., and his little daughters and I have been pushed aside. At
first, I saw no problem with him having [political] ideas, but he is more concerned for
the Jota [Communist Youth] and the PC[CH] than for his home.’52
Alicia’s husband’s absences from home grew longer as he rose in the organisation’s
hierarchy. ‘That’s the problem I have. I’m always alone, since he is never at home.
First it was days, then weeks, now months.’ When the husband told her that he now
had to leave the country for an entire year in order to undergo political training abroad,
the couple had a huge fight. She asked him to set his priorities straight: ‘enraged, I told
him to choose either the trip or his home, wife, and daughters’. He chose the former.
‘Now I’m so alone, so sad, because he left and left me [here]. My marriage has failed.
I’m considering letting him free, so he can go on pursuing his ideals once he comes
back and not be burdened by me.’53
Like Alicia, Mathilde Del Canto was the non-communist wife of a young commu-
nist cadre, Francisco González. Del Canto was already a widow and a mother of two
when she began dating González, sometime in the 1960s. When they discussed getting
married, in 1971, González asked her to quit her job as a nurse assistant, which had
provided the financial means to support her two children, and instead devote herself to
the home. In return, he promised to take good care of Del Canto and her children. Del
Canto accepted. Unfortunately, González had trouble keeping his promise. His relent-
less commitment to politics affected the family’s economic and emotional well-being.
He eventually quit his job as a construction worker and became a party functionary to
help the Allende government, earning a meagre salary.
Del Canto explained in a 2010 oral history interview: ‘We had a very bad economic
situation. We were dependent on his salary [ . . . ] which back then was the salary he
earned as a [party] functionary, because he devoted himself twenty-four hours a day
to the party and did not have time to work in anything else.’ To make matters worse,
González insisted that Del Canto should not work, which she resented. Del Canto spent
her days at home, feeling secluded. ‘He used to tell me to hold on, that he was going
to work [in something else]. He was not lazy. He was a hardworking person. But for
working in politics he disregarded the family’s material well-being. [ . . . ] So, there
was a conflict between us.’54
Conclusion
In a chapter of his memoirs devoted to his loyal communist wife, tellingly titled ‘Marı́a,
Self-Sacrificing Marı́a’, party leader César Godoy Urrutia described her by using the
odd term ‘mujer orquesta’, a ‘one-woman band’ who does everything around the house:
‘She cooks, cleans, irons, cuts and sews; she knows about electricity, carpentry, and a
lot about mechanics.’ When closing the chapter, Godoy Urrutia thanked his long-time
partner while excusing himself:
A politician or revolutionary is a difficult case when it comes to marital and domestic life. You can
rarely count on him. As a rule, he is incompetent in the performance of household chores – a lousy
team member. He often brings guests to the house, but when it’s time to do the dishes, he is nowhere
to be found.55
As this article has argued, the experience of Godoy Urrutia and his self-sacrificing
wife was not only common among left-leaning couples but also crucial to the success
of communism in twentieth-century Chile. Even though Marı́a was herself a party
member, the party’s interest lay primarily in Godoy Urrutia’s career as a professional
revolutionary, which required her to cook, clean, iron, cut and sew for the family. To
facilitate the political work of men such as Godoy Urrutia, the PCCH promoted the idea
of politically committed families and assigned different roles for each family member,
the lion’s share of household responsibilities falling within the realm of women. Men
such as Godoy Urrutia, who defined their identity in relation to public life, found the
arrangement convenient.
The PCCH’s discourse on women discussed herein could be dubbed ‘traditional’
or ‘conservative’, since it drew upon well-established ideas of women as wives and
mothers and assigned them important roles as nurturers, caretakers and home managers.
Nevertheless, these oft-used concepts tends to efface what was perhaps the most
important role ascribed to these women: their role as helpmates. The literature has
already noticed the surprisingly traditional ideas of gender and family life promoted
by communism across the world – especially after Joseph Stalin rose to power in the
Soviet Union – but it has not paid enough attention to the instrumental deployment
of such ideas. As I have attempted to show, twentieth-century Chilean communism
did not merely ‘reproduce’ the gender conventions of its time and place, but actually
founded a powerful political movement based partly on such conventions.
Against self-serving political tropes and historical analyses that focus on class-
conscious female workers and prominent female activists, this article has paid attention
and discussed the fate of scores of women who spent most of their time at home and
whose main contribution to communism was cooking, cleaning, ironing, cutting and
sewing for their families. By imbuing men with a strong sense of public mission and by
demanding that their wives take care of the household, communism strengthened the
gendered public-private divide and produced quite a few unequal partnerships among
the working class.
Notes
1. Interview with Ana González by Marı́a Eugenia Camus, Santiago, Chile, 16 April 2009, Proyecto 100
Entrevistas, Centro de Documentación del Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos.
2. On left-wing parties, the labour movement and the enlargement of the Chilean political sphere, see Alan
Angell, Politics and the Labour Movement in Chile (London: Oxford University Press, 1972); Thomas
Klubock, Contested Communities: Class, Gender, and Politics in Chile’s El Teniente Copper Mine, 1904–
1951 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998); Tomás Moulian, La forja de ilusiones: El sistema de partidos,
1932–1973 (Santiago: Flacso, 1993); Jody Pavilack, Mining for the Nation: The Politics of Chile’s Coal
Communities from the Popular Front to the Cold War (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press,
2011); Karin Rosemblatt, Gendered Compromises: Political Cultures and the State in Chile, 1920–1950
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Arturo Valenzuela, ‘Chile: Origins, Consolidation,
and Breakdown of a Democratic Regime’, in Larry Diamond, Juan Linz and Seymour Lipset (eds),
Democracy in Developing Countries, Vol. 4: Latin America (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1989); and Peter
Winn, Weavers of the Revolution: The Yarur Workers and Chile’s Road to Socialism (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1986).
3. For an overview of this literature, see Rolando Álvarez, ‘Historias, historiografı́a y memorias del comunismo
chileno en la primera década del siglo XXI: Un ensayo bibliográfico’, in Viviana Bravo (ed.), ¡Con la razón
y la fuerza, venceremos!: La rebelión popular y la subjetividad comunista en los ‘80 (Santiago: Ariadna,
2010), pp. 11–53; Jorge Rojas, ‘Historia, historiadores y comunistas chilenos’, in Manuel Loyola and
Jorge Rojas (eds), Por un rojo amanecer: Hacia una historia de los comunistas chilenos (Santiago, 2000),
pp. 1–79.
4. Carolina Fernández-Niño, ‘La muchacha se incorpora a la lucha popular: La militancia femenina: Una
aproximación a la cultura polı́tica del Partido Comunista de Chile: 1965–1973’ (unpublished Bachelor’s
thesis, Universidad Santiago de Chile, 2009); Carolina Fernández-Niño, ‘“Y tú, mujer, junto al trabajador”:
La militancia femenina en el Partido Comunista de Chile’, Izquierdas 3/2 (2009), n.p.; Yazmı́n Lecourt,
‘Relaciones de género y liderazgo de mujeres dentro del Partido Comunista de Chile’ (unpublished Master’s

thesis, Universidad de Chile, 2005); Jocelyn Reyes, ‘“Luchamos por la transformación revolucionaria de
la sociedad y debemos actuar con una ética también revolucionaria en la vida privada”: Discursos polı́ticos
enunciados por el Partido Comunista hacia las mujeres y sus roles de género (1969–1973)’ (unpublished
Bachelor’s thesis, Universidad Academia de Humanismo Cristiano, 2011); Claudia Rojas, ‘¿Mujeres co-
munistas o comunistas mujeres? Segunda mitad siglo XX’, in Olga Ulianova, Manuel Loyola and Rolando
Álvarez (eds), 1912–2012: El siglo de los comunistas chilenos (Santiago: Instituto de Estudios Avanzados,
2012), pp. 335–56; Karin Rosemblatt, ‘Women and the Chilean Communist Party’ (unpublished Master’s
thesis, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1990). On a later period, see Samantha Avendaño, ‘La partici-
pación de la mujer dentro del Frente Patriótico Manuel Rodrı́guez: 1983–1990’ (unpublished Bachelor’s
thesis, Universidad Academia de Humanismo Cristiano, 2015); Javiera Robles, ‘“Las rodriguistas”: La
mujer militante en la prensa del Frente Patriótico Manuel Rodrı́guez (1983–1988)’, Revista Eletrônica da
ANPHLAC 18 (2015), pp. 5–22; Javiera Robles, ‘Memorias de la clandestinidad: Relatos de la militancia
femenina del Frente Patriótico Manuel Rodrı́guez’, Nomadı́as. Incursiones feministas 19 (2015), pp. 85–
103; and Cherie Zalaquett, Chilenas en armas: Testimonios e historias de mujeres militares y guerrilleras
subversivas (Santiago: Catalonia, 2009), pp. 175–267.
5. For example, Reyes, ‘Luchamos por la transformación revolucionaria’ and Lecourt, ‘Relaciones de género’,
pp. 95–138; see also Rojas, ‘Historia, historiadores y comunistas chilenos’, pp. 49–53.
6. Especially Reyes, ‘Luchamos por la transformación revolucionaria’. On women and political rhetoric in
Chile more generally, see Gwinn Thomas, Contesting Legitimacy in Chile: Family Ideals, Citizenship, and
Political Struggle, 1970–1990 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011).
7. For example, Fernández-Niño, ‘La muchacha se incorpora a la lucha popular’; Lecourt, ‘Relaciones de
género y liderazgo de mujeres’ and Rojas, ‘¿Mujeres comunistas o comunistas mujeres?’.
8. Edda Gaviola, Queremos votar en las próximas elecciones: Historia del movimiento sufragista chileno,
1913–1952 (Santiago: Lom, 2007); Julieta Kirkwood, Ser polı́tica en Chile: Las feministas y los partidos
(Santiago: Flacso, 1986); Marı́a Angélica Illanes, Nuestra historia violeta. Feminismo social y vidas de
mujeres en el siglo XX: Una revolución permanente (Santiago: Lom, 2012).
9. Rosemblatt, Gendered Compromises, pp. 95–122, 231–52. On the idea of ‘bourgeois feminism’, see
Marilyn Boxer, ‘Rethinking the Socialist Construction and International Career of the Concept “Bourgeois
Feminism”’, American Historical Review 112 (2007), pp. 131–58.
10. Kirkwood, Ser polı́tica en Chile. For an engagement with, and a critique of, Kirkwood’s argument, see
Rosemblatt, ‘Women and the Chilean Communist Party’.
11. For example, Elizabeth Quay Hutchison, Labors Appropriate to Their Sex: Gender, Labor, and Politics in
Urban Chile, 1900–1930 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001); Jadwiga Pieper Mooney, The Politics
of Motherhood: Maternity and Women’s Rights in Twentieth-Century Chile (Pittsburgh: University of
Pittsburgh Press, 2009); Rosemblatt, Gendered Compromises; and Heidi Tinsman, Partners in Conflict:
The Politics of Gender, Sexuality, and Labor in the Chilean Agrarian Reform, 1950–1973 (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2002).
12. Margaret Power, Right-Wing Women in Chile: Feminine Power and the Struggle against Allende, 1964–1973
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002).
13. For example, Rebecca Neary, ‘Mothering Socialist Society: The Wife-Activists’ Movement and the Soviet
Culture of Daily Life, 1934–41’, Russian Review 58 (1999), pp. 386–412; David Hoffmann, Stalinist
Values: The Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity, 1917–1941 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003),
pp. 88–117; and Wendy Goldman, Women, the State, and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life,
1917–1936 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
14. On republican motherhood and republican womanhood more generally, see Linda Kerber, ‘The Republican
Mother: Women and the Enlightenment – An American Perspective’, American Quarterly 28 (1976),
pp. 187–205 and Rosemarie Zagari, ‘Morals, Manners, and the Republican Mother’, American Quarterly
44 (1992), pp. 192–215. On maternalism, see Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, ‘Womanly Duties: Maternalist
Politics and the Origins of Welfare States in France, Germany, Great Britain, and the United Sates, 1880–
1920’, American Historical Review 95 (1990), pp. 1076–108; and Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and
Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1992).
15. On patriarchy, see Kate Millet, Sexual Politics (New York: Doubleday, 1970); Gerda Lerner, The Creation
of Patriarchy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); and Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract
(Cambridge: Polity, 1988). On gender, see Joan Scott, ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis’,
American Historical Review 91 (1986), pp. 1053–75; and Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and
the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).

16. For canonical studies of the PCCH and detailed analyses of its membership, see Rolando Álvarez, Arriba
los pobres del mundo. Cultura e identidad polı́tica del Partido Comunista de Chile entre democracia y
dictadura, 1965–1990 (Santiago: Lom, 2011); Andrew Barnard, ‘The Chilean Communist Party, 1922–
1947’ (unpublished dissertation thesis, University of London, 1977); and Carmelo Furci, The Chilean
Communist Party and the Road to Socialism (London: Zed, 1984).
17. Dirección General de Estadı́stica de Chile, Polı́tica, administración y justicia: Año 1947 (Santiago, 1949),
pp. 2–21.
18. Partido Comunista de Chile, Las mujeres en la lucha por el progreso y la felicidad. Documentos del
XIII Congreso Nacional del Partido Comunista de Chile (Santiago: Imprenta Horizonte, 1965), p. 22;
Luis Corvalán, El poder popular, única alternativa patriótica y revolucionaria: Informe al XIV Congreso
Nacional del Partido (Santiago: Imprenta Horizonte, 1969), p. 14.
19. I have derived these data based on the lists of Central Committee members (both regular and alternates)
published in Iván Ljubetic, El Partido Comunista de Chile: Un joven combatiente de más de cien años
(Santiago: Horizontes, 2014), vol. 1: pp. 366, 390–1; vol. 2: pp. 423–4, 460.
20. On the promotion and discussion of women’s only organisational units, see Virginia González, ‘Las células
femeninas’, Principios 73 (September 1960), pp. 29–32; Olga Saavedra, ‘El Partido al hogar’, Principios
88 (January–February 1962), pp. 30–2; Olga Saavedra, ‘Hacia nuevos métodos en el trabajo femenino’,
Principios 121 (September–October 1967), pp. 82–9; Elena Pedraza, ‘El aporte de las mujeres al triunfo
de marzo’, Principios 150 (March–April 1973), pp. 27–35.
21. Lecourt, ‘Relaciones de género’. For a pioneering study of the difficult experience of women in politics in
the region, see Elsa Chaney, Supermadre: Women in Politics in Latin America (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1979).
22. For a historical overview of magazines and women’s magazines in Chile, see Claudia Montero, Y también
hicieron periódicos. Cien años de prensa de mujeres en Chile 1850–1950 (Santiago: Hueders, 2018) and
Giselle Munizaga, Revistas y espacio comunicativo (Santiago: Ceneca, 1984). For an analysis of Paloma
(1972–73) as a feminist magazine, see Illanes, Nuestra historia violeta, pp. 91–104.
23. ‘Carta a la mujer obrera’, El Siglo 31 August 1940, p. 3.
24. ‘Carta a la mujer campesina’, El Siglo 17 September 1940, p. 5; ‘Carta a la mujer profesional’, El Siglo 23
September 1940, p. 5.
25. For example, ‘Llamamiento a la mujer’, El Siglo 14 October 1940, p. 4; ‘Dueñas de casa responden a
nuestra campaña pro abaratamiento de consumos’, El Siglo 15 October 1940, p. 7; ‘A las dueñas de casa’,
El Siglo 24 October 1940, p. 7; ‘¡A las dueñas de casa!’, El Siglo 2 November 1940, p. 8; ‘Dueña de casa
denuncia abusos de industriales de panaderı́a’, El Siglo 19 November 1940, p. 6; ‘Dueñas de casa de Barrio
Independencia realizarán un comicio esta noche para pedir abaratamiento de subsistencias’, El Siglo 13
December 1940, p. 7; ‘Dueñas de casa están decididas a detener el complot de la vida cara’, El Siglo 20
December 1940, p. 6; ‘Dueñas de casa van a la vanguardia en la lucha contra los lanzamientos’, El Siglo
25 December 1940, p. 6; ‘Activa labor despliega comité de dueñas de casa de la 8ª comuna’, El Siglo 29
December 1940, p. 7.
26. ‘La mujer y el niño’, El Siglo 22 December 1940, p. 4.
27. ‘Sencillos cuidados de belleza’, El Siglo 28 June 1942, p. 4. The headline does not refer to the content of
the column because the editors made a mistake. The piece quoted above should have been published under
the heading ‘Consejos para la mujer’.
28. ‘Carta a nuestras lectoras’, El Siglo 2 April 1944, p. 4; see also ‘Carta a nuestras lectoras’, El Siglo 15 April
1945, p. 4. I chose never to translate the terms compañero and compañera when quoting from a source,
even though the terms’ multiple meanings may sometimes lead to confusion. Ordinary people used these
terms to refer to their co-workers and working-class peers and sometimes also to their romantic partners.
Chilean communists used them in these two senses quite often, and in addition, they used them to refer
to other communists as well, so much so that compañero and compañera ended up virtually replacing the
term camarada, or comrade.
29. ‘Dueña de casa: A la calle a defender el pan para tus hijos’, El Siglo 21 July 1943, p. 1; ‘Dueñas de casa
van a la vanguardia en la lucha contra los lanzamientos’, El Siglo 25 December 1940, p. 6.
30. ‘Carta a nuestras lectoras’, El Siglo 4 June 1944, p. 4.
31. For example, Luis Corvalán, De lo vivido y lo peleado: Memorias (Santiago: Lom, 2007), p. 90.
32. ‘Acto literario musical en Casa América’, Adelante 7 November 1941, p. 6; ‘Advertencia a los militantes
del Partido Comunista’, Adelante 12 December 1943, p. 3.
33. For example, ‘Un té familiar’, Adelante 29 August 1942, p. 2; ‘Asado al palo’, Adelante 11 March 1944,
p. 2; ‘Asado al palo’, Adelante 12 November 1944, p. 1; ‘Asado al palo realiza la Célula Nº 1 el domingo

22 del mes en curso’, Adelante 18 December 1946, p. 3; and ‘Té danzante’, Adelante 16 August 1947, p.
2.
34. ‘Baby Bar’, El Siglo 3 December 1942, p. 3.
35. ‘Un ejemplo de organización: El Baby Bar’, El Siglo 8 December 1942, p. 3. For a similar case, see
‘Guarderı́a de niños habrá en el E. Nacional en el Congreso CTCH’, El Siglo 11 December 1946, p. 4.
Unsurprisingly, the expansion of childcare for working women – back then, the legislation demanded the
availability of crèches only in industrial factories where fifty or more adult women worked – would be one
of the signature demands of the left concerning ‘women’s issues’, though it would not be achieved until
the 1960s.
36. For example, ‘Con un gran festival despiden el año los militantes de la Juventud Comunista’, Frente Popular
31 December 1938, p. 5 and ‘Mañana se llevará a cabo gran baile en San Martı́n 841, a las 9.30 horas’,
Frente Popular 15 March 1940.
37. Vı́ctor Guerrero, ¡Por una Juventud Comunista de masas! (Santiago: Juventud, 1941), p. 17.
38. Interview with Graciela by the author, Santiago, 11 February 2014.
39. ‘Informe de Andrés Escobar al Comité Ejecutivo de Komintern, Moscú’, in Olga Ulianova and Alfredo
Riquelme (eds), Chile en los archivos soviéticos, 1922–1991, Vol. 3: Komintern y Chile, 1935–1941
(Santiago: de la Dibam, 2017), p. 727.
40. Manuel Gutiérrez, ‘¿Debe trabajar la mujer fuera del hogar?’, El Riel 48 (May 1944), p. 14.
41. Marta Vergara, Memorias de una mujer irreverente (1962; repr. Santiago: Nacional Gabriela Mistral, 1974),
p. 179.
42. Vı́ctor Contreras, Campesino y proletario (Moscow: Agencia de Prensa Nóvosti, 1981), pp. 43–5.
43. Elı́as Lafertte, Vida de un comunista (páginas autobiográficas) (1957; repr. Santiago, 1961), pp. 217–8.
44. ‘La compañera de Lafertte’, Vistazo 10 November 1959, p. 4.
45. Contreras, Campesino y proletario, pp. 65–6.
46. ‘Antes que la historia lo juzgó el pueblo’, Mirada 1 March 1961, pp. 12–13.
47. ‘La compañera de Lafertte’, Vistazo 10 November 1959, p. 4.
48. ‘30 años de amor junto a Lafertte’, Mirada 18 November 1959, p. 15.
49. Fresia Gravano, ‘Jugábamos a imitar los discursos de los dirigentes’, El Siglo 23 January 1972, p. 7
revista.
50. Fresia Gravano, ‘Testimonio ex-detenida’, August 1982, in Fondo Testimonios, Fundación de Ayuda Social
de las Iglesias Cristianas.
51. Gravano, ‘Testimonio ex-detenida’.
52. ‘La polı́tica y el amor’, Ramona 81 (15 May 1973), p. 35. For other letters that touched upon similar
issues, see ‘Esposa que sufre y marido que no comparte’, Ramona 48 (26 September 1972), pp. 38–9 and
‘Indiferencia con matrimonio, guagua y polı́tica’, Ramona 87 (26 June 1973), pp. 34–5.
53. ‘La polı́tica y el amor’, Ramona 81 (15 May 1973), p. 35.
54. Interview with Mathilde del Canto, Santiago, 20 May 2010, Colección Archivo Oral de Villa Grimaldi,
Corporación Parque por la Paz Villa Grimaldi.
55. César Godoy, Vida de un agitador (Sinaloa: Universidad Autónoma de Sinaloa, 1983), pp. 99–102.

The Rearguard of The Vanguard

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Gender & History ISSN 0953-5233

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