Urban Pioneers: The Role of Women in The Local Government of Santiago, Chile, 1935-1946

Urban Pioneers: The Role of Women
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in the Local Government of Santiago, Chile,
1935–1946
Richard J. Walter
Introduction
When Socialist Ricardo Lagos assumed the presidency of Chile in January 2000,
he named five women to his 16-member cabinet. While these five appoint-
ments were primarily to ministries that dealt with “women’s issues” such as
education and health care, he also named Christian Democrat Soledad Alvear
to the prestigious post of minister of foreign affairs.1 Two months later, he also
appointed lawyer Patricia Carrasco as a kind of “super mayor” (alcalde mayor) to
oversee social development in the largely urban province of Santiago.2 Soon
thereafter, former first lady Marta Larraechea de Frei, the wife of ex-president
Eduardo Frei Jr. (1994 – 2000), announced that she would run for the office of
mayor of Santiago.3 At the same time, Gladys Marín Millie served as the head
of the Communist Party and had been a first-round presidential candidate her-
self in 1999.4 Countless other women occupied important positions through-
I would like to thank my colleagues at Washington University, Lisa Baldez and Andrea
Friedman, along with the anonymous reviewers of the HAHR and editor Mary Kay Vaughn
for their very helpful comments in the preparation of this article.
1. El Mercurio (Santiago), 29 Jan. 2000, pp. A1 and C2.
2. El Mercurio, 14 Mar. 2000, p. 1.
3. The principal concern among the coalition that supported Larrachea’s candidacy
when it was announced was that she would be defeated by her most likely main opponent,
Conservative Joaquín Lavín, who had narrowly lost to Lagos in the national election. This
would leave the president in the awkward position of having to collaborate with his leading
rival in the governance of the nation’s capital —which, indeed, is exactly what happened.
4. Marín received only a little more than 3% of the vote in the first round of balloting
in 1999. While there is some debate over the matter, that 3% appeared to go primarily to
Lagos in the second round, giving him his narrow margin of victory over Lavín. El
Mercurio, 10 Feb. 2000, p. C2.
Hispanic American Historical Review 84:4

Copyright 2004 by Duke University Press
662 HAHR / November / Walter
out the nation’s local and national administrations. In January 2002, Lagos
named Michelle Bachelet as his minister of defense—the first woman to assume
that post in Latin America — making her, along with Alvear, a potential presi-
dential candidate for 2006.5
The prominence of women in Chilean political life reflects, in large part,
their electoral influence. In 1949 Chilean women achieved the right to vote in
national elections, and they have been crucial in both right- and left-wing cam-
paigns (although more the former than the latter) ever since. Half a million
more women than men voted in the 2000 presidential election, and it was in-
cumbent upon both major candidates to make special appeals to their female
constituencies.6 In the democratic transition following the dictatorship of
Augusto Pinochet (1973 –1990), all political parties have paid increasing atten-
tion to women’s issues and to women’s participation in the political arena.7
Chilean women have been important actors at the local level as well. Legisla-
tion enacted in 1934 granted them the right to vote in municipal elections, and
they were also allowed to run for local administrative positions starting in
1935. From that time forward, women made their presence felt in various mu-
nicipal governments, serving most commonly as elected members of city coun-
cils or, on occasion, appointed or elected as mayors of several major Chilean
cities.8
There is a recent and growing literature on the role of women in Chilean
national life in general, and in the political sphere in particular.9 While much
5. New York Times, 4 Jan. 2003, p. 7.

6. In the second round of the presidential election, there were 3,871,181 female voters
and 3,390,770 male voters. The gender gap was not particularly significant, with Lavín
receiving a little better than 51% of the women’s vote and Lagos, running in coalition with
the Christian Democrats (who historically, along with the Conservatives, had done well
with women voters, while the Socialists generally had not) receiving 49%. El Mercurio, 17
Jan. 2000, p. A11.
7. Lisa Baldez, “Coalition Politics and the Limits of State Feminism in Chile,” Women
and Politics 22, no. 4 (2001): 1– 28.
8. For more on the granting of suffrage to women in the Southern Cone, see
Asunción Lavrín, Women, Feminism, and Social Change in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay,
1890 –1940 (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1995), esp. chaps. 8 –10; and Lavrín,
“Suffrage in South America: Arguing a Difficult Case,” in Suffrage and Beyond: International
Feminist Perspectives, ed. Caroline Daley and Melanie Nolan ( New York: New York Univ.
Press, 1994), 184 – 209.
9. See, for example, Lisa Baldez, Why Women Protest: Women’s Movements in Chile
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002); Elizabeth Quay Hutchison, Labors Appropriate
to Their Sex: Gender, Labor, and Politics in Urban Chile, 1900 –1930 (Durham: Duke Univ.
Press, 2001); Thomas Miller Klubock, Contested Communities: Class, Gender, and Politics in
The Role of Women in the Local Government of Santiago 663
of this literature examines women’s suffrage and political role at the local and
national levels, no one has yet studied female elected officials’ actual perfor-
mance in office.10 I aim to fill this gap by examining women’s initial participa-
tion both as voters and as city council members and administrators in Santiago,
the nation’s capital and largest city. In the process, I will address particular
questions with larger implications.
What were the constraints and challenges that women faced in this form
of political participation — not just as voters, but as elected officials? On the
one hand, as the first women to participate in municipal government — in a
sense, as “urban pioneers” for their gender—they faced a more intense scrutiny
than did their male colleagues in order to prove their ability to function effec-
tively in a highly competitive and partisan arena. While it was rarely stated
openly, undoubtedly many skeptics believed that women would not be up to
the task. On the other hand, some argued that the presence of women in
municipal government would mean sweeping change. Repeating a familiar
trope of Southern Cone feminism, this camp alleged that women’s innate
virtue (especially as wives and mothers) would bring a badly needed morality to
city governments notably lacking in this regard.11 Moreover, as Margaret
Chile’s El Teniente Copper Mine, 1904 –1951 (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1998); Julieta
Kirkwood, Ser política en Chile: Los nudos de la sabiduría feminista, 2nd ed. (Santiago: Cuarto
Propio, 1990); Margaret Power, Right-Wing Women in Chile: Feminine Power and the Struggle
against Allende, 1964 –1973 (State College: Penn State Univ. Press, 2002); Karin Alejandra
Rosemblatt, Gendered Compromises: Political Cultures and the State in Chile, 1920 –1950
(Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2000); and the articles on women in Chile in
the August-November 2001 issue of the Hispanic American Historical Review 81, nos. 3 – 4:
493 – 619.
10. A study that provides considerable information on how women received the vote
in Chile and that examines in some detail the impact of the female vote in municipal
elections from 1935 to 1947 is Erika Maza Valenzuela, “Catholicism, Anticlericalism, and
the Quest for Women’s Suffrage in Chile,” Working Paper no. 214 (University of Notre
Dame: The Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies, Dec. 1995). However, this
work does not discuss how women performed in municipal office during this period.
11. As Lavrín has observed, “Southern Cone feminists extended women’s role at home
to society at large and used motherhood as the path to active participation in public life
throughout the late 1930s. . . . The ‘innate female qualities’ . . . were called forward to
serve the general cause of social reform and to validate women’s presence in politics. Their
presumed ‘higher sensitivity’ to other feelings and their higher sense of moral duty were
the bases for the claim to a place in the sun. Women would be the ones to eradicate vice,
rectify injustice, and create a more equitable society in the Southern Cone.” Lavrín,
Women, 48. Elsa M. Chaney noted that in the 1960s in Chile and Peru, “The female official
often sees herself as a kind of supermadre in the large casa of the municipality and even the
Power has argued, Chile’s male-dominated political parties allowed the exten-
sion of voting and office-holding rights to women at the local level with the
understanding that the municipality was “an extension of the female domestic
sphere [that] . . . primarily dealt with local neighborhood issues . . . [and] did
not violate a woman’s primary role as wife and mother.”12 To what extent were
Santiago’s first female officeholders able to transcend these expectations and
implied limitations in order to address issues of broader concern? Second, how
did their male colleagues react to the presence of women in offices and institu-
tions that previously had been their exclusive preserve? Moreover, what was
the relationship between the changing role of women at the local level and
Chile’s increasingly polarized, complex, and male-dominated political party
system in the late 1930s and early 1940s? Third, what does this experience
reveal about the general workings of municipal government in Santiago at this
time (a subject that has received little attention to date)? Were women able to
effect any significant changes in a local administration that was often seen as
inefficient, inept, and ineffectual?
Finally, while Chile was not among the first nations in Latin America to
grant suffrage to women in national elections, it was among the first to open up
educational opportunities for women and to produce a substantial group of
middle-class professional women who pushed for equal rights and improved
conditions for their gender from the late nineteenth century on.13 Chilean
women were the first in the Southern Cone to win the right to vote and to
serve in municipal office, and in 1939 (as will be seen) Santiago had the first
female mayor of any Latin American capital. Therefore, examining women’s
role in Santiago’s municipal administration during the first decade of local elec-
toral participation provides a point of comparison for others studying similar
phenomena in Latin America and elsewhere —where, by the latter decades of
the twentieth century, women were found in increasing numbers on municipal
councils and in the mayoral offices of major cities.
nation, where she views her work as differing only in magnitude from the nurturing and
emotional tasks women perform for husband and family.” Elsa M. Chaney, “Women in
Latin American Politics: The Case of Peru and Chile,” in Female and Male in Latin America:
Essays, ed. Ann Pescatello (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1973), 104.
12. Power, Right-Wing Women, 51.
13. See Chaney, “Women in Latin American Politics,” 107 – 9.
Background
The struggle to achieve rights for women in Chile was, as in most countries, a
long and difficult one. It began in earnest in the second half of the nineteenth
century with the establishment of organizations and periodicals that advocated
equal access to education for women, equal legal footing with men, and the
extension of suffrage. The movement gathered steam in the early twentieth
century, with much of the impetus coming from upper-class women’s groups
associated with the charitable efforts of the Catholic Church and particularly
concerned with social ills such as prostitution, alcoholism, child abandonment,
and infant mortality. In 1919 Amanda Labarca, a member of the anticlerical
Radical Party, created the National Council of Women (Consejo Nacional de
Mujeres) as a platform to push for women’s rights independent of conservative
and church influence. She also was married to party leader Guillermo Labarca
Hubertson, who would serve as Santiago’s alcalde from 1932 to 1935.14
When Arturo Alessandri was elected president as the candidate of a Lib-
eral Alliance (Liberals, Democrats, and Radicals) in 1920, Amanda Labarca
and others pushed him to extend the suffrage to women, but to no avail. After
four frustrating years, a military coup in September 1924 removed Alessandri
from office, at least temporarily. One of the results of that coup was to replace
the elected government of Santiago with a junta de vecinos (citizens’ committee)
appointed by the national government. The junta de vecinos varied in number
from as few as two to as many as ten members and governed the nation’s capi-
tal from 1924 to 1935. The elected city council (municipalidad ) had been estab-
lished as part of a national reform in 1891. In the years prior to 1924, the capi-
tal had been governed by a 13-member city council made up of regidores
(councilmen) elected on a citywide basis every three years. They, in turn,
elected three alcaldes, the first of which served, in essence, as the chief execu-
14. Both of the Labarcas, who were educators by profession, had studied at Columbia
University in New York, and Amanda was apparently much influenced by her exposure to
and contact with feminist movements in the United States and Europe. In 1931 and 1932,
Amanda served as director of secondary education in the Chilean Ministry of Education.
For biographical information on both, see Empresa Periodística de Chile, eds., Diccionario
biográfico de Chile, 1946 –1947, 6th ed. (Santiago, 1947), 582 – 83. For more on the role of
Amanda Labarca and others in pushing for women’s suffrage, see Edda Gaviola Artigas et
al., ‘Queremos votar en las próximas elecciones’: Historia del movimiento femenino chileno,
1913 –1952 (Santiago: Centro de Análisis y Difusión de Condición de la Mujer, 1986),
21– 49; Kirkwood, Ser política, 113 – 25; Lavrín, Women, 291– 312; and Maza Valenzuela,
“Catholicism,” 1– 27.
tive of the city. This system was the result of reforms initiated in 1908 by
upper-class elements who were concerned, among other things, with what they
perceived to be the excessive partisanship and resulting inefficiency and inep-
titude of the local administration.15 This poor administration, in turn, was seen
as largely responsible for the city’s uneven development, evidenced in stark
contrasts between the neighborhoods and living conditions of the rich and
poor, appalling public health problems, and insufficient and inadequate munic-
ipal services in all areas.16
The reforms, however, did not produce the changes that their proponents
had desired. Prone to the same conflicts that plagued the national congress and
administration in these years as a result of the nation’s complex multiparty sys-
tem, contention and stalemate continued to cripple Santiago’s government
after the reforms were enacted.17 Moreover, several administrations of the
period became mired in criminal scandals that involved regidores and alcaldes
of various parties. When the city councils were dissolved in 1924 and replaced
by the juntas de vecinos, U.S. ambassador William Collier reported back to
Washington: “This drastic reform is generally commended by newspapers as
terminating governments that were inefficient and corrupt.”18 That was cer-
tainly the view of the nation’s leading newspaper, El Mercurio, an early propo-
nent of the juntas de vecinos. The paper hoped they would end a municipal
regime constantly preoccupied with partisan considerations and replace it with
one directed by “respectable and responsible citizens.” The announced change,
15. For more on the movement for municipal reform, see Arturo Valenzuela, Political
Brokers in Chile: Local Government in a Centralized Polity (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1977),
210 –15.
16. Details on social conditions in Santiago in the first decades of the twentieth
century can be found in Simon Collier and William F. Sater, A History of Chile, 1808 –1994
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996), 173 –78. For the working and living conditions
of women in particular, see Hutchison, Labors, esp. chap. 2.
17. For more on Chile’s complex party system and political history, see Federico Gil,
The Political System of Chile (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966); Karen L. Remmer, Party
Competition in Argentina and Chile: Political Recruitment and Public Policy, 1890 –1930
(Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1984); and Timothy R. Scully, Rethinking the Center:
Party Politics in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Chile (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press,
1992).
18. “Telegram from William Collier to the Secretary of State on the Actions of the
Military Junta,” 22 Sept. 1924, United States National Archives, Department of State
Records Related to the Internal Affairs of Chile ( Washington, DC, 1910 –1929), RG 59,
825.00/243.
it said, had “produced an excellent impression among the public at large,” and
the passing of the old system, it claimed, was welcomed by all.19
Both the juntas de vecinos and the elected systems they replaced excluded
women from any form of direct participation. It was against this background
that on December 20, 1924, a delegation of women from among Santiago’s
most distinguished families met with the leader of the national governing junta
at the time, general Luis Altamirano Talavera.20 At that meeting, they pre-
sented to him a petition, signed by over a hundred women, urging a thorough-
going change in the way the capital was governed. Without setting a definite
timetable, they recommended a return to an elected city council, but under
provisions that would assure that it would focus on administration and not on
politics. Just how this would be achieved was not too clear, but they suggested
that municipal elections be held every four years, that they be distinct from
national elections, that voters be restricted to taxpayers, and that the position
of first alcalde (who would be elected directly) be endowed with greater author-
ity than had been the case in the past. The most important aspect of their pro-
posal, however, came at the end. While denying that the main purpose of their
effort was to promote women’s rights, they concluded that women, as taxpay-
ers, had a right both to vote in future city elections and to present themselves
as candidates.21 Such roles, they argued, would be “particularly beneficial” to
local administration, because “[t]hey [women] would crack down on vice with
much more tenacity than men. They would [for example] supply to the poor
honest entertainments, while at the same time caring for the ornamentation
and beautification of the city.”22 As mentioned, the idea that women would add
a dose of morality to what many considered a notoriously corrupt system of
city government was repeated frequently.
There was little action on this issue over the next several years. A major
breakthrough occurred, however, in May 1931, when president Carlos Ibáñez
19. El Mercurio, 22 Sept. 1924, p. 3.

20. For more on Altamirano and the national political situation at the time, see
Frederick M. Nunn, Chilean Politics, 1920 –1931: The Honorable Mission of the Armed Forces
(Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1970), 47 – 66.
21. A few years earlier, Argentine feminist Alicia Moreau had argued that “[s]uffrage . . .
was a right that belonged to anybody paying taxes.” Given the frequent interchanges
between feminist groups across the Andes, this was an argument about which the Chilean
advocates for women’s rights might very well have been aware, although there is no direct
evidence that this was the case. See Lavrín, Women, 43.
22. El Mercurio, 21 Dec. 1924, p. 7.
(1927 – 31) issued a decree that paved the way for a return to elected city coun-
cils through the formation of new voter registries and the scheduling of local
elections. The most dramatic features of this decree were provisions to extend
the vote to literate women over the age of 25 who were either property owners
or professionals, and to foreign males who were legal residents. The implica-
tions were substantial. While the number of foreign voters was small, the in-
clusion of women could potentially at least double the electorate, and it seemed
logical that suffrage at the local level would be extended in the not-too-distant
future at the national level as well.
As it happened, Ibáñez was himself overthrown in July 1931, and the
decree became moot. After a turbulent interlude, Arturo Alessandri was again
elected president in late 1932, and a certain stability was restored.23 Municipal
elections had been scheduled on various occasions in 1931 and 1932 but, due to
the turmoil of the period, never took place. Soon after his presidential election,
Alessandri made clear his desire to hold these elections as soon as possible.
Once the new congress was assembled, he sent it a message urging the early
consideration and passage of the legislation necessary to give the vote to women.
The national Chamber of Deputies began consideration of such a measure on
February 13, 1933. During the debate, which lasted several weeks, representa-
tives of various women’s organizations filled the galleries and lobbied hard for
inclusion of women’s suffrage in the final provisions. That issue dominated the
discussion with most speakers, especially representatives of Chile’s proclerical
Conservative Party, strongly supporting the cause. A prominent line of argu-
ment was that suffrage had been granted to females in Europe, the United
States, and other Latin American countries, and that Chile should not lag
behind in this regard.24 The strongest objections came from Rolando Merino
Reyes of the newly formed Socialist Party, who argued that extending the vote
to women was not a pressing “social necessity,” that the campaign for its pas-
sage was being promoted by a well-intentioned but self-interested minority,
and that it only dealt superficially with the real problems of women. The entire
23. For an overview of these developments, see Collier and Sater, A History, 205 – 26.
24. Chaney argues, “Evidence suggests that in giving the vote to women, male
politicians in many Latin American countries probably were more persuaded by the desire
to appear ‘modern’ in the eyes of the world than by any illusion that the step would be
progressive.” Chaney, “Women in Latin American Politics,” 111. This interpretation might
well have applied to Chile in this case. Another author suggests that conservative support
for women’s suffrage at the municipal level was seen as a kind of experiment to determine
the partisan affiliation of their vote and the implications for national elections. Gaviola
Artigas et al., ‘Queremos votar,’ 59.
electoral process, he charged, was corrupt and venal, and, until it was cleansed,
the “stain” of such venality should not be spread to include females.25 These
and other arguments from the Left had little effect in a congress where Con-
servatives and Liberals, both of whom strongly favored the municipal suffrage
law, held large majorities. On March 9, the chamber, by ample margins and
with little real disagreement, approved the new law concerning municipal elec-
tions and governments, with provisions for extending the vote to literate
females and foreigners (male and female) over the age of 21 who had lived in
the comuna (voting district) where they were to vote for at least five years. The
property-owning provisions included in the first proposals were dropped.26
After several months of debate and some compromise, in October the senate
also approved the legislation by a wide margin.27
President Alessandri signed Law no. 5357 into effect on January 15, 1934.
The registries were opened on May 15, and the first election was scheduled for
April 7, 1935.28 In Santiago, the law called for the election now of 15 regidores
(two more than previously) to serve three-year terms and to be elected, as in
the past, citywide. There had been some sentiment in congress for an elected
alcalde, but the capital’s chief executive would remain (as had been the case
under the juntas de vecinos) appointed by the president of the republic. Clearly,
the most important innovation was the provisions allowing women to vote, to
run for office as regidores, and even to be named mayors. While many conti-
nuities prevailed, local politics and government in Santiago would never be
quite the same as a result.
25. República de Chile, Cámara de Diputados, Boletín de las sesiones ordinarias

(Santiago: 14 Feb. 1933), 735 – 40. Sectors of the Chilean Left, beginning with Luis Emilio
Recabarren, founder of the Partido Obrero Socialista, which evolved into the Chilean
Communist Party, had long championed equal rights for women (Kirkwood, Ser política,
112 –17). But some on the Left, as revealed in the congressional debate, also appeared to
fear (with some reason) that the women’s vote would be unduly influenced by the church,
and the Conservative Party with which it was associated.
26. Boletín de las sesiones ordinarias, 9 Mar. 1933, 1372 – 86.
27. El Mercurio, 8 Oct. 1933, p. 13. The complete text of the law was also reprinted in
República de Chile, Boletín Municipal de la República 4, no. 42 ( Jan. 1934): 26 – 37. For more
on the pressure applied by women’s groups to see this legislation enacted and their reaction
to its passage, see Lavrín, Women, 300 – 301.
28. Erika Maza Valenzuela, “Las mujeres chilenas y la ciudadania electoral: De la
exclusión al voto municipal, 1884 –1934” ( paper presented at the 20th International
Congress of the Latin American Studies Association, Guadalajara, Mexico, April 17 –19,
1997).
Women and the Municipal Elections of 1935
Preparations for the April 7, 1935 elections were slow and deliberate. Soon
after Alessandri signed the enabling legislation, the minister of the interior
began the process of inscribing the newly eligible foreigners and women into
the electoral registry. This was a registry separate from that for adult Chilean
male voters. This effort was not completed until the end of 1934. Once the
registration had been completed and a definitive date was set, various observers
expressed hope that the inclusion of formerly excluded groups, especially
women, would change the tone and improve the quality of local government.
An editorial in El Mercurio, for example, expressed the belief that the excessive
partisanship afflicting previous elected municipalities would be “neutralized
with the intervention of women and foreigners, a political experiment that,
fundamentally, is associated with the highest expectations.”29 Another com-
mentator stated optimistically, “The new law of municipal elections provides
the remedy to the ancient defect of politically formed city councils with the
promise of the vote to women and foreigners. We can only hope that this mea-
sure will improve the quality of communal representation and will spare us the
well-established corruption that has been a true affront to more than one city
in Chile.”30 The popular magazine Zig-Zag suggested that women would enter
the city council “disposed to manage the city as they have managed their homes.
For most, a city well swept, well lighted, and with its hygienic services in order
will have the same agreeable aspect as a well-appointed house at tea time when
the daughter nervously awaits the visit of her fiancé.”31 These remarks again
underscored the “special qualities” that women were expected to bring to their
roles in the public sphere.
As the date for the elections approached, a dozen parties (most of which by
this time had created, or were in the process of creating, feminine branches)
selected a total of 93 candidates for Santiago’s 15 regidor positions. Most atten-
tion focused on the female candidates. The first to declare was writer Luisa
Zanelli of the Partido Liberal Femenino. While concerned specifically with
women’s issues, she promised to defend the interests of all the capital’s citizens.
She saw as top priorities the need to lower the cost of basic necessities, to elim-
inate a 2 percent sales tax, to create institutions to protect the family, and to
encourage the construction of workers’ housing.32 The two candidates of the
29. El Mercurio, 11 Dec. 1934, p. 3.

30. Boletín Municipal de la República, Oct. 1934, p. 20 – 21.
31. Zig-Zag (Santiago), 5 Apr. 1935.
32. Zig-Zag, 15 Jan. 1935.
Acción Nacional de Mujeres, Adela Edwards de Salas and Elena Doll de Díaz,
promised much the same emphasis. For her part, Edwards de Salas, from one
of Chile’s wealthiest families and a prominent figure in the struggle for women’s
suffrage, argued that Chilean women should enjoy the same rights as women in
various European countries and the United States, and she felt that the current
feminist movement in Chile was motivated in part by the failure of male politi-
cians and government officials to focus adequately on matters of particular
concern to women. She pointed specifically to what she called halfhearted
efforts to control white slavery and to regulate prostitution as pertinent exam-
ples.33 Natalia Rubio Cuadra, representing the Acción Patriótica de Mujeres de
Chile, a splinter of the Acción Nacional and one of the main groups organized
to mobilize women voters and support women candidates, made many of these
same arguments.34 Seeking to ally with these candidates and to attract women’s
votes to his own party, Conservative president Horacio Walker Larraín, in a
lengthy radio address, argued that within the program of his party could be
found “the most solid defense of the stability of the family, of social peace, and
of Christian morality.”35
The election itself proceeded smoothly. Separate polling places were es-
tablished for women to cast their ballots, apparently not only to reinforce the
fact that they were restricted, at the time, to voting only in municipal elections
but also to keep men and women from mingling in an unsupervised environ-
ment, a practice that continues to the present day. Women were in charge of
these polling places, and by all accounts they handled their newfound respon-
sibilities with skill and enthusiasm (see fig. 1). In Santiago, the Acción Nacional
de Mujeres had listed central locations in each of the capital’s main voting dis-
33. Zig-Zag, 5 Apr. 1935. In 1918 Edwards (who would sign the 1924 petition asking
the governing junta to grant women the right to vote in municipal elections) formed a
charitable institution called the Cruz Blanca to shelter abused women, among other
functions. She also had been an active figure in the Liga de Damas Chilenas, a Catholic
women’s organization formed in 1912, where she had been an early and outspoken
proponent of the need to address the problem of prostitution in Chile. See Ericka Kim
Verba, “Catholicism, Feminism, and Acción Social Feminina [Women’s Social Action]: The
Early Years of the Liga de Damas Chilenas, 1912 –1924” (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of California at
Los Angeles, 1999), 332 – 33 and 339 – 42.
34. El Diario Ilustrado (Santiago), 6 Apr. 1925, p. 15. Rubio Cuadra had been the
leader of a Catholic and anti-Socialist union of white-collar female employees, the
Sindicato de Empleadas de Comercio y Oficinas, which had become an independent trade
union in 1916. See Hutchison, Labors, 193 – 95.
35. As elsewhere, the radio was becoming an increasingly important tool in Chilean
political life. El Mercurio, 6 Apr. 1935, p. 17.
Figure 1. Female polling
place.
tricts where female voters could go for information. It also urged them to vote
early and to mark their ballots carefully. All reports indicated that the contest
was remarkably free of the fraud and bribery that usually accompanied Chilean
elections. A feminist interviewed by Zig-Zag attributed “the tranquility of the
electoral act to the presence of women,” an assertion that would be difficult to
prove, in that men voted separately in areas presumably removed from such
influences.36
Whatever the reasons for the “tranquility” of the contest, the results were
clear — a major triumph for the parties of the Right. Nationwide, Conserva-
tives and Liberals took 47.2 percent of the total vote (see table 1) and candi-
dates of the Right captured about two-thirds of the open seats. The big losers
were the divided Radicals, who gained only 18.5 percent of the total. Turnout
was high — better than 86 percent — but it should also be noted that, nation-
wide, only 35.6 percent of all eligible males and only 9 percent of all eligible
females were actually registered to vote.37
The Conservatives benefited most directly from the women’s vote, gaining
almost half of it nationwide. Moreover, of the 25 female candidates elected to
Chile’s city councils in 1935, 16 were either from the Conservative Party or
36. Zig-Zag, 5 Apr. 1935.

37. Election information is from El Mercurio, 7 Apr. 1935, p. 25, 8 Apr. 1935, pp. 1
and 15, and Maza Valenzuela, “Catholicism,” 29 – 36, who provides further information on
the relatively low proportions of males and females registered to vote.
affiliated with the Acción Nacional de Mujeres. In Santiago, Adela Edwards de
Salas was the capital’s leading vote getter, with 5,417 tallies. While trailing far
behind in number of votes, Natalia Rubio Cuadra and Elena Doll de Díaz were
also elected as the first women to serve as Santiago councilwomen. According
to one careful analysis, while the candidates themselves were of the upper class,
they drew most of their support from the middle and lower classes, especially
“from women who were associated as employees, clients, and/or members of
the social beneficence and union-like organizations that they led.”38
In discussing these results, Margaret Power suggests that the greater
energy and attention that the Conservative Party devoted to mobilizing the
women’s vote was an important factor in developing this broad appeal. More-
over, the Acción Nacional de Mujeres, tied to the church and the Conserva-
tives and created by Edwards de Salas and others in 1934, had been particularly
effective in crafting a program that promised specific benefits for working-class
women.39 Another analysis emphasizes the poor organizational efforts of the
center and Left to attract women’s votes and the failure of most women, voting
for the first time, to appreciate the importance of their ballot, implying a kind
of “false consciousness” on the part of those from the lower classes who sup-
ported the Conservatives. This analysis also mentions bribery (cohecho) as a fac-
tor in the balloting, although contemporary accounts (as noted above) labeled
this a relatively “clean” contest.40 Finally, literacy provisions and a complex
voter registration process meant that many women of the lower classes were, in
essence, disenfranchised and hence unavailable to vote for parties of the center
and Left, presuming that those parties were interested at this time in attracting
the women’s vote.41
Whatever the reasons, the conservative press was predictably enthusiastic
about these results. El Mercurio proclaimed, “Taking her first political steps,
the Chilean woman has inclined toward the side of forces that desire progress
within a climate of social peace.”42 The Catholic and conservative El Diario
Ilustrado saw things in virtually the same terms, claiming that the female voter
“has placed, in general, her vote at the service of order, social peace, and polit-
38. Ibid., 34 – 36.

39. Power, Right-Wing Women, 52 – 54.
40. Gaviola Artigas et al., ‘Queremos votar,’ 60 – 62.
41. Corinne A. Antezana-Pernet, “Mobilizing Women in the Popular Front Era:
Feminism, Class, and Politics in the Movimiento Pro-Emancipación de la Mujer Chilena
(MEMCh), 1935 –1950” (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of California at Irvine, 1996), 64 – 66.
42. El Mercurio, 8 Apr. 1935, p. 3.
ical honesty and has shown respect for the conscience of the country and its
democratic institutions.”43 The Left, of course, was much less enthusiastic
about the outcome and the role women had played in it. Socialist and Radical
publications attacked the Catholic Church for what they alleged was undue
influence over female voters and claimed that a disproportionate number of
nuns had been mobilized to account for the triumph of the Right. Interviewed
soon after the election, Radical Party president Pedro Aguirre Cerda stated
that while his party favored women’s suffrage in general terms, at the moment
it now advocated postponing its extension to national elections, while a group
of Radical women went to the extreme of going on record as opposing such an
extension altogether.44 The Left, however, recognized the importance of these
results. Radicals, Socialists, and Communists all had created women’s branches
early on and were proponents of the kinds of social reforms aimed to appeal to
them. Increasingly after 1935, they began to organize more carefully to push
for women’s rights and to enlist and prepare female candidates of their own to
compete in upcoming contests.
Cartoons in the irreverent humor magazine Topaze illustrate differing
reactions to the presence of women in the capital’s local administration. Figure
2 shows the president of the Conservative Party, Horacio Walker Larraín,
clinging to the skirt of Adela Edwards de Salas as she makes her way up the
steps of city hall, underscoring the importance of the women’s vote to the party’s
triumph. The relative size of the respective figures also suggests the predomi-
nant role women might be destined to play within the new municipality. Figure
3 displays Aguirre Cerda and the Radical Party decapitated (and perhaps even
emasculated) by the feminine vote. Figure 4, showing alcalde Absalón Valencia
Zavala sweeping up the city hall using a broom (“There is no new broom that
does not clean well”) with Edwards de Salas’s head superimposed on it,
reverses gender roles but also reinforces the idea that women would have a spe-
cial vocation to put the municipal house in order.
Women in Santiago’s City Council, 1935–1938
The official installation of Santiago’s newly elected city council took place on
June 9, 1935. As was customary, spokespersons for each party made a brief
speech outlining their program of action. Representing the three regidoras was
43. El Diario Ilustrado, 9 Apr. 1935, p. 3.

44. Maza Valenzuela, “Catholicism,” 35 – 36. For more on the reaction to the election,
see Lavrín, Women, 313 –14.
Figure 2. President of the Conservative Party, Horacio Walker Larraín,

clings to the skirt of Adela Edwards de Salas as she makes her way
up the steps of city hall.
HAHR / November / Walter
Figure 3. Aquirre Cerde and the Radical Party decapitated

(and perhaps even emasculated) by the feminine vote.
676
Figure 4. “There is no new broom that does not clean well.”
Elena Doll de Díaz. During her remarks, she assured her male colleagues,
“The feminist movement does not imply a struggle of the sexes or the sup-
planting of men by women. This movement consists of the union of all women
who, feeling themselves sisters and understanding their mutual necessities,
anxieties, or desires, work to achieve a greater well-being, a greater social jus-
tice, a worthy recognition of the rights, and of the participation that corre-
spond to them in all the activities of collective life.” And, she continued,
our program deals with the interests that touch us most closely: to pro-
cure healthy and comfortable housing; to provide sufficient nourishment
through farmers’ markets [ ferias libres] and abundant supplies of the
items of basic necessity; to stimulate popular education with courses on
domestic economy and family industries. An object of special attention
for us will be all that which refers to the protection of minors; making
sure that the laws concerning public performances, publications, and
centers of entertainment be observed; trying at the same time to main-
tain public entertainments and moral performances [espectáculos] in all
neighborhoods. Nevertheless, we shall not forget problems of general
interest and offer our most decided cooperation in their resolution.45
Doll de Díaz’s opening statement brought a rejoinder from Socialist Party

regidor Ricardo Latcham, one of two members of that party elected to the new
city council. In his own remarks, he pointed to what he considered a certain
irony in the regidora’s emphasis upon teaching “domestic economy to a people
who do not have enough to eat.” He underscored the Socialists’ critique of the
charitable efforts of the Catholic Church and of the women’s organizations
with which Doll de Díaz and the other regidoras were associated—which viewed
them as only papering over and ignoring the profound inequities in Chile cre-
ated, as they saw it, by the capitalist system. Conservative Jorge Richard
Barnard came to Doll de Díaz’s defense, saying that Latcham had twisted her
meaning to score political points.46 The matter was not pursued, but the brief
exchange foreshadowed future clashes and disagreements between the regido-
ras and the representatives of the Left that would continue as a significant leit-
motif of the new city council.
Although women comprised only 3 of the 15 council members, their num-
bers remained significant within a city council that was, as was common,
divided among various parties, especially if they voted en bloc. Also elected in
1935 were four members of the Conservative Party. While the three regidoras
had run separately from the Conservatives and promised to adhere to an inde-
pendent and nonpartisan position within the council, their connections and
sympathies with that party were well known. The four Conservatives, the three
regidoras, and two members of President Alessandri’s Liberal Party gave the
Right a solid majority in the council. On the Left were two Radicals, two Social-
ists, one Democrat, and one member of a minor party, the Unión Repúblicana.47
Hopes that the restoration of an elected city council and the inclusion of
women in the process would produce better results than in the past were soon
45. Municipalidad de Santiago, Boletín Municipal de la Ciudad de Santiago (Hereafter as

BMCS), 25 June 1935, p. 6004. The BMCS provides the transcribed minutes of city council
sessions.
46. BMCS, 25 June 1935, pp. 6004 – 5.
47. Biographies of the 15 newly elected regidores, along with their party affiliations,
were published in a special edition of the BMCS, 8 June 1935, pp. 5787 – 802.
dashed. Despite having alcaldes (first Absalón Valencia Zavala and then
Augusto Vicuña Subercaseaux, both Liberals) appointed by and enjoying the
confidence of President Alessandri, and with a solid majority on the Right, the
council almost immediately became bogged down in partisan squabbling and
in-fighting, which led to stalemate, inaction, and frustration. The two Socialists
were prominent in this regard, raising objections to and resisting many mea-
sures emanating either from the alcalde or the regidores of the Right. Compli-
cating matters at the local level were national developments that resulted in a
growing polarization between the forces of the Right, grouped around Presi-
dent Alessandri and his conservative minister of finance and would-be succes-
sor, Gustavo Ross, and a leftist Popular Front composed of Radicals, Socialists,
and Communists.48
Within this larger framework, the three regidoras played a relatively active
role within the Santiago city council. From the beginning, they participated
fully in debate and did not hesitate to make their positions known on various
important matters. Edwards de Salas, initially the best-known of the three,
made her first major intervention on July 29, 1935, with a lengthy exposition
on the subject of prostitution. She began by arguing that the current system,
which sought primarily to regulate prostitution, was not working. That system
had been established early in the century and was designed primarily to protect
men from the effects of venereal disease. Edwards sought to shift the attention
to the protection of prostitutes themselves. Drawing on numerous foreign
examples, she highlighted the many failures of regulatory systems elsewhere
and concluded that it was folly to think that they would operate any more
effectively in Chile. She also discounted a common justification for regulated
but legal prostitution — that abstinence from such sexual encounters was some-
how bad for a male’s health — as a “medieval superstition.” “None of us know,”
she said, “of an illness or symptom of physical weakness that we can attribute to
having lived a moral and self-disciplined life.” The only solution to “this most
terrible of plagues that threatens the destruction of the strong Chilean race”
was first to abolish totally the white slave trade that forced young women into
a life of vice and then to eliminate prostitution altogether. She also recognized
that the fundamental conditions that led young women, mostly of the lower
classes, to enter prostitution — low wages, the breakup of the family, alco-
holism, and crowded living conditions — must also be addressed in order to
48. For an overview, see Collier and Sater, A History, 226 – 34. The classic study of the
center-Left coalition is John Reese Stevenson, The Chilean Popular Front (Philadelphia:
Pennsylvania Univ. Press, 1942).
successfully resolve the problem. To this end, she moved for the creation of a
special committee to study measures that would end prostitution altogether
and combat and control social diseases. Finally, she argued that the problem of
prostitution, the resolution of which she called crucial for “the future progress
of the nation,” was of special interest to women and had been an important fac-
tor in her own decision to enter the political arena. But it was important to
men, too, whose support she sought. “Without men who are sound in body
and soul,” she concluded, “there is no possibility of stability or national pros-
perity.”49
In subsequent sessions, Edwards continued to push this issue and urge
council action. In a discussion of the matter on August 16, Socialist Latcham
again engaged, and perhaps enraged, the regidoras by agreeing with them on
the evils of prostitution and white slavery but tying their existence and persis-
tence to the inequities of the capitalist system and the influence of the Catholic
Church, clearly carrying the argument much further to the Left than Edwards
had intended.50 At the following session, Doll de Díaz took Latcham to task for
what she called his “obstructionist” tactics (the length of his remarks had pre-
vented a vote on Edwards’s proposal), for taking the occasion to express his
own “doctrinal propaganda,” and for employing phrases that “wounded my
own religious and moral sentiments.”51 Finally, on September 16, the council
agreed to name a committee to study Edwards’s initiative, a committee that
included the three regidoras.52
As happened to many initiatives from both males and females, once it went
to committee nothing more was heard of Edwards’s proposal, despite a fairly
broad range of support for it. Edwards, due to poor health, had to absent her-
self from the council for several months in 1936, and when she did return
she seemed to have diminished enthusiasm for her duties. During her absence,
she sent an open letter to El Mercurio in which she lamented the “politiquería”
( petty politics) that seemed to dominate the city council, making effective
action to resolve the city’s problems virtually impossible.53 For her part,
Natalia Rubio Cuadra from the beginning rarely intervened in council debates,
although she did attend sessions with some regularity and cast her vote on
49. El Mercurio, 31 July 1935, p. 17. For more on the general issue of prostitution in
Chile and attempts to regulate it, see Alvaro Góngora Escobedo, La prostitución en Santiago,
1813 –1931: Visión de las élites (Santiago: Dirección de Bibliotecas, Archivos y Museos, 1994).
50. BMCS, 26 Sept. 1935, pp. 6588 – 594.
51. BMCS, 17 Sept. 1935, p. 6627.
52. BMCS, 15 Nov. 1935, pp. 7191– 93.
53. El Mercurio, 6 Sept. 1936, p. 3.
those items that came up for roll call, sometimes in opposition to her two
female colleagues.54
Of the regidoras, Doll de Díaz emerged, over the course of her first term
on the council, as the most active and influential. Like Edwards, she had been
prominent in Catholic social welfare activities, had served as a director of the
charitable organization, the Cruz Blanca, that her colleague had created to care
for indigent young women, and had participated in the Acción Nacional de
Mujeres prior to her election in 1935.55 Like the other regidoras, she focused
on issues of particular importance to women but also did not restrict herself to
these; she was active and outspoken in debate on a wide range of matters that
came to the council’s attention. She was also perhaps the council’s most consis-
tent critic of what she often saw as unnecessary expenditures for partisan polit-
ical purposes, especially the common practice of raising salaries and providing
bonuses for municipal employees and workers prior to elections as a means to
curry favor and gain votes. She was also the principal spokesperson for the
regidoras when it came to the shifting political alliances and coalitions within
the council. In mid-1937, for example, she led the regidoras in helping to form
a new majority in support of then-alcalde Augusto Vicuña Subercaseaux.56 On
the other hand, she did not hesitate to criticize that same alcalde for what she
considered his lack of attention to his duties in subsequent months. To prod
him to greater action, she and the other regidoras, in early July 1937, joined
with the rest of the council to recommend the naming of one of their number
as a “special advisor” to the alcalde to assist him in governing the capital. When
the city attorney declared such an appointment illegal, Doll de Díaz responded
that such objections could be overcome and, speaking for her colleagues, noted
that “in our desperation . . . we believe that there remains no alternative but to
advise the alcalde with one of our own, who will represent the council and
make the alcalde do what he does not want to do.”57
54. Rubio Cuadra’s occasional dissent from the other two regidoras may have been
due to the fact that she belonged to a different feminist organization from them, but she
never said enough in debate to reveal the roots of her disagreements.
55. Doll de Díaz was educated at the Colegio del Sagrado Corazón in Santiago and
finished her studies in England. She was married to Raúl Díaz Riesco, a successful
businessman, and was the mother of three. Empresa Periodística, Diccionario biográfico de
Chile, 309 –10, 316.
56. El Mercurio, 25 May 1937, p. 3.
57. BMCS, 2 Mar. 1938, Session of 5 July 1937, pp. 540 – 42. Beginning about this
time, the publication of the council minutes often ran several months behind the date of
the sessions themselves.
These actions produced some tense exchanges between the alcalde and
Doll de Díaz, both in the council and in the press. At one point, Vicuña Suber-
caseaux rather condescendingly excused Doll de Díaz not only for backing the
special adviser plan but also for calling for an investigation into his administra-
tion of the city — due primarily, he said, to her relative lack of experience in
public affairs.58 At the council meeting following the alcalde’s remarks, Doll de
Díaz took exception to their tone and substance. She claimed that she had a
perfect right and, indeed, a responsibility to request of the executive the infor-
mation she had, and she objected to his interpretation that somehow she was
endangering the structure and legitimacy of his administration. She suggested,
instead, that the mayor was trying to turn the council into “a mere consultative
body.” The regidoras, she continued, had come to the council with the best
intentions of acting responsibly and, unencumbered by party ties, “to intro-
duce a new way of doing things within the administration.” But after two years
of such effort, “our motives are twisted [by others].” In a concluding exchange
with the alcalde, she pledged to continue to bring to the attention of the coun-
cil matters she believed to be of importance. In her words, “I am not going to
accept, unconditionally, the alcalde’s impositions . . . nor am I going to arbi-
trarily reject any of his actions; but when it deals with something that I con-
sider worthy of concern, I shall consider myself totally free to bring it to the
attention of others.”59 Vicuña Subercaseaux, for his part, must have been a bit
perplexed to hear such comments from someone who was, at least in theory,
part of the majority on the council committed to supporting him.
While tensions soon cooled over this particular issue, throughout the next
several months Doll de Díaz continued to be active, prominent, and undoubt-
edly in the eyes of some, contrary. In the session of January 5, 1938, for exam-
ple, she strongly pushed Vicuña Subercaseaux, much against his will, to name
three female gynecologists to serve as city-appointed doctors in the newly
established sanitary zones into which the capital had been divided, largely on
her initiative.60 At a following session, on February 1, she was the sole dissenter
to a resolution approving the hiring of 55 additional city workers at a total cost
of $289,445 pesos (the peso was at about 25 to the dollar at the time), arguing
that they had been hired by department heads without the proper prior autho-
rization.61 On February 8, she abstained from voting on a resolution that pro-
58. BMCS, 12 Apr. 1938, Session of 26 July 1937, pp. 1085 – 88.
59. BMCS, 18 Apr. 1938, Session of 2 Aug. 1937, pp. 1199 – 202.
60. BMCS, 10 May 1938, Session of 5 Jan. 1938, p. 1496.
61. BMCS, 13 May 1938, Session of 25 Jan. 1938, pp. 1581– 83.
vided $50,000 pesos for improvements in one of the city’s main parks, because
she objected to the form in which the expenditure would be made.62 On March
8, she joined Rubio Cuadra and the center-Left Democratic regidor to vote
against the sale of municipal property on the capital’s principal avenue, arguing
that there were unspecified political reasons behind this step, which was favored
by the regidores of the Right.63
Not all of Doll de Díaz’s actions were in opposition to the majority, how-
ever. She was important, as mentioned, in the formulation and passage of a
measure to create new sanitary zones and, with some reservations, supported
arrangements to fund a new municipal slaughterhouse. She also received plau-
dits from the union of municipal workers and her own colleagues for being the
principal author of a measure that created a new registry to certify more clearly
the rank, merit, and salary of city laborers. The workers’ main publication called
her one of “the most selfless defenders” of their interests, despite her reluc-
tance to increase their salaries or provide bonuses for what she saw as purely
political reasons.64 In sum, by 1938 she clearly had established her credentials
as an independent and aggressive council member, unafraid to stand alone on
principles to which she held dear but also accommodating enough to achieve
certain measures she considered important. She also had participated actively
in most of the debates within the council and had shown no reluctance to
address issues well beyond the feminist agenda.
Women in the Municipal Elections of 1938
With the experience of three years on the Santiago city council behind them,
women candidates participated again in the next set of local elections held in
April 1938. These elections were seen as particularly important as a harbinger
for the presidential contest later in the year that would pit Conservative Gus-
tavo Ross against Pedro Aguirre Cerda of the Popular Front. Once again, fe-
males were prominent. Generally, the assessment of their participation in local
government up to that time was favorable, though still described by some in
rather traditional gendered terms. Writing in the Boletín Municipal de la Re-
pública in April, for example, one male commentator argued that women, by
nature, were “without doubt incompatible with politics.” It was this very char-
acteristic, however, that made them most suitable to serve on city councils,
62. BMCS, 8 Feb. 1938, p. 1604.

63. BMCS, 8 Mar. 1938, p. 1643 – 47.
64. El Obrero Municipal (Santiago), 1 Feb. 1938, p. 1.
which, in theory, “should have nothing to do with politics.” Referring favorably
to their activity on the Santiago city council, he saw them as representatives
who took their seats not out of “vanity” or “exhibitionism” but rather “to
develop a program and to give life to ideas full of humanism and well-being.”65
All told, in 1938 the various parties competing for council positions in
Santiago put up a total of 44 aspirants for the 15 positions. This was about half
the total of 1935 but included 16 women, 7 more than previously. Among the
most notable candidates was Elvira Santa Cruz, better known by the pen name
Roxane. As a journalist for El Mercurio, Zig-Zag, and other publications, she
had written extensively about the city and its problems. And as a private citizen,
she had been active in establishing summer vacation camps for underprivileged
children along the Pacific Coast. She also had served as an inspector of factory
conditions for women on behalf of the national Labor Department in the mid-
1920s and was known as “perhaps the most prominent exponent of middle-
class feminism and its positive assessment of women’s work.”66 She received the
enthusiastic endorsement of Alberto Mackenna Subercaseaux, the former head
of the group that had pushed for the original municipal reforms in 1908. He
observed, “Women, by nature, have attributes superior to men in their ap-
proach to certain aspects of urban life,” and that Roxane (who, he claimed, had
these attributes in abundance) was “born to be a regidor.”67
The best known and now most seasoned of the female candidates was
Elena Doll de Díaz. Like most candidates, she went to the radio airwaves to
make her case, broadcasting appeals to the women of Chile to support her and
other females in the upcoming election. These women running for office, she
proclaimed, were prepared to offer solutions to problems of particular concern
to the working classes, such as alcoholism and poor housing.68 Her candidacy
received the strong backing of her colleague Adela Edwards de Salas, who for
health reasons was not running in this contest. In an open letter of support,
Edwards recalled how she had embarked on her duties in 1935 with the belief
that “goodwill and a good spirit” would be sufficient to carry the day but
quickly had recognized that “the realities of politics” presented substantial
obstacles to getting things done. Despite these obstacles, she argued, Doll de
Díaz “was disposed to realize feminine ideals at the cost of whatever sacrifice
65. Roberto López Meneses, “La mujer en las funciones edilicias,” Boletín Municipal de
la República (Apr. 1938): 7 – 8.
66. Hutchison, Labors, 234.
67. El Mercurio, 1 Apr. 1938, p. 20.
68. El Mercurio, 25 Mar. 1938, p. 13.
and in part, at least, had realized some of these.” She called on her readers to
review the records of the council meetings and to see for themselves “the enor-
mous influence she [Doll de Díaz] had exercised in these debates.” She then
enumerated a rather impressive list of measures that bore her colleague’s stamp
and called on all women voters to cast their ballots for her.69
Running as a candidate for the Acción Patriótica de Mujeres de Chile was
Amelia Díaz de Díaz, the vice-president of that organization. Active in charity
work, she claimed to be intimately familiar with the poor neighborhoods of
Santiago and pledged to work for their improvement, as well as to seek better
public transportation, better housing, and better food distribution.70 In addi-
tion, women’s groups (judging by the names of participants, primarily of the
upper class) organized to promote and endorse the candidacies of Conser-
vatives Germán Domínguez Echenique and Rafael Agustín Gumucio Vives.
Domínguez’s female backers claimed that, due to his “intelligence and hon-
esty,” he would “guarantee the strict fulfillment of the patriotic desires of the
women of Chile,” and they lauded his previous efforts on behalf of the capital’s
neediest classes.71
The Left, through the Popular Front, also offered two female candidates:
Enriqueta Silva de Vargas and María Aguirre Aguilar. They, like the Front,
enjoyed the support of the Movimiento pro Emancipación de Mujeres de
Chile (MEMCh), created in 1935 by a combination of independent women
and those associated with parties of the Left, with “the understanding that
women’s emancipation was not possible without radical changes in all the
structures of society.”72 MEMCh’s program included efforts to lower the cost
of living, to address the problem of malnutrition among the working classes, to
encourage state intervention on behalf of the health of women and children, to
equalize minimum salaries for men and women, to ensure full political and legal
rights for women, to legalize divorce and birth control measures, and to forge
greater international solidarity in the face of the growing threat of fascism.73
The election itself again went smoothly, generally repeating the pattern of
three years earlier. Nationwide, while there was some decline in turnout from
69. El Mercurio, 29 Mar. 1938, p. 3.

70. El Mercurio, 22 Mar. 1938, p. 16.
71. El Mercurio, 25 Mar. 1938, p. 15.
72. Gaviola Artigas et al., ‘Queremos votar,’ 43.
73. Corinne Antezana-Pernet, “El MEMCh en provincia: Movilización femenina y
sus obstáculos, 1935 –1942,” in Disciplina y desacato: Constitución de identidad en Chile, Siglos
XIX y XX, ed. Lorena Godoy et al. (Santiago: SUR / CEDEM, 1995), 288 – 89.
Table 1. Municipal Elections in Chile, 1935–44
1935 1938 1941 1944
Party Male Female Male Female Male Female Male Female
Conservative 57,304 29,970 77,926 29,163 58,956 20,950 77,570 26,808

Liberal 55,835 11,736 77,937 12,899 74,931 18,437 57,578 14,227
Democratic 18,193 1,560 10,898 818 23,695 2,543 39,942 5,793
Radical 52,720 7,912 88,070 10,348 126,765 19,642 105,001 18,137
Socialist 448 69 45,729 3,777 61,680 8,572 36,802 5,448
Other 80,098 11,966 109,687 17,754 61,953 10,600 93,480 17,648
Total 264,598 63,113 410,247 74,759 408,160 80,744 410,373 88,061
Registered 302,541 76,049 512,042 100,707 575,625 124,518 619,312 145,780
Turnout 87% 83% 80% 74% 71% 65% 66% 60%
Source: Compiled from Erika Maza Valenzuela, “Catholicism, Anticlericalism, and the
Quest for Women’s Suffrage in Chile,” Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies
Working Paper no. 214, 1995, pp. 30 – 40.
Note: Most of the “Other” vote was for independent parties and candidates.
the previous municipal elections, there was a substantial increase in the total
vote: from 327,711 in 1935 to 485,006 in 1938, with most of that increase com-
ing from men (from 264,598 to 410,247) as opposed to women (from 63,113 to
74,759) (see table 1). The overall increase in voter interest was undoubtedly
related to the growing politicization and polarization as a prelude to national
elections later in the year. Turnout in Santiago was respectable, with about
70,000 out of 90,000 registered voters participating.74 Nationwide, the Right
(especially the Conservative Party) increased its strength, building on a good
showing in the 1937 congressional elections. Overall, the Conservatives and
the Liberals continued to get the lion’s share of the women’s vote (39 percent
and 18 percent of the total respectively), with the Radicals gaining slightly
(about 14 percent of the total).75
An Alcaldesa of the Popular Front
In Santiago, the only two women elected to the city council were Elena Doll de
Díaz and Amelia Díaz de Díaz. They served on a council almost evenly divided
between representatives of the Right and of those of the Popular Front. These
divisions were exacerbated by a standoff between the new alcalde, Onofre Lillo
74. El Mercurio, 4 Apr. 1938, p. 21.

75. For more on the election and its results, see Gaviola Artigas et al., ‘Queremos
votar,’ 62 – 63; and Lavrín, Women, 316 –17.
Astorquiza, who was close to Conservative candidate Gustavo Ross, and the
regidores of the Left. Within this context, Elena Doll de Díaz continued to
play a prominent role, speaking out on a wide range of issues. While she usu-
ally voted with the Right, on at least one occasion she, too, clashed with the
alcalde in a session when he arbitrarily denied her the right to speak. In
response, she abandoned the council chamber, joined by the regidores of the
Popular Front, who were more than happy to embarrass the mayor by accom-
panying her out of city hall.76 This particular episode did not result in any last-
ing alliance between Doll de Díaz and the Left. In subsequent sessions, she
sometimes voted with them and sometimes did not, depending on the issue. It
did, however, underscore her continuing independent stance. Her fellow regi-
dora, Díaz de Díaz, usually sided with her but was much less active and much
less of a presence on the council, probably due to poor health that would lead
to her withdrawal from the city council the following year.
While the confrontations between regidores and the alcade in these
months were often spectacular, they were only sideshows to the main event. In
October 1938, after a lively, impassioned, and sometimes violent campaign, the
Popular Front candidate, Pedro Aguirre Cerda, narrowly defeated Conserva-
tive Gustavo Ross to capture the presidency of Chile.77 So far as Santiago was
concerned, one of the most important decisions the new president would make
would be to name a new alcalde to govern the capital. (It was a foregone
conclusion that Lillo would be removed.) Speculation centered on Rogelio
Ugarte, a regidor off and on since 1900, a former alcalde, and a member of
Aguirre Cerda’s own party. On January 4, 1939, however, the new president
named a woman, Graciela Contreras de Schnake, as the first Socialist and the
first female alcalde of Santiago or any other Latin American capital city. Polit-
ical calculations were undoubtedly paramount in this unprecedented decision.
Contreras de Schnake was the wife of Oscar Schnake Vergara, the president of
the Socialist Party, which was, after the Radicals, the most important compo-
nent of the Popular Front.78 This appointment, then, was clearly part of
Aguirre Cerda’s strategy of rewarding the leftist partners of his coalition with
important governmental positions.79 It may also have been calculated to appeal
76. BMCS, 29 Oct. 1938, Session of 5 Aug. 1938, pp. 3961– 63.
77. For more, see Stevenson, The Chilean Popular Front, 73 – 93.
78. More on Oscar Schnake’s role within the Socialist Party can be found in Julio
César Jobet, El partido socialista de Chile, vol. 1, 2nd ed. (Santiago: Prensa Latinoamericana,
1971), 104 –12.
79. For more on this strategy, see Paul W. Drake, Socialism and Populism in Chile,
1932 –1952 (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1978), 210 –11.
to female voters, following through on the president’s campaign commitment
“to support the rights of women and to elevate their social, economic, and
political position.”80 As it happened, the Radical Party did significantly increase
its share of the women’s vote over the course of his administration.81
Although Contreras de Schnake appeared to enjoy the full support of
Aguirre Cerda, it was clear from the beginning that her task and her position
would not be easy. The appointment received widespread press coverage,
including a New York Times article that emphasized the uniqueness of her
appointment and underscored the many challenges she faced. Among these
were an insufficient revenue base for a city that had grown dramatically — from
half a million inhabitants in 1920 to over a million by 1940— inadequate hous-
ing and drinking water, the high price of foodstuffs, and increasing traffic con-
gestion.82 Chilean publications, for their part, were generally circumspect in
their judgments on the appointment itself but also underscored the many
pressing urban problems the new alcaldesa confronted. The most openly skep-
tical was El Diario Ilustrado. An editorial on January 8 began by noting that
while the paper had not endorsed Rogelio Ugarte for the position (as had some
conservatives), it had hoped for an appointment free of political considerations
and with experience in municipal affairs. Instead, the president had chosen a
neophyte for a post “that is most delicate and full of responsibilities.” More-
over, the partisan nature of the appointment could not be clearer, meaning that
the alcaldesa’s actions “are going to be viewed with fear and mistrust.”83 This
editorial, along with commentary in other publications, did not suggest that
Contreras de Schnake was inappropriate for the position because she was a
woman, but many of the skeptics surely held that view.
Contreras de Schnake did her best to allay these doubts. She granted an
unusually large number of press interviews and sought to emphasize her com-
mitment to address the social needs of Santiago, especially those of working-
class women and children, with seriousness, dedication, and hard work. When-
ever possible, she promised to call upon nonpartisan technical experts to aid in
planning and implementing programs.84 On the issue of inexperience, she
pointed out that she had been an active partner of her husband through his
many political trials and tribulations and had learned a great deal from him and
80. This point was made in the magazine Ercilla (Santiago), 6 Jan. 1939, p. 6.
81. Maza Valenzuela, “Catholicism,” 38 – 39.
82. New York Times, 12 Jan. 1939, sec. 8, p. 3.
83. El Diario Ilustrado, 8 Jan. 1939, p. 7.
84. Zig-Zag, 1 Jan. 1939.
their life together. In addition, she had been secretary of the Acción de Mujeres
Socialistas, recognized in 1937 as the female confederation of the Socialist
Party, and active in the MEMCh.85 In other words, while she lacked a back-
ground in elected office and municipal affairs per se, she was not without polit-
ical and organizational experience, both in collaboration with and indepen-
dently from her husband.86
Whatever the effect of these reassurances, Contreras de Schnake faced a
series of daunting obstacles and challenges as she assumed office. First, of course,
was the pressure to perform in the face of skeptics who questioned the fitness
of a woman for the position. Second, stung by their electoral defeat in the pres-
idential election, the Right fiercely resisted Aguirre Cerda’s attempts at pro-
gressive reform and mounted a consistent and concerted opposition to him in
the national congress and elsewhere. This translated into an often obdurate
conservative opposition to Contreras de Schnake at the local level. Third, while
the position of mayor of Santiago had certain strengths and advantages so long
as the office-holder enjoyed the support and confidence of the national author-
ities (which seemed to be the case for Contreras de Schnake), it also suffered
from certain constraints and disadvantages—especially a chronic revenue short-
age. Success in the position required at least a modicum of support from the
city council. Given the divided and often fractious nature of Chile’s complex
multiparty system, consensus and majority support was often difficult, if not
impossible, to obtain. As a result, few alcaldes served their full three-year terms,
and most were forced to resign in frustration (sometimes after only a few
months in office), with relatively little to show for their efforts.87
Contreras de Schnake did have the apparent advantage of a slim Popular
Front majority on the council at the time she took office. This majority was gen-
erally sympathetic with and supportive of her various initiatives. However, it was
a shaky coalition of support at best. At first, elements within her own Socialist
Party objected to her appointment, some resenting the fact that Aguirre Cerda
had not consulted them prior to his decision. Subsequent divisions within the
party further weakened her position. To some extent, these were related to
85. Relations between the MEMCh and Contreras de Schnake’s Socialist Party had
become strained by the time she assumed the mayor’s office. See Antezana-Pernet,
“Mobilizing Women,” 318 – 21.
86. BMCS, 5 Jan. 1939, p. 25 – 26; and Ercilla, 30 Dec. 1938, p. 11.
87. There is relatively little information on the history of local government in
Santiago for this period. A brief overview is provided in René León Echaíz, Historia de
Santiago, vol. 2, La República (Santiago: Imprenta Ricardo Neupert, 1975), 194 – 98.
attacks on her husband, who in September 1939 became Aguirre Cerda’s minis-
ter of development and was one of the main figures in the party’s “accommoda-
tionist” wing that drew the ire of more radical members.88 For their part, certain
Radicals had wanted a female of their own, Cora Cid Quiroz, a leader of the
party’s feminist wing, named as alcaldesa.89 At the end of 1939 and the beginning
of 1940, the Radical Assembly of Santiago in essence voted “no confidence” in
Contreras de Schnake and urged Aguirre Cerda to replace her, something the
president, at least at the time, refused to do.90 It should be noted, however, that
many mayors faced these sorts of problems, regardless of gender.
Contreras de Schnake proved, in sum, to be a competent, honest, and out-
spoken alcaldesa, and she appeared to grow comfortable with the job over time.
Her most significant accomplishment was to establish a series of farmers’ mar-
kets throughout the city, where small farmers could sell their products directly
to the public at lower prices than in larger markets, where middlemen and
speculators were often accused of extortionate practices.91 An editorial in the
semiofficial La Nación reviewed her first year in office and observed that she
had overcome “hostile indifference from some and ironic skepticism from
many others” to deal a “rude blow to criollo prejudices” against the idea of a
female mayor. It reported that after the first few months of “sterile political
maneuvering, even her adversaries have had to recognize the productive labor
realized by the first alcaldesa of Santiago.”92 But, in reality, aside from the farm-
ers’ markets, her concrete accomplishments were scant. Hamstrung by a recal-
citrant council and an uncertain coalition of support, she made little progress
on the major problems of housing, sanitation, and traffic congestion that had
confronted her when she assumed office. Ultimately, after sustaining some
heavy criticism for her handling (or mishandling) of a violent incident in the
city paving office that pitted Radicals against Socialists in early 1940, she fol-
lowed the path of many of her male predecessors and submitted her resigna-
tion to the president —who, after some delay, finally accepted it.93
88. For more on these developments, see Drake, Socialism, 226 – 43.
89. More on Cid Quiroz can be found in Empresa Periodística, Diccionario
biográfico, 233.
90. El Mercurio, 6 Jan. 1940, p. 9.
91. The high cost of food was a persistent problem that almost all local
administrations tried to confront and resolve, mostly with little success. For the role of
food costs in the lives of Chile’s urban working classes in the first decades of the twentieth
century, see Peter DeShazo, Urban Workers and Labor Unions in Chile, 1902 –1927 (Madison:
Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 64 – 67.
92. Reprinted in BMCS, 22 Dec. 1939, p. 2795.
93. El Mercurio, 22 Mar. 1940, p. 3.
Three years after leaving office, Contreras de Schnake visited the United
States in the company of her husband and gave an interview in the New York
Times. She expressed her pride in the farmers’ markets, which had become
established institutions in Santiago and even spread to other parts of Chile. She
also observed that, while she had not been able to do as much to improve the
lot of women in Santiago as she had hoped, she did believe that her time in
office “gave them [women] a lot of confidence” that a female could handle the
duties of alcalde effectively and responsibly. She went on to recall how male
regidores has refused to accept her at first but that she ultimately had won them
to her side. Throughout her time in office, however, the interviewer reported
her saying, “She had the complete cooperation of two women Council mem-
bers who, like the men, had been elected by popular vote.”94
This recollection, however ( perhaps because it was part of an interview in
a foreign publication), was something of a distortion. One of the two elected
women, Amelia Díaz de Díaz, died in May 1939 and had attended very few
council sessions; the other, Elena Doll de Díaz, had been in Europe until the
end of the year. In an interview of her own, soon after her return, Doll de Díaz
stated that although she was still unaffiliated with any party, she sympathized
with certain socialist principles and found the Scandinavian brand of social
democracy appealing. When asked what she thought of Contreras de Schnake,
she claimed to have heard many good things about her. But, she added, “Per-
sonally I can only criticize one thing about her: she is too political”— meaning,
perhaps, that she seemed too tied to the interests of the Socialist Party and its
agenda, as opposed to Doll de Díaz’s own attempts to remain independent.
While she had supported Ross in the 1938 presidential election, she had hoped
that the Popular Front government would change some of the things that she
had found “deplorable” about the second Alessandri administration; so far, she
concluded, not much had changed.95 Returning full-time to the council in the
last months of Contreras de Schnake’s tenure in office, Doll de Díaz continued
to follow her by-now well-defined independent path. However, on most mat-
ters, she sided with the Conservatives, and there was little evidence of the
“complete cooperation” that Contreras de Schnake later recalled.96
94. New York Times, 30 Jan. 1939, sec. 12, p. 5.

95. Ercilla, 22 Nov. 1939, p. 11.
96. In her first significant council intervention following her return, for example, Doll
de Díaz expressed her serious reservations about a proposal from the alcaldesa to sell off
the capital’s venerable Mercado Central to pay for a new city hall. BMCS, 2 Jan. 1940,
6 –13.
With the resignation of Contreras de Schnake and the death of Díaz de
Díaz, Doll de Díaz remained the only female voice on the city council for the
remainder of the 1938 – 41 term. As such, she stood out again as the most out-
spoken, persistent, and often sole critic of what she considered unnecessary
budgetary allotments intended more for political than for practical purposes.
This was the case, for example, on several votes on supplemental appropria-
tions approved by substantial majorities at the council session of November 19,
1940, on which Doll de Díaz either voted “no” or abstained. When discussion
of special appropriations to pay for houses for city workers came up and pro-
duced some hostile comments from some of those same workers in attendance,
Doll de Díaz called on the presiding officer to restore order. She added, “We
are tired . . . of those situations that find us making piecemeal supplements that
produce a sensation of deception, poor administration, and wastefulness. I
would like the city treasurer, once and for all, as I have requested, to tell us how
much we owe, how much we have to supplement, and where the funds are
going to come from.” The treasurer, who was present, provided some of those
requested details, but apparently not to Doll de Díaz’s satisfaction; she and a
Conservative regidor abstained in the vote on the supplement, which was none-
theless approved overwhelmingly.97
Again, Doll de Díaz’s votes were not always isolated and in the opposition
minority. She joined in a unanimous initial recommendation on a proposal to
create a so-called Corporación de Carnes (Meat Corporation) to build a new
city slaughterhouse. She was also part of a unanimous vote in favor of setting
aside some 25,000 pesos to construct a “museum of popular art” in the city’s
famous Santa Lucía park, an idea first introduced by Contreras de Schnake.98
At the end of the year, the council began to consider the possibility of purchas-
ing the Cousiño family mansion, one of the city’s best-known and most elabo-
rate nineteenth-century elite residences, with the understanding that the fur-
nishings would be sold to cover the costs and then the residence would be
demolished. Doll de Díaz approved of the purchase (at about 3.5 million pesos)
but disapproved of the demolition. She suggested instead that the structure
should remain, as it still does, as “a reminder of the social life of Santiago in
another epoch.”99
97. BMCS, 24 Dec. 1940, Session of 19 Nov. 1940, pp. 2413 – 426.
98. BMCS, 4 Oct. 1940, Session of 24 Sept. 1940, p. 1898.
99. BMCS, 5 Feb. 1941, Session of 30 Dec. 1940, pp. 262 – 64.
Women and the Municipal Elections of 1941
Women again actively participated in the municipal elections of April 1941.
Among the best-known candidates was Doll de Díaz, running once more as a
representative of the Acción Nacional de Mujeres. By this time, Doll de Díaz
was known simultaneously as the Conservative Party’s “best critic” and as a
woman who made her mark in politics “without losing femininity.”100 She also
campaigned on a platform that sought to appeal to workers of both sexes. Two
other prominent female candidates were former alcaldesa Contreras de Schnake,
now running for regidora on the Socialist Party ticket, and Graciela Mandu-
jano Castillo, the only female candidate put forth by the reconstituted Popular
Front (the mainline Socialists having split from the original coalition).101 As in
the past, women voters were also encouraged to support male candidates who
were presumably sympathetic to the issues of special concern to them. Also as
in the past, Conservatives in particular made a pitch for the female vote, which
was once again significant in this election. Nationwide, 80,744 females cast
their ballots — about 6,000 more than in 1938. While almost half went to Con-
servatives and Liberals, the parties of the original Popular Front tallied notable
gains: especially the Radicals, who took only about 14 percent of the women’s
vote in 1938 but captured better than 24 percent three years later (see table 1).
Aguirre Cerda’s efforts to reach out to women undoubtedly played a role in this
shift. In addition to naming and supporting Contreras de Schnake as mayor of
Santiago, in January 1941 he introduced a measure to extend suffrage to
women in all elections, and in March he named Señorita Olga Boettcher, a
Radical of German descent, as the governor of La Unión province, the first
female appointed to such a position.102
100. Lavrín, Women, 319.

101. Mandujano Castillo was an educator who had spent time in the United States,
where, as was the case with Amanda Labarca, she had come into contact with and been
influenced by various feminist organizations. In 1929, during the Ibáñez regime, she had
been appointed head of the Dirección General de Educación Sanitaria and a professor of
the Escuela Nacional de Higiene. In October 1941, when many non-Communist women
left the MEMCh in protest of that party’s growing influence in the organization, she was
named as its secretary general and was described as “an apolitical liberal with a certain
interest in the working class. Also a sincere feminist.” As quoted in Rosemblatt, Gendered
Compromises, 113. See also Empresa Periodística, Diccionario biográfico, 662.
102. In its interview with Boettcher upon her appointment, the magazine Ercilla
described her as “the beautiful Radical lady” (“la hermosa dama Radical”) but said little
about her qualifications for the post to which she had been named. Ercilla, 26 Mar. 1941,
p. 4.
Despite these developments, for the first time since 1935 not a single woman
(out of the seven who entered) was voted onto Santiago’s city council. Doll de
Díaz ran at the top of the list put forth by the Acción Nacional de Mujeres,
which also backed some Conservative male candidates, but failed to win reelec-
tion. Contreras de Schnake received almost the same total as did Doll de Díaz
but also failed in her election bid, as did Mandujano Castillo, who may have
been hurt by divisions within the MEMCh.103 No one seemed to interpret
these results as a broader rejection of women’s participation in local adminis-
tration. Rather, they seemed to reflect the consequences of rather fewer female
candidates this time around and the more complicated and shifting dynamics
of coalition building and party realignments.
Women and the Santiago Municipality, 1944–46
As a result, no women served on Santiago’s city council during the next three-
year term. Moreover, no women were named alcaldesa until Carlos Ibáñez,
elected president in 1952, appointed María Teresa del Canto, his minister of
education, to that post in 1953.104 The municipal election of April 1944, how-
ever, provided another opportunity for female representation on the council.
Running as an independent but on the Conservative Party’s list, Doll de Díaz
was elected to her third term as regidora. The other female candidate to emerge
triumphant was Carmen Lazo de Vidal, one of two representatives of the
Socialist Party. That party, in turn, was included in a bloc of Radicals, Com-
munists, and the Socialist Workers Party labeled the “Democratic Alliance.”
The Alliance bested a Conservative-Liberal slate by a margin of some two
thousand votes in Santiago, but nationwide the Conservatives continued to
enjoy the edge in number of seats won and in their share of the women’s vote.105
While the number of registered voters almost doubled between 1935 and 1944,
103. El Mercurio, 15 Apr. 1941, p. 16 and Lavrín, Women, 318. In her analysis of the
election results in Santiago in 1941, Antezana-Pernet argues that the candidates of the
center-Left attracted a substantial portion of the female vote in the working-class districts
of the city, belying the impression that women only voted for the Right. Antezana-Pernet,
“Mobilizing Women,” 116 –19.
104. Del Canto was alcaldesa until 1958, making her one of the longest-serving
mayors of the capital up to that time. Jorde Fuentes y Lia Cortés, Diccionario político de
Chile (1810 –1966) (Santiago: Orbe, 1967), 83.
105. Santiago results from El Mercurio, 11 Apr. 1944, p. 9, and La Hora (Santiago), 4
Apr. 1944, p. 4. Nationwide, the Conservatives and Liberals combined got almost 47% of
the women’s vote (which was about 18% of the total vote), about the same percentage as in
1941, while the Radical percentage declined from 24% in 1941 to 21% in 1944 and the
voter turnout declined and the number of actual voters grew only gradually
(see table 1).106
Lazo de Vidal was the first leftist female elected to Santiago’s city council.
From a northern working-class family, she had joined the Socialists at the
tender age of 13. Working by day and studying by night, she had traveled
throughout Chile on the party’s behalf. Her abilities and efforts allowed her to
become a leading figure in the party, assuming a position as head of the
women’s branch and as the only female on the directive committee. At the time
of her election, she was married to fellow Socialist and journalist Gustavo Vidal
Gómez.107
The new council began its business of May 22, 1944. Speaking for the two
Socialists, Lazo (the youngest of the regidores) promised, as she had in the
past, to defend the interests “of the workers, of the woman who struggles, of
the abandoned child, of the middle classes, of all those who labor, who form
the base of our society and who in our large cities suffer the consequences of
poverty and exploitation.”108 In subsequent sessions, like her Conservative fel-
low regidora, she showed no hesitation in participating actively in debate and
promoting her party’s agenda. In her first major intervention, for example, she
forcefully advocated a measure that would provide higher salaries for city
workers, and at the next week’s session she highlighted what she and others saw
as major deficiencies in the operation of one of the city’s main food distribution
centers (the Vega Municipal) and (reflecting a concern shared by both right-
and left-wing women) violations there of municipal regulations prohibiting the
sale of alcohol.109
Socialists from 11% to 6% for the same period. Maza Valenzuela, “Catholicism,” 38 – 40
and table 1.
106. Elsa M. Chaney observes that it was only when Chilean women got the vote in
national elections that they began to participate in significant numbers in local contests.
Chaney, “Women in Latin American Politics,” 109 –11.
107. While Lazo claimed to have enjoyed a good relationship with her male
colleagues in the Socialist Party, she also admitted in an interview that one of them had
once tried to rape her. Rosemblatt, Gendered Compromises, 199 – 200. Biographical
information from Ercilla, 15 Mar. 1944, p. 6. Elsa M. Chaney states that in the 1960s, Lazo
was one of the few exceptions to the supermadre female official in Chile. By 1967, she had
switched her affiliation from the Socialist to the Communist Party and, along with
Conservative María de la Cruz, was described “ ‘as spectacular and combative as the men
[politicians].’ ” Chaney, “Women in Latin American Politics,” 104.
108. BMCS, 6 July 1944, Session of 22 May 1944, pp. 7439 – 40.
109. BMCS, 13 July 1944, Session of 2 June 1944, p. 7502, and 17 July 1944, Session
of 9 June 1944, p. 7540. For more on the problem of alcoholism, see Collier and Sater, A
History, 176 –77; and DeShazo, Urban Workers, 78 –79.
On most issues, Lazo on the Left and Doll de Díaz on the Right were on
opposite sides of the political fence. On one major issue, however, they (as well
as most of the male regidores) were in agreement: namely, in their growing
opposition to the current alcalde, Radical Galvarino Gallardo Nieto.110 On
September 26, 1944, for example, Doll de Díaz resigned from the council’s
finance committee because of what she considered the fiscal irresponsibility of
the mayor’s office, blaming Gallardo Nieto for failing to provide satisfactory
leadership and for acting in a high-handed manner by approving, without
council sanction, supplementary budgetary expenditures — something she had
consistently opposed throughout her years in the council.111 Two weeks later,
in somewhat milder terms, Lazo echoed these concerns. In discussion of re-
pairs at the city slaughterhouse, she asked why the council was spending its
time and energy on such relatively minor matters, when more pressing issues—
such as poor housing, inadequate sanitation, and general malnutrition —were
going unaddressed. Now was the time, she argued, for Gallardo Nieto to trace
out a program to achieve some concrete good for the city and “to end the dis-
trust, the lack of authority, and the lack of responsibility that is visible every-
where.” She concluded, “I request, with all respect, that once and for all you
[Gallardo Nieto] assume the responsibility that is yours and be the alcalde of
Santiago.”112
By the end of 1944, the majority of regidores had made it clear that they
could not work with Gallardo Nieto, and they urged president Juan Antonio
Ríos (1941– 46) to replace him. This was something that Ríos, for reasons of
his own, refused to do. The alcalde, for his part, took the unprecedented step
of refusing to preside over council meetings from the end of 1944 on, and he
distanced himself as much as possible from the actions of the regidores. During
this seemingly intractable standoff, the council elected its own “acting alcalde”
and proceeded, as much as possible, with business as usual. Within the council
itself, the regidores remained sharply divided between Right and Left, but the
tone and passion of their confrontations were somewhat muted by their com-
mon opposition to Gallardo Nieto. Finally, in April 1946, the stalemate was
110. Gallardo Nieto, a lawyer and a journalist, had served previously in the cabinet of
the first Alessandri administration and on the junta de vecinos in the early 1930s prior to
his appointment as alcalde by fellow Radical, president Juan Antonio Ríos, in 1943. On the
junta, he had often taken an obstinate and contrary stand on many issues, characteristics he
carried with him to the mayor’s office. Empresa Periodística, Diccionario biográfico, 421.
111. BMCS, 30 Oct. 1944, Session of 26 Sept. 1944, pp. 8462 –70.
112. BMCS, 10 Nov. 1944, Session of 10 Oct. 1944, pp. 8568 – 47, emphasis added.
resolved when Gallardo Nieto submitted his resignation to President Ríos —
who, nearing the end of his own administration, accepted it. Throughout this
difficult period, both Lazo and Doll de Díaz continued to perform their regu-
lar duties on the council as active and frequently prominent participants in its
deliberations, following the general lines of the respective coalitions of Left
and Right with which they were associated. It should be noted that Lazo, affil-
iated directly with the Socialist Party, was less prone to taking the independent
stance that Doll de Díaz often did, and she usually worked in close collabora-
tion and voted with her fellow Socialist on the council, Israel Friedman.113
Conclusion
At the time of Gallardo Nieto’s resignation, the expectations of those who

thought the participation of women as voters and officials would substantially
change the tenor and substance of Santiago’s local government remained un-
fulfilled. The city council was still far from the well-ordered and well-managed
“household” that some had envisioned in 1935. Partisanship remained as sharp
as ever, and confrontations between regidores and alcaldes produced frequent
periods of stalemate during which little was accomplished. Fundamental prob-
lems of inadequate revenues and resources remained unresolved, and there had
been little progress on issues of particular concern to women — such as hous-
ing, health care, or the control and regulation of social ills such as alcoholism
and prostitution. Public complaints about the deficiencies of municipal services
and the poor overall state of the city were as pronounced in 1945 as they had
been in 1935. There were comparatively fewer scandals directly involving
alcaldes and regidores in this period than in some previous periods, but this
was probably due as much to happenstance as to any effect of an increased role
for women in municipal affairs.
The expectation that women could produce a dramatic change in Santi-
ago’s governance was probably unrealistic from the start. While the regidoras
could tip the balance in closely divided councils, they still were only a minor-
ity throughout these years and were not represented at all between 1941 and
1944. Even if a majority had been elected, presuming that they represented the
various parties of the Right and Left that vied for votes in Chile’s multiparty
system, there was no guarantee that they would be any less partisan or more
113. Information on the Gallardo Nieto imbroglio comes primarily from a review of
the BMCS between 1944 and 1946, as well as general press coverage for the period,
especially in El Mercurio.
prone to compromise than their male colleagues. The appointment of Con-
treras de Schnake as mayor provided the greatest opportunity for a woman to
make a difference in the way Santiago was governed. But, as we have seen, her
efforts were largely hobbled by the same kinds of constraints that hindered
many a male alcalde. Most important among these were structural impedi-
ments to raising the revenues and providing the resources to accommodate the
demands of the fast-growing capital.
While women’s participation in Santiago’s government did not produce
spectacular results in these years, it was, nonetheless, significant. The mere fact
that they could begin to vote and to stand for office in 1935 served to expand
the electorate and contributed to greater democratic development overall.
Groups like the Acción Nacional de Mujeres, for example, became full partici-
pants in the political process, and the established parties of both the Left and
Right were forced to incorporate women into their deliberative processes,
select them as candidates, and appeal to them as voters. Moreover, those women
who did win office established precedents and patterns in this period that made
them role models for others to follow. As regidoras, they proved as capable and
competent as their male colleagues (in some instances clearly more so) and,
notably in the case of Doll de Díaz, able to initiate and to see enacted some leg-
islative measures of particular importance to women. They also introduced
women’s voices to speak for women’s issues. On the other hand, they were not
constrained or limited in their municipal activities from addressing a wide
range of matters beyond those of particular interest to women. In these and
other ways, they made important contributions to the development of democ-
racy and social justice, which Asunción Lavrín has identified as one of the most
important legacies of 1930s feminism in the Southern Cone.114
It is difficult to generalize about how their male colleagues responded to
the presence of women in Santiago’s local administration. From 1935 on, Con-
servative regidores appeared to welcome the women sympathetic to their cause
with open arms and encouragement. Regidores of the Left, especially the
Socialists, were, of course, much more critical and antagonistic. But, at least on
the surface, they grounded their disagreements in doctrinal and not gender dif-
ferences. By the early 1940s, the parties on the Left, especially the Socialists,
were putting forth their own female candidates. On occasion, the regidores of
the Right seemed to display a somewhat overly protective attitude toward
“their” regidoras, something that Doll de Díaz in particular tried to deflect.
Her efforts in this regard appeared to be part of a larger attempt by politically
114. Lavrín, Women, 360 – 61.

active women to establish their own movement and identity free from male-
dominated parties.115 There were some, too, who argued that Contreras de
Schnake got something of a “free pass” as the first alcaldesa, because male regi-
dores were reluctant to criticize her and showed unusual “gentlemanly” defer-
ence to her because she was a woman. While this may have been the case ini-
tially, it certainly was much less evident by the end of her term, when she came
in for some fierce attacks from her political opponents on the Right, dissidents
within her own party, and important components of the Popular Front coali-
tion. Again, these attacks seemed to have been based primarily on her particu-
lar actions and not on her gender per se, although this is not always easy to
disentangle. It seems likely, too, that throughout this period of initial female
involvement in local politics and administration, male politicians were very
careful not to exhibit behaviors or express opinions that could alienate a grow-
ing and important portion of the electorate. Refraining from criticism of women
in Santiago’s government, therefore, was not only “gentlemanly” but also the
practical political thing to do.
Whatever the reservations, by the mid-1940s the women who had served
in Santiago’s city council had clearly made their mark. Entering into a realm
from which they previously had been excluded, they proved themselves to be
serious, competent, hard-working, and often effective legislators and adminis-
trators. As women generally moved from the private to the public sphere in
these years, the regidoras of the Santiago city council and the alcaldesa were
prominent and highly visible representatives of this process. While the changes
they brought and represented may not have been as dramatic as they and oth-
ers might have hoped, their record of achievement was not insubstantial. As
time progressed, their presence as voters and as members of local government
seemed less a case of “urban pioneers” blazing new paths and more the natural
state of affairs. Given the circumstances, this was no small accomplishment.
115. See ibid., especially 164 –73.

Urban Pioneers: The Role of Women in The Local Government of Santiago, Chile, 1935-1946

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Urban Pioneers: The Role of Women in The Local Government of Santiago, Chile, 1935-1946

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Urban Pioneers: The Role of Women

Hispanic American Historical Review 84:4

5. New York Times, 4 Jan. 2003, p. 7.

19. El Mercurio, 22 Sept. 1924, p. 3.

25. República de Chile, Cámara de Diputados, Boletín de las sesiones ordinarias

Women and the Municipal Elections of 1935

29. El Mercurio, 11 Dec. 1934, p. 3.

Figure 1. Female polling

36. Zig-Zag, 5 Apr. 1935.

afﬁliated with the Acción Nacional de Mujeres. In Santiago, Adela Edwards de

38. Ibid., 34 – 36.

Women in Santiago’s City Council, 1935–1938

43. El Diario Ilustrado, 9 Apr. 1935, p. 3.

Figure 2. President of the Conservative Party, Horacio Walker Larraín,

Figure 3. Aquirre Cerde and the Radical Party decapitated

sure that the laws concerning public performances, publications, and

Doll de Díaz’s opening statement brought a rejoinder from Socialist Party

45. Municipalidad de Santiago, Boletín Municipal de la Ciudad de Santiago (Hereafter as

Women in the Municipal Elections of 1938

62. BMCS, 8 Feb. 1938, p. 1604.

which, in theory, “should have nothing to do with politics.” Referring favorably

69. El Mercurio, 29 Mar. 1938, p. 3.

Table 1. Municipal Elections in Chile, 1935–44

Party Male Female Male Female Male Female Male Female

Conservative 57,304 29,970 77,926 29,163 58,956 20,950 77,570 26,808

An Alcaldesa of the Popular Front

74. El Mercurio, 4 Apr. 1938, p. 21.

to female voters, following through on the president’s campaign commitment

94. New York Times, 30 Jan. 1939, sec. 12, p. 5.

With the resignation of Contreras de Schnake and the death of Díaz de

Women and the Municipal Elections of 1941

100. Lavrín, Women, 319.

Women and the Santiago Municipality, 1944–46

resolved when Gallardo Nieto submitted his resignation to President Ríos —

At the time of Gallardo Nieto’s resignation, the expectations of those who

prone to compromise than their male colleagues. The appointment of Con-

114. Lavrín, Women, 360 – 61.

115. See ibid., especially 164 –73.

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