In Labors Appropriate to Their Sex Elizabeth Quay Hutchison addresses the plight of working women in early twentieth-century Chile, when the growth of urban manufacturing was transforming the contours of women’s wage work and stimulating significant public debate, new legislation, educational reform, and social movements directed at women workers. Challenging earlier interpretations of women’s economic role in Chile’s industrial growth, which took at face value census figures showing a dramatic decline in women’s industrial work after 1907, Hutchison shows how the spread of industrial sweatshops and changing definitions of employment in the census combined to make female labor disappear from census records at the same time that it was in fact burgeoning in urban areas.

In addition to population and industrial censuses, Hutchison culls published and archival sources to illuminate such misconceptions and to reveal how women’s paid labor became a locus of anxiety for a society confronting social problems—both real and imagined—that were linked to industrialization and modernization. The limited options of working women were viewed by politicians, elite women, industrialists, and labor organizers as indicative of a society in crisis, she claims, yet their struggles were also viewed as the potential springboard for reform. Labors Appropriate to Their Sex thus demonstrates how changing norms concerning gender and work were central factors in conditioning the behavior of both male and female workers, relations between capital and labor, and political change and reform in Chile.

This study will be rewarding for those whose interests lie in labor, gender, or Latin American studies; as well as for those concerned with the histories of early feminism, working-class women, and sexual discrimination in Latin America.

"[A]n important contribution to the study of both Chilean labor history and Chilean feminism. Elizabeth Quay Hutchison convincingly demonstrates that feminist debates about women’s work and women workers profoundly shaped Chile’s early system of labor relations. Her book joins a growing literature on Latin American women and Latin American feminism, but her study is set apart from the work of others through her achievement of establishing a connection between the reality of women’s labor and feminist debates." - Business History Review

"[O]utstanding. . . . Hutchison's broad-ranging and nuanced account makes critical, often revisionist, interventions in many fields. It will be required reading for historians and other scholars interested in gender, labor movements, Catholic activism, Chile, and the state. It provides one of the best available discussions of a major transformation affecting all of Latin America in the early twentieth century." - The Americas

"Refreshingly lucid. The introduction makes a particularly clear, compelling case for the relevance of gender to the histories of class formation, labor organization, left politics, and state reform. Valuable to students of Latin American history and to specialists on labor and gender in the region, Labors Appropriate to Their Sex will also contribute much to comparative discussion and scholarship as gender analysis continues to transform and enrich labor historiography." - Labor History

"[A] serious and stimulating new work that I would recommend to anyone interested in the study of gender, labor, politics, and society." - Hispanic American Historical Review

"[Hutchison] meticulously reconstructs factory life, women's role in the economy, their place in the production process in a variety of factory settings, and their role in modernizing Chile. . . . [She] sets a new standard for probing empirical resources. . . . [An] example to which future labor history must aspire, since the day is long gone when any history can blithely forget one-half of the population and still assume that the whole story has been told".
- Journal of Women's History

"As part of a growing body of groundbreaking scholarship on women and gender in Chilean history, Hutchison’s Labors Appropriate to Their Sex makes an important contribution to the existing scholarship on working-class women in early twentieth-century Latin America." - Journal of Interdisciplinary History

"Hutchison has produced the best single study we have of Chilenas in the work place. It is one of the few historical portraits we have of urban working women for any country and should fit well into surveys about Latin American women, the history of Chile, and general courses on the region. This is a pioneering account of working women in Chile. It is graced throughout by appropriate illustrations, running from photographs of women in factories and in the market to reproductions of their early newspapers. Future studies of Chilean women workers now have a place to start." - The History Teacher

"This exceptional study of women's paid employment and its regulation in early twentieth-century Chile is destined to become obligatory reading for students of Latin American gender and labour history." - Canadian Journal of History