Labors Appropriate to Their Sex

"Labors Appropriate to Their Sex is exhaustively researched, elegantly written, and well-formed by the related literature from U.S., European, and Latin American history. What makes this excellent book an innovative model for working-class history is Hutchison's ambitious attempt to relate the changes in economic and social structures to changes in discursive structures, with attention to the actions and policies that resulted. . . . [T]his book will, I hope, make it impossible for future scholars to exclude female workers from the history of Chile's working people." - John Lear , Industrial and Labor Relations Review

"[A]n elegant analysis. . . ." - Patrick Barr-Melej , Journal of Economic History

"[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." - J. Pablo Silva , 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." - Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt, The Americas

"Elizabeth Quay Hutchinson's book is a meaningful study of a neglected topic: women workers as part of working-class history. . . . [A] serious and stimulating new work that I would recommend to anyone interested in the study of gender, labor, politics, and society." - M. Elisa Fernández , Hispanic American Historical Review

"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." - Anne S. MacPherson , Labor History

“In fruitful dialogue with work on other historical periods and regions, Hutchison's meticulously researched study of early twentieth-century Chile traces the deep roots and enduring themes of contemporary debates on women's labor, gender, the family, and social policy.” - Florencia Mallon, author of Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru

“This is a work of superior scholarship on an important but neglected subject. Hutchison has written from a new perspective that reflects considerable and original research in a wide variety of documents. Representing a new wave in feminist studies, this multifaceted book reveals the gendered character of Chilean discourse on work, poverty, activism, and reform.” - Peter Winn, author of Americas: The Changing Face of Latin America and the Caribbean

"[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".
- Teresa A Meade , 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." - Christine Ehrick , 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." - Michael Monteón , 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." - David S. Parker, Canadian Journal of History