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Affectionate Mothers and the Colossal Machine: Feminism, Social Assistance and the State in Uruguay, 1910-1932*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2015

Christine Ehrick
Christine Ehrick*
Affiliation:
University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky
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Extract

In 1910, the Uruguayan Public Assistance Law established the concept of universal poor relief, declaring that “anyone … indigent or lacking resources has the right to free assistance at the expense of the state.” Nothing better than this law qualifies Uruguay for its distinction as the ‘first welfare state’ in Latin America. As in other countries, much of the first social assistance legislation targeted poor women and children and relied on elite women for much of its implementation. In the Uruguayan case, the primary intersections between public assistance and private philanthropy were the secular “ladies’ committees” (comités de damas), charitable organizations without direct ties to the Catholic Church. These organizations were also an important catalyst for liberal feminism in Uruguay, whose chronology—from the foundation of the National Women's Council in 1916 through the women's suffrage law of 1932—closely parallels the history of the early Uruguayan welfare state. Following a discussion of the formation of the National Public Assistance and its significance for class and gender politics in Uruguay, this article will summarize the evolving relationship between the Uruguayan social assistance bureaucracy and one of these groups, the Sociedad “La Bonne Garde,” an organization that worked with young unmarried mothers. It then discusses how a formal and direct relationship with the state helped make the Bonne Garde and other groups like it a principal point of entry for many elite women in the early phases of Uruguayan liberal feminism. Finally, this article shows how processes set in motion in the 1910s resulted in a relative marginalization of elite women from both state welfare and organized liberal feminism in the 1920s. Through an examination of the history of these ladies’ committees, we gain new insight into both welfare state formation in its earliest Latin American example as well as some of the elements and circumstances which helped shape liberal feminism in Uruguay.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Americas , Volume 58 , Issue 1 , July 2001 , pp. 121 - 139
Copyright
Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 2001

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Footnotes

*

Research for this article was sponsored by a University of Northern Iowa Faculty Summer Travel Grant. Special thanks to Margarita Goday at the Bonne Garde in Montevideo and to Oscar Padrón at the Historical Museum in Durazno for all of their invaluable assistance and generosity. Earlier versions of this paper were delivered at the 1998 meeting of Latin American Studies Association and the 1999 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women. The author would like to thank Silvia Arrom, Ann Blum, Donna Guy, Elizabeth Hutchison, and The Americas reviewers for their helpful comments. All translations are the author's. Last names of Bonne Garde clients have been omitted to preserve their anonymity.

References

1 Asistencia Pública Nacional, Publicación oficial de la dirección general (Montevideo, 1913), p. 7.

2 For a concise and well-analyzed discussion of batllista social policy, see Filgueira, Fernando, A Century of Social Welfare in Uruguay: Growth to the Limit of the Batllista Social State (Kellogg Institute:Google Scholar Democracy and Social Policy Series, Working Paper #5 Spring 1995). Filgueira chooses to use the term “social assistance state” as opposed to “welfare state” to highlight the less than universal coverage of the Uruguayan and other Latin American reformist states.

3 For a comparison with European cases, see Accampo, Elinor et al (eds.) Gender and the Politics of Social Reform in France, 1870–1914 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Koven, Seth and Michel, Sonya (eds.), Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States (London: Routledge, 1993)Google Scholar; and Pederson, Susan, Family, Dependence, and the Origins of the Welfare State: Britain and France, 1914–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).Google Scholar For the U.S. case, see Gordon, Linda (ed.), Women, the State, and Welfare (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990),Google Scholar and Skocpol, Theda, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).Google Scholar

4 For the purposes of this study, I define liberal feminism as that ideological branch of the women's movement oriented toward the acquisition of equal political and civic rights for women within a generally capitalist and secular framework, including but not limited to, demands for equal access to education and the professions, as well as equal property, citizenship, and suffrage rights. The liberal feminists were not the only active feminist groups on the scene at this time, nor were they the only with members in the various ‘ladies’ committees. I have narrowed my focus here because of a specific interest in the ways that secular state building affected liberal feminist politics, as opposed to the ways liberal/batllista policies engendered a female opposition, as in the case of the conservative Liga de Damas Católicas or (to a lesser extent) women's groups affiliated with the Anarchist or Communist left.

5 Panizza, Francisco, “Late Institutionalisation and Early Modernisation: The Emergence of Uruguay's Liberal Democratic Political Order,” Journal of Latin American Studies 29 (October 1997), pp. 667–691.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also López-Alves, Fernando, State Formation and Democracy in Latin America, 1810–1900 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000).Google Scholar

6 Panizza, , “Late Institutionalisation,” pp. 673–674.Google Scholar

7 For more on the role of the elites and conservative groups in the batllista project (post-1916) see Caetano, Gerardo, La República Conservadora, 2 vols. (Montevideo: Fin de Siglo, 1992–1993).Google Scholar

8 To situate batllismo theoretically, I feel it is helpful to return to the introductory chapters of Stepan's, Alfred The State and Society: Peru in Comparative Perspective (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978).Google Scholar Stepan traces the roots of Latin American statism through Roman Law and Catholic social theory, a model which he calls organic-statist. The model he describes has a strong resonance in the ideology of batllismo.

9 “El memorable discurso de Batlle, Pronunciado por Radiotelefonía el 12 de diciembre de 1922,” Mujer Batllista, September 1946, p. 1..

10 Boletín de la Asistencia Pública Nacional (hereafter Boletín APN), July 1911, p. 23; Asistencia Pública Nacional, Publicación oficial de la APN (Montevideo, 1913), p. 21.

11 Publicación oficial de la APN, p. 5. These secularizing laws, coupled with proposed divorce legislation, prompted the foundation of the Liga de Damas Católicas in 1906.

12 Ferreira, Mariano, “La mujer Uruguaya en la Beneficencia Pública,” Revista del Instituto Histórico y Geográfico del Uruguay 1 (1920), p. 109–110.Google Scholar

13 For more information on the Argentine social assistance, specifically the Sociedad de Beneficencia, see Mead, Karen “Oligarchs, Doctors, and Nuns: Public Health and Beneficence in Buenos Aires, 1880–1914” (PhD Diss., University of California Santa Barbara, 1994)Google Scholar, and Di Liscia, María Herminia and Maristany, José (eds.), Mujeres y estado en la Argentina: educación, salud y Beneficencia (Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblos, 1997).Google Scholar For a Chilean comparison, see Zárate Campos, Soledad María , “Vicious Women, Virtuous Women: The Female Delinquent and the Santiago de Chile Correctional House, 1860–1900,” in Salvatore, Ricardo D. and Aguirre, Carlos eds., The Birth of the Penitentiary in Latin America: Essays of Criminology, Prison Reform, and Social Control, 1830–1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996).Google Scholar

14 Boletín APN (July 1911), p. 23.

15 de Bengoa, Miguel Becerro, Los problemas de la Asistencia Pública (Montevideo: El Siglo Ilustrado, 1922), p. 5.Google Scholar One of the fundamental differences between the French system and the Uruguayan was the tremendous centralization of the latter. This, combined with limited financial resources, may explain the reliance on private organizations.

16 Boletín APN (December 1913), p. 420.

17 Ibid.

18 Boletín APN (June 1912) p. 526.

19 As with the French system, the Uruguayan public assistance assumed responsibility for abandoned children until the age of 21.

20 Some groups, like the Escuela de Nurses and the Instituto de Ciegos ‘General Artigas,’ were connected to the Ministry of Education, and others such as the Unión Jeanne D'Arc, the Liga Uruguaya contra la Tuberculosis, and the Bonne Garde were under the jurisdiction of the APN.

21 The Bonne Garde had a relationship with the state from its inception, working within the Refugio de Embarazadas. But this relationship was still mostly informal and, it seems, voluntary. The opening of the Maternity Hospital and the corresponding change in the Bonne Garde's status marked a major upgrade in this system, one which created a more formal financial tie between these two bodies. This is also reflected in the fact that it was in 1915 that the Bonne Garde became an officially recognized and registered organization (personería jurídica), undoubtedly a prerequisite for the direct receipt of public funds.

22 Boletín APN (June 1915), p. 365.

23 Boletín APN (July 1915), p. 92.

24 Archivo General de la Nación, Consejo Patronato Delincuentes y Menores, (hereinafter AGN-CPDM), 1927 c. 88. Averaging only about 10 pesos per month per ward, the Bonne Garde must have been receiving money from other sources, given that the average wage in 1914 was listed as between 12 and 40 pesos monthly (women and men respectively) (Uruguay: Oficina del Trabajo, Boletín, January 1914). It is in fact difficult to trace the actual budget numbers because groups like the Bonne Garde often received funds from multiple state bodies simultaneously (the Patronato, the Asistencia Pública Nacional and even the House and Senate allocated monies to these groups at this time). It appears that these subsidies were centralized in the APN sometime in the mid-1920s.

25 Archivo Sociedad “La Bonne Garde,” Ingresos e Egresos, 1911–1925.

26 Bauzá, Julio A., “Mortalidad infantil en la República del Uruguay en el decenio 1901–1910,” Revista Médica del Uruguay (February 1913), p. 51.Google Scholar The fact that infant mortality rates were higher in Montevideo than in many departments in the interior is largely glossed over by Bauzá.

27 Turenne, Augusto, El aborto criminal es un grave problema nacional (Montevideo: Sindicato Médico del Uruguay, 1926), p. 28.Google Scholar

28 Not all APN services were limited to Montevideo. There were a number of public hospitals in the interior, and state-sponsored “Gota de Leche” school milk programs to assist poor mothers were founded throughout the Republic.

29 Diario de sesiones de la H. Cámara de Representantes, vol. 283 (August 1920), pp. 498–499.

30 Gabriel Haslip-Viera describes the same process of placing delinquent women ‘en depósito’ with ‘honorable families’ in eighteenth-century Mexico City in Crime and Punishment in Late Colonial Mexico City, 1692–1810 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999). Teresita Martínez-Vergne writes of mid-nineteenth century juntas de beneficencia in Puerto Rico, placing poor children in homes where they worked as apprentices and maids. Martínez-Vergne, Teresita, Shaping the Discourse on Space: Charity and its Wards in Nineteenth-Century San Juan, Puerto Rico (Austin: University of Texas Pres, 1999).Google Scholar Kristin Ruggiero argues that in late nineteenth-century Argentina wives were treated this way. Ruggiero, Kristin, “Wives on ‘Deposit:’ Internment and the Preservation of Husbands’ Honor in Late Nineteenth-Century Buenos Aires,” Journal of Family History 17:3 (1992), pp. 253–270.CrossRefGoogle Scholar More research is needed to know the complete history of this practice in Latin America.

31 Although precise comparisons are unavailable, this salary was clearly quite low for the 1920s. In 1914 the Ministry of Labor listed the average salary for working women as about 12 pesos per month. In May 1926, the APN Boletín listed the monthly salary of a teacher as 66 pesos and a nurse as 65 pesos. And most wards generally accumulated far less, since funds were often deducted for various expenses. Martina V, for example, had accumulated only 78 pesos after nearly five years of confinement/employment with the Bonne Garde (AGN-CPDM 1923 c.334).

32 AGN-CPDM 1923 c.301.

33 Ibid.

34 AGN-CPDM 1923 c.334, 373. Although the release of Amabilia O was recommended much earlier, she was not actually released to her father until April 1924, three months after the death of her daughter, born the previous September.

35 Work farms for boys were created as a result of the 1911 “Protection of Minors” law which eliminated prison terms for delinquent boys under the age of 18.

36 One of the main criteria for declaring a minor a ward of the state was whether or not she had relatives in Montevideo itself. The lack of “anyone to speak for her” in the capital made her, in effect, a technical orphan.

37 The father of Amabilia O's child was identified as her “boyfriend … with whom she had had relations” and who lived on the same estate in Rio Negro where she and her family lived and worked. Yet other than to identify the father of the child by name (along with his father's name), no follow-up on the paternal side is indicated.

38 In 1916, the first year of the program, Elvira D. was placed with the García Lagos family, and Jacinta I. with the De María family. Both of these families were wealthy and powerful but, it should be noted, neither associated with nor allied itself with the ruling Colorado Party (AGN-CPDM 1916 c.410; Bonne Garde Minutos).

39 Boletín APN (January-February 1929), p. 104.

40 Turenne, Augusto, La protección a la madre soltera (Montevideo: Consejo de Salud Pública, 1932), p. 14.Google Scholar

41 Archivo Sociedad “La Bonne Garde, ” Libro de Actas, 14 June 1922.

42 Boletín APN (May-June 1929), p. 757.

43 Batllista policy sought to increase the number of women in many areas of public sector employment. In 1911, for example, an Executive Decree ordered that government offices should give preference to women when filling vacancies. (See Ana Frega, “Redentores, amos y tutores: La concepción dominante sobre el papel de la mujer en el Uruguay a comienzos del siglo xx.” Montevideo Uruguay, photocopy, 1990).

44 The program to train visitadoras sociales was set up in 1926 within the Nursing School (Escuela de Nurses), founded in 1913 based on a British model. It appears the program had difficulty getting off the ground, because in 1928 the APN announced that “the Nation had still not organized a school for social workers” and named a French social worker to head the program in hope that she would be able to make the program function. Boletín APN (January 1928), p. 51.

45 AGN-CPDM 1927, C.95.

46 AGN-CPDM 1930, C.173, 185.

47 The new Consejo de Salud Pública, for example, began to see illegitimacy (as opposed to poverty) as the principal cause of infant mortality, and its maternal assistance bodies began to focus on regularizing unions in addition to providing assistance to poor mothers See Boletín del Consejo de Salud Pública (January-March 1932), p. 7.

48 Cortinas was listed as the Bonne Garde's secretary in correspondence with the Consejo del Patronato de Delincuentes y Menores in December 1931 (AGN-CPDM 1927 c.88).

49 Cortinas, Laura, “El Buen Amor,” in Teatro del Amor (Barcelona: Editorial Juventud, 1930), pp.85–157.Google Scholar

50 AGN-CPDM 1927 c.88.

51 The issue of women's participation in the social assistance bureaucracy is an important point of comparison for scholars of women and the welfare state in Europe and the United States. See for example, Koven and Michel, Mothers of a New World, and Gordon, Women, the State, and Welfare.

52 Índices de la personería jurídica, Archivo General de la Nación, Montevideo, Uruguay.

53 In a 1918 letter to feminist activist and political confidante Otilia Schultze de Galarza, Paulina Luisi reported on the Bonne Garde. She explained to Schultze de Galarza that despite efforts by CONAMU members to affiliate the Bonne Garde with the feminist organization, the membership “had resisted” that affiliation. Yet despite this and the fact that, according to Luisi, the group was “totally Catholic” at its base, Luisi felt that the Bonne Garde was an organization worthy of support (she herself was a subscriber). Paulina Luisi to Otilia Schultze de Galarza, 15 August 1918. Private archives of Oscar Padrón Favre, Durazno, Uruguay.

54 Letter from Paulina Luisi to Otilia Schultze de Galarza, 26 March 1918. Private archives of Oscar Padrón Favre, Durazno Uruguay.

55 The foundation of the more middle class (and more radical) Women's Suffrage Alliance in 1919 only accelerated the class shift within Uruguayan liberal feminism.

56 Archivo Sociedad “La Bonne Garde,” Libro de actas, 29 July 1922.

57 Paulina Luisi Archive, Archivo General de la Nación, Montevideo, Uruguay. 250/7/1.

58 Cortinas, Laura, “La mujer escritora,” in Alianza Uruguaya and Consejo de Mujeres, La mujer uruguaya reclama sus derechos políticos (Montevideo: Editorial Apolo, 1930), pp. 115–123.Google Scholar

59 Besse, Susan K., Restructuring Patriarchy: The Modernization of Gender Inequality in Brazil, 1914–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), pp. 151–155.Google Scholar