By Beatriz O'Brien
The 20th century marked a series of changes for the country. The advent of growing industrialization attracted thousands of women and men from the countryside to the cities in search of better job opportunities. Santiago, the country's administrative center, lacked the necessary infrastructure to accommodate the peasant masses and their families, who were crowded into old tenements and cités in the northern center of the capital. Urban growth marked a change of era but also new challenges for a nation beginning to chart its path toward modernization. According to historian Elizabeth Quay Hutchinson, the capital's population was 177,271 in 1885, rising to 839,565 in 1930.
Women and men left behind centuries of servile labor and material insecurity for the promise of a promising future for those who embraced the new opportunities offered by industrialization and its manufacturing jobs. The shift from the countryside to the city brought new models of life, social relations, and clothing. Men abandoned ponchos and bayetas, woolen trousers characterized by their loose weave, for suits of jacket, pants, and hat, while women adopted smocks and aprons, the latter an emblem of a new economic force vigorously pushing to enter the factory workforce.
The clothing and clothing industry began to expand in 1865. At the beginning of the 20th century, this was the manufacturing sector that employed the most female labor in the country. Between 1912 and 1925, 77.6% of those working in the clothing and clothing industries were women*. They worked in large workshops, including department stores , generally of European origin, and in other medium- and small-sized shops. They also worked within their homes as home seamstresses. (*Elizabeth Quay Hutchinson, Labors Specific to Their Sex).
Dreams of a better life through wage labor turn out to be the transfer of precarious conditions from the provinces to the cities. Long hours of grueling work, mistreatment, and poverty wages are the daily reality of their lives within dirty, dark buildings. Every tragedy brings with it an awakening. The seamstresses' is one with historic and emancipatory characteristics. Women understand, in the broadest sense of the word, that their working conditions go beyond simply being workers; they stem from the structural oppression of women in society.
The state, the church, and the national upper class viewed the incorporation of working-class women into factory work frowned upon. They continued to hold the prevailing view that women "belong" within their homes, taking care of their families. In 1924, Elena Caffarena conducted a qualitative study that proved important in revealing the realities of working-class women. The vast majority of them were the sole breadwinners of their households and were responsible for various family members, whether parents, siblings, or children. They began working at a young age and learned the trade in the workshops themselves.
The sewing machine is a tool of employability, but also of struggle, for working-class women. Towards the end of the 19th century, sewing machines had considerably decreased in value, making them affordable to purchase and install in workshops and homes. The sewing machine symbolizes the dreams of a better life for thousands of women who defy obstacles and embark on the path to economic independence, stitch by stitch.
In 1905, Valparaíso typographer Carmen Jeria published the first edition of La Alborada. This publication joined the working-class press of the time, emphasizing social class issues but, and here's the most important point, from a gender perspective. La Alborada instilled and spread awareness around the double exploitation of poverty and the mere fact of being women. The discussion and its respective diagnosis had already taken root among workers; the time had come to organize. In 1906, the Seamstresses Association "Protection, Savings, and Defense" was founded, composed of 120 seamstresses and led by journalist Esther Valdés de Diaz.
The call was for the rest of the union to react to the injustices they suffered. Valdés de Diaz wrote about the prevailing need for social legislation that would protect the rights of women working in the fashion and clothing industries in their various fields (tailoring, embroidery, linen, seamstresses, hats, ties, etc.). In May 1908, the organization's workers' newspaper began circulating. La Palanca defines itself as a "feminist publication of emancipatory propaganda" and attempts to go further than its predecessor. It publishes articles on working-class sexuality, criticizing the nation's institutions for denying women the right to control their own bodies and reproductive capacity.
The sexual division of labor persists to this day. However, the struggle of more than a century of generations of women would not be the same without the first seamstresses, who organized and articulated themselves as political subjects, for the first time, in the garment and clothing workshops.
