By Beatriz O'Brien
The 20th century marks a series of changes for the country. The advent of increasing industrialization attracts thousands of women and men from the fields to the cities in search of better job opportunities. Santiago, the country's administrative center, did not have the necessary infrastructure in those years to receive the peasant masses and their families who were crowded into old tenements and cités in the north center of the capital. Urban growth marks a change of era but also new challenges for a nation that is beginning to trace its path towards modernization. According to the historian Elizabeth Quay Hutchinson, in 1885 the capital's population was 177,271 inhabitants to reach 839,565 in 1930.
Women and men left behind centuries of menial work and material precariousness for the promise of an auspicious future for those who joined the new opportunities offered by industrialization and their occupational positions in manufacturing. The transfer from the countryside to the city brings new models of life, social relations as well as clothing. The men leave behind the ponchos and baizes, characteristic wool pants for their loose weave, for jacket, pants and hat suits and the women adopt the smock and the apron, the latter, emblem of a new economic force that pushes vigorously to enter to work in the factories.
The industrial branch of clothing and clothing began to expand from 1865. Starting the 20th century, this is the manufacturing sector that employs the most female labor in the country. Between 1912 and 1925, 77.6% of those who worked in the clothing and clothing industries were women*. They work in large workshops, among which are stores or department stores, generally of European origin, others of medium and small size, as well as in their homes as home seamstresses. (* Elizabeth Quay Hutchinson, Labor proper to her sex).
The dreams of a better life through salaried work turn out to be the transfer of precariousness from the provinces to the cities. Long hours of exhausting work, mistreatment and poverty wages are the daily reality of their reality within dirty and dark buildings. Every tragedy brings with it an awakening. That of the seamstresses is one of historical and emancipatory characteristics. Women understand, in the broadest sense of the word, that their working conditions go beyond just the fact of being workers, their origin is the female oppression in society in a structural way.
The State, the Church and the national upper class look badly at the incorporation of popular women into factory work. In them, the vision that women “belong” within their home, taking care of their families, continues to prevail. In 1924, Elena Caffarena carried out a qualitative study that is important to reveal the realities of working women. The vast majority of them are the sole financial support of their home and have different members of their families under their care and responsibility, be they parents, siblings or children. They start working from a young age and learn the trade within the same workshops.
The sewing machine is the tool of employability but also of struggle for proletarian women. Towards the end of the 19th century, these have considerably decreased in value, making their purchase and installation within workshops and homes accessible. The sewing machine symbolizes the dreams of a better life for thousands of women who defy obstacles and embark on the path of economic independence, stitch after stitch.
In 1905, the Valparaíso printer Carmen Jeria published the first edition of La Alborada. This publication joins the labor press of that time, with an emphasis on social class issues but, and here is what is relevant, from a gender perspective. La Alborada installs and spreads awareness around double exploitation, poverty and the mere fact of being women. The discussion and its respective diagnosis is already installed among the workers, the time has come to organize. In 1906, the Association of Seamstresses "Protection, Savings and Defense" was created, made up of 120 seamstresses and led by the journalist Esther Valdés de Diaz.
The call was to the rest of the union to react against the injustices they suffered. Valdés de Diaz wrote about the prevailing need for social legislation that would ensure the rights of women workers in fashion and clothing in their various areas (tailoring, embroidery, linen, cosets, hats, ties, etc.). In May 1908, the workers' newspaper of said organization began to circulate. La Palanca defines itself as a "feminist publication of emancipatory propaganda" and tries to go further than its predecessor. It publishes articles about worker sexuality, scolding the nation's institutions for denying women the possibility of having their own body and reproductive capacity.
The sexual division of labor still persists today. However, the struggle of more than a century of generations of women would not be the same without the first seamstresses who organize and articulate as political subjects, for the first time, in the clothing and clothing workshops.
