Elizabeth Quay Hutchison’s book is a meaningful study of a neglected topic: women workers as part of working-class history. Hutchison addresses the role of working women in early-twentieth-century Chile, where the growth of urban manufacturing transformed the contours of women’s wage work while stimulating public debate, legislation, educational reform, and social movements aimed at workers. Hutchison argues that previous historians have wrongly taken at face value census figures that show a dramatic decline in female employment in industry after 1907. A closer examination of the records reveals that women’s participation shifted, rather than evaporated: female labor was informalized by a combination of domestic sweatshops and changing definitions of employment, with the result that much of it disappears from the census by 1930. The author also claims that changing norms of gender and work in Chile were central factors in conditioning the behavior of male and female workers, relations between capital...

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