Barbara Weinstein

“They don't even look like women workers”: Femininity and Class in Twentieth-Century Latin America

Recent research on consumer culture and working-class femininity in the United States has argued that attention to fashionable clothing and dime novels did not undermine female working-class identities, but rather provided key resources for creating those identities. In this essay I consider whether we can see a similar process of appropriation by working-class women in Latin America. There women employed in factories had to contend with widespread denigration of the female factory worker. Looking first at the employer-run “Centers for Domestic Instruction” in Sao Paulo, I argue that “proper femininity” in these centers––frequented by large numbers of working-class women––reflected middle-class notions of the skilled housewife, and situated working-class women as nearly middle class. What we see is a process of “approximation,” not appropriation. I then look at the case of Argentina (especially Greater Buenos Aires) where Peronism also promoted “traditional” roles for working-class women but where Eva Peron emerges as a working-class heroine. The figure of Evita––widely reviled by women of the middle and upper classes––becomes a means to construct an alternative, class-based femininity for working-class women. Some of the most innovative new work in the field of gender and labor history among US historians has dealt with consumerism and new notions and styles of femininity among working girls and women. This would include especially the pathbreaking work of Nan Enstad, with its many insights into the way women workers used images from film and popular fiction to fashion identities for themselves that were both working-class and feminine. Questions about consumerism and related issues of appearance, style, behavior, etc., have gotten much less attention in the Latin American context, except perhaps from those scholars studying the very recent past (for example, the work of Heidi Tinsman on globalization and gendered labor in the Chilean fruit industry or Carla Freedman on high tech workers in Barbados). This is partly because we generally assume that Latin-American workers, male and female, have been excluded from the world of modern consumerism––though certainly not from the world of popular culture, which, as Enstad argues, constitutes “one resource (among many) that people use to create community, pleasure, and sometimes politics.” But I also think we assume, and rightly so, that Latin-American workingclass women of an earlier era faced particularly daunting challenges in their relations and confrontations with shifting standards of femininity and respectability, and had even less room to maneuver, in the sense of reinventing what it International Labor and Working-Class History No. 69, Spring 2006, pp. 161–176 # 2006 International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. meant to be a woman and a worker, than women of the popular classes elsewhere. Subjected to disparaging constructions of working-class women by the dominant classes and by the men of their own putative social class, seen as tainted and degraded by the experience of wage work (and factory work in particular), working-class women’s response was likely to be an assertion of their femininity and respectability through approximation/appropriation of the taste and styles associated with the middle-class woman. Enstad persuasively argues that such appropriations do not necessarily translate into weakened political identities––indeed, the logical extension of her argument is that they virtually never do––but if we shift the time and place to the middle decades of the twentieth century, and to Latin America, such an “optimistic” reading may be difficult to sustain. In the essay that follows, I draw upon my own research and other recent scholarship on gender and class in Latin America to explore how preoccupations with femininity have influenced working-class identities. By femininity I mean a set of assumptions about female style, appearance and behavior (sexual and otherwise) that emerges from a variety of different sources, and can tap into a range of desires. What I am suggesting, though very speculatively and with many reservations, is that in Latin America, and perhaps elsewhere, images of femininity/respectability typically reflected the gendered norms of an emerging middle class, and thus tended to undercut working-class political identities for women. To negotiate proper images of femininity, working-class women, by and large, had to play down the “class” aspects of their identities, and disassociate themselves, as much as possible, from the world of work and the streets. Whereas working-class men could draw on longstanding images of masculinity that emphasized hard work, strength and independence, and that both reinforced their identity as workers and, equally important, provided a basis for ridiculing men of other social classes as insufficiently manly, working-class women had fewer resources with which to repel insinuations about physical unattractiveness, lack of sexual respectability, and generally unfeminine behavior. Enstad, even in her “optimistic” interpretation, writes that working women in the US “created their own distinctive style that implicitly denied that labor made them masculine, degraded or alien.” But the very fact that they had to deny these images, and neutralize the stigma of factory work, is significant. Clearly, seeming “masculine” was hardly a problem for most men who labored. To put it in schematic terms, I would argue that, under most circumstances, masculinity and class intersected to strengthen (male) working-class identities, whereas femininity and class intersected to weaken (female) working-class identities. Furthermore, any effort to repel negative images of the woman worker, or to construct alternative forms of femininity were further complicated by the question of race––an issue that was much more vexing in the Latin American context where the lines between white and nonwhite were far more fluid and unstable, and were often as much a matter of self-presentation as skin color. I want to emphasize that I ammaking a relative, not an absolute, argument. Surely working-class women in Latin America were never entirely lacking in 162 ILWCH, 69, Spring 2006