State, women, and home in Chile. The disciplinary role in official period publications

Abstract

Discourses surrounding women, domestic life and home in Chile in the first half of the 20th Century are framed in a series of actions related to the State´s decisions related with a biopolitical disciplining understood as how society should be ruled. These decisions take the form of institutions, directly or indirectly connected to the State, which are in charge of instituting or disseminating social policies. It is in this spirit that this paper focus in the discourses that circulated in official publications aligned with State decision-making in the first half of the 20th Century. More specifically, it analyzes discourses that are directly related to the regulation of family life, with a particular emphasis on those that are targeted at women and domestic life in two periodic publications. One of them, “Comuna y Hogar” is published by the league of municipalities from 1927 to 1959 and the other ”Servicio Social”, is created by the first School of Social Work of the Junta Nacional de Beneficencia (Chile’s Welfare Administration) in 1927. This paper argues that these two publications allow for a greater comprehension of the State discourse around domestic life and women in the period.