It shows the crucial role that oral testimony has played in rescuing the hidden voices suppressed in other types of historical sources., The individual life stories of a smaller group of women workers show us the complicated mixture of emotions that characterizes interpersonal relations, and by doing so breaks the implied homogeneity of pre-existing categories.. Policing womens interactions with their male co-workers had become an official part of a companys code of discipline. Rosenberg, Terry Jean. History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth. . This focus is something that Urrutia did not do and something that Farnsworth-Alvear discusses at length. Bergquist, Labor History and its Challenges: Confessions of a Latin. They take data from discreet sectors of Colombia and attempt to fit them not into a pan-Latin American model of class-consciousness and political activism, but an even broader theory. The way in which she frames the concept does not take gender as a simple bipolar social model of male and female, but examines the divisions within each category, the areas of overlap between them, and changing definitions over time. Some texts published in the 1980s (such as those by Dawn Keremitsis and Terry Jean Rosenberg) appear to have been ahead of their time, and, along with Tomn, could be considered pioneering work in feminist labor history in Colombia. Education for women was limited to the wealthy and they were only allowed to study until middle school in monastery under Roman Catholic education. Bergquist, Labor in Latin America, 315. If success was linked to this manliness, where did women and their labor fit? Women Working: Comparative Perspectives in Developing Areas. The press playedon the fears of male readers and the anti-Communism of the Colombian middle and ruling classes. Working women then were not only seen as a threat to traditional social order and gender roles, but to the safety and political stability of the state. Sowell, David. I am reminded of Paul A. Cohens book History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth. Farnsworths subjects are part of an event of history, the industrialization of Colombia, but their histories are oral testimonies to the experience. The same pattern exists in the developing world though it is less well-researched. The red (left) is the female Venus symbol. The historian has to see the context in which the story is told. The assumption is that there is a nuclear family where the father is the worker who supports the family and the mother cares for the children, who grow up to perpetuate their parents roles in society. The data were collected from at least 1000 households chosen at random in Bogot and nearby rural areas. Urrutia, Miguel. Latin American Women Workers in Transition: Sexual Division of the Labor Force in Mexico and Colombia in the Textile Industry. Americas (Academy of American Franciscan History) 40.4 (1984): 491-504. Duncan, Ronald J. While they are both concerned with rural areas, they are obviously not looking at the same two regions. French and James. As a whole, the 1950's children were happier and healthier because they were always doing something that was challenging or social. Bergquist, Labor in Latin America, 353. is considered the major work in this genre, though David Sowell, in a later book on the same topic,, faults Urrutia for his Marxist perspective and scant attention to the social and cultural experience of the workers. Her work departs from that of Cohens in the realm of myth. Since then, men have established workshops, sold their wares to wider markets in a more commercial fashion, and thus have been the primary beneficiaries of the economic development of crafts in Colombia.. If La Violencia was mainly a product of the coffee zones, then the role of women should be explored; was involvement a family affair or another incidence of manliness? According to the United Nations Development Program's Gender Inequality Index, Colombia ranks 91 out of 186 countries in gender equity, which puts it below the Latin American and Caribbean regional average and below countries like Oman, Libya, Bahrain, and Myanmar. On December 10, 1934 the Congress of Colombia presented a law to give women the right to study. Eugene Sofer has said that working class history is more inclusive than a traditional labor history, one known for its preoccupation with unions, and that working class history incorporates the concept that working people should be viewed as conscious historical actors., It seems strange that much of the historical literature on labor in Colombia would focus on organized labor since the number of workers in unions is small, with only about, , and the role of unions is generally less important in comparison to the rest of Latin America.. Cohen, Paul A. Explaining Confederation: Colombian Unions in the 1980s. Latin American Research Review 25.2 (1990): 115-133. VELSQUEZ, Magdala y otros. Colombian women from the colonial period onwards have faced difficulties in political representation. Conflicts between workers were defined in different ways for men and women. Pedraja Tomn, Ren de la. Sowell attempts to bring other elements into his work by pointing out that the growth of economic dependency on coffee in Colombia did not affect labor evenly in all geographic areas of the country. Bogot was still favorable to artisans and industry. New York: Greenwood Press, 1989. French, John D. and Daniel James. Most of the women who do work are related to the man who owns the shop. Womens work supports the mans, but is undervalued and often discounted. One individual woman does earn a special place in Colombias labor historiography: Mar, Cano, the Socialist Revolutionary Partys most celebrated public speaker., Born to an upper class family, she developed a concern for the plight of the working poor., She then became a symbol of insurgent labor, a speaker capable of electrifying the crowds of workers who flocked to hear her passionate rhetoric., She only gets two-thirds of a paragraph and a footnote with a source, should you have an interest in reading more about her. French, John D. and Daniel James, Oral History, Identity Formation, and Working-Class Mobilization. In. Bergquist, Labor History and its Challenges: Confessions of a Latin Americanist.. Crafts, Capitalism, and Women: The potters of La Chamba, Colombia. Farnsworth-Alvear, Ann. Other recent publications, such as those from W. John Green. The small industries and factories that opened in the late 1800s generally increased job opportunities for women because the demand was for unskilled labor that did not directly compete with the artisans., for skilled workers in mid to late 1800s Bogot since only 1% of women identified themselves as artisans, according to census data., Additionally, he looks at travel accounts from the period and is able to describe the racial composition of the society. . Sowell, The Early Colombian Labor Movement, 14. The state-owned National University of Colombia was the first higher education institution to allow female students. Bogot: Editorial Universidad de Antioquia, 1991. Depending on the context, this may include sex -based social structures (i.e. (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2000), 75. Cano is also mentioned only briefly in Urrutias text, one of few indicators of womens involvement in organized labor. Her name is like many others throughout the text: a name with a related significant fact or action but little other biographical or personal information. French, John D. and Daniel James. He cites the small number of Spanish women who came to the colonies and the number and influence of indigenous wives and mistresses as the reason Colombias biologically mestizo society was largely indigenous culturally. This definition is an obvious contradiction to Bergquists claim that Colombia is racially and culturally homogenous. While women are forging this new ground, they still struggle with balance and the workplace that has welcomed them has not entirely accommodated them either. The Development of the Colombian Labor Movement, 81, 97, 101. In academia, there tends to be a separation of womens studies from labor studies. Labor in Latin America: Comparative Essays on Chile, Argentina, Venezuela, and Colombia. While he spends most of the time on the economic and political aspects, he uses these to emphasize the blending of indigenous forms with those of the Spanish. Soldiers returning home the end of World War II in 1945 helped usher in a new era in American history. If the mass of workers is involved, then the reader must assume that all individuals within that mass participated in the same way. Farnsworth-Alvear, Ann. Activities carried out by minor citizens in the 1950's would include: playing outdoors, going to the diner with friends, etc. Paid Agroindustrial Work and Unpaid Caregiving for Dependents: The Gendered Dialectics between Structure and Agency in Colombia, Anthropology of Work Review, 33:1 (2012): 34-46. They explore various gender-based theories on changing numbers of women participating in the workforce that, while drawn from specific urban case studies, could also apply to rural phenomena. A 1989 book by sociologists Junsay and Heaton. The research is based on personal interviews, though whether these interviews can be considered oral histories is debatable. Womens identities are still closely tied to their roles as wives or mothers, and the term las floristeras (the florists) is used pejoratively, implying her loose sexual morals. Womens growing economic autonomy is still a threat to traditional values. Among women who say they have faced gender-based discrimination or unfair treatment, a solid majority (71%) say the country hasn't gone far enough when it comes to giving women equal rights with men. The nature of their competition with British textile imports may lead one to believe they are local or indigenous craft and cloth makers men, women, and children alike but one cannot be sure from the text. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986. The only other time Cano appears is in Pedraja Tomns work. Again, the discussion is brief and the reference is the same used by Bergquist. This distinction separates the work of Farnsworth-Alvear from that of Duncan, Bergquist, or Sowell. Women Working: Comparative Perspectives in, Bergquist, Charles. [5], Women in Colombia have been very important in military aspects, serving mainly as supporters or spies such as in the case of Policarpa Salavarrieta who played a key role in the independence of Colombia from the Spanish empire. Leah Hutton Blumenfeld, PhD, is a professor of Political Science, International Relations, and Womens Studies at Barry University. Oral History, Identity Formation, and Working-Class Mobilization. In The Gendered Worlds of Latin American Women Workers.