In Workers Like All the Rest of Them, Elizabeth Quay Hutchison recounts the long struggle for domestic workers’ recognition and rights in Chile across the twentieth century. Hutchison traces the legal and social history of domestic workers and their rights, outlining their transition from slavery to servitude. For most of the twentieth century, domestic service remained one of the key “underdeveloped” sectors in Chile’s modernizing economy. Hutchison argues that the predominance of women in that underpaid, underregulated labor sector provides one key to persistent gender and class inequality. Through archival research, firsthand accounts, and interviews with veteran activists, Hutchison challenges domestic workers’ exclusion from Chilean history and reveals how and under what conditions they mobilized for change, forging alliances with everyone from Catholic Church leaders and legislators to feminists and political party leaders. Hutchison contributes to a growing global conversation among activists and scholars about domestic workers’ rights, providing a lens for understanding how the changing structure of domestic work and worker activism has both perpetuated and challenged forms of ethnic, gender, and social inequality.

Elizabeth Quay Hutchison is Professor of Latin American History and Associate Vice President for Equity and Inclusion at The University of New Mexico. She is the author of Labors Appropriate to Their Sex: Gender, Labor, and Politics in Urban Chile, 1900–1930 and coeditor of The Chile Reader: History, Culture, Politics, both also published by Duke University Press.

Illustrations  xi
Abbreviations  xiii
Acknowledgments  xv
Introduction. Empleadas Lost and Fount  1
1. From Servants to Workers in Chile  15
2. Fighting Exclusion: Domestic Workers and Their Allies Demand Labor Legislation, 1923–1945  36
3. Rites and Rights: Catholic Association by and for Domestic Workers, 1947–1964  68
4. Domestic Workers’ Movements in Reform and Revolution, 1967–1973  102
5. Women’s Rights, Workers' Rights: Military Rule and Domestic Worker Activism  128
Conclusion. The Inequities of Service, Past and Present  156
Notes  167
Bibliography  197