Rural women and modern? Sanitary and sexual education in the Unidad Popular (1970-1973)

Abstract

The thousand days of the Popular Unity (UP) signified a series of social transformations. In particular, in public health, we see the central efforts to deploy preventive social and community medicine across the territory. In that vein, we are interested in courses and trainings related to health education for the home and/or sexual education, as well as literacy aimed at rural populations. What ideas and actions about families did the volunteers of the training programs and courses in health/sexual education promote during the UP? How do the women from rural areas appear in these actions?

We believe that health, sexual, and/or family education allows us to view the history of families and public policies through a gendered lens. The Chilean path to socialism, in its short duration, enables us to review the sharpening of certain transformations and contradictions, such as the democratization of education, illiteracy rates, and school dropout in rural areas, alongside the lack of information and access to health services. The agrarian reform was deepening, although its reach was concentrated in the latifundia of Chile’s central valley.

From a history-of-the-street perspective focused on microhistory (Revel 1995; Zemon Davis 1991, 2024), we consider primary sources—oral and written—such as testimonies of women of the era, local and national press, as well as institutional documentation from the period. We believe that women in rural settlements—conceived as hamlets and fragmented villages—were the objects of health/sexual/ household/family education at different levels of reach and intent.

In terms of gendered social relations, the agents responsible for developing the courses and trainings ignored the social and cultural conditions of some areas, even as they acknowledged areas of notable “cultural lag”. It was mainly women who mediated, based on these diagnoses that argued for a lack of modernization in rural areas when it came to public health and education. These ideas were present in health education, where family size and the regulation of sexuality were part of the implicit modernization debate for women.