The Shield of the Weak

A century after he became president of Uruguay and initiated its transformation into South America’s first welfare state, Jose Batlle y Ordóñez remains a towering figure. Yet, increasingly historians have recognized that Batlle’s reforms had their limits — social, geographic, and gendered. It is the relationship of gender and feminism to the Batllista state that is the central subject of Christine Ehrick’s illuminating book.Ehrick draws on two phases of feminist scholarship on Latin America, combining analysis of feminism and women’s movements with a gendered understanding of state formation. But she goes beyond her models in both methodology and interpretation. Commendably, her analysis of feminist movements in Uruguay extends past its leadership. Ehrick has constructed a database of more than five hundred politically active women of the era, which allows her to analyze their class, ethnic, and political characteristics. She compares their membership in different organizations and thus traces changes in those organizations over the first three decades of the twentieth century. One surprising conclusion is that immigration does not explain the distinctive nature of Uruguayan feminism, as most Uruguayan feminists were native-born.For Ehrick, Uruguayan feminism had four distinguishing characteristics: it was plural, it was partisan, it was shaped largely by local conditions, and it was influenced by the Batllista state. Where earlier studies focused on Uruguay’s middle-class “liberal feminism,” Ehrick stresses that there were several feminisms — some of them elite and conservative, others working class and socialist. She also argues that Uruguayan female activists shared the intense political partisanship of the region’s longest-lived two-party system, one of the unique local political factors that set Uruguayan feminism apart from its Latin American counterparts. Another was the Batllista state, whose links to many liberal feminists — teachers and professionals — lent Uruguayan feminism a statist cast.Ehrick departs from much recent feminist scholarship on the state. Instead of viewing the state-building process as “the modernization of patriarchy,” she argues that in Uruguay it can be described instead as the “modernization of paternalism.” This more flexible term allows her to analyze Uruguay as a stratified society of “interlocking relationships and mutual obligations” (p. 7); these unequal relationships are defined by class and ethnicity, as well as by gender.Batlle’s stance in favor of the practical interests of women (such as legalized divorce and women’s suffrage) and the readiness of the Batllista state to incorporate women, including feminists, contributes to her characterization of the unique gendered nature of the Uruguayan state-building process. As the title — a famous Batlle quote — suggests, in Batlle’s “model country,” the state would act as “the shield of the weak,” a category that included women, children, workers, and the poor. Clearly, Batlle was no feminist; but, Ehrick argues, he favored policies — including “compensation” — that could help women advance toward equality, culminating in Uruguay’s granting women full suffrage in 1932. Moreover, his support for women’s education and social assistance, along with the atmosphere of social experimentation and political innovation he created, encouraged the participation of women and the incorporation of feminists. Ehrick has captured the underlying ambiguity of Batllista Uruguay, and, to her credit, she refuses to settle for a more simplistic interpretation.Her reading of Uruguayan history reflects a comparable balance. She embraces the current views of Uruguayan scholars: that Batlle’s reforms “anticipated rather than responded to the emergence of civil society” and that civil society emerged instead during the “great antireformist reaction” of 1916 – 29 that followed Batlle’s two presidencies. But she criticizes their omission of the role of women in this process, arguing persuasively that Uruguayan feminisms — some supportive of Batllista reforms, some opposed — “developed concurrently” with the Batllista welfare state and that “Uruguayan women took part in the debate and dialogue over reform and its limits” (p. 7). Her book begins earlier, with an exploration of Uruguayan feminisms between 1880 and 1915, whose divisions followed mutually reinforcing religious and political lines; she follows with a discussion of Batllista ideology and a chapter on women, education, and social assistance under Batlle.The core of her research, however, is the three chapters on the main currents in Uruguay feminism between 1916 and 1933: middle-class liberal feminism; elite, conservative “Christian feminism”; and working-class socialist feminism. These chapters examine political parties such as the Socialists and Communists but are most interesting when they explore civil-society organizations such as the elite, conservative Catholic Ladies’ League and the liberal National Women’s Council of Uruguay (CONAMU) and Uruguayan Women’s Suffrage Alliance (Alianza), secular middle-class organizations that marginalized poor and working-class women. None of these organizations were mass movements, perhaps because their leaders embraced a condescending social politics that figuratively placed them in the position of protective mothers to their less fortunate poor daughters, while taking advantage of Batllista policies of inclusion to gain access to higher education and develop their own feminist consciousness.Shield of the Weak contributes to the history of Latin American feminism, offering a complex view of the relationships between gender, feminism, Uruguayan politics, and the Batllista state. Ehrick adds to our understanding of the formation of the Batllista state and its reform project, stressing their gendered limits but underscoring as well that they represented an advance for women, one that played a significant role in the construction of Uruguayan feminism. Her balanced interpretation makes this book recommended reading for historians of gender and Latin America alike

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