Women with Conciencia: The Lives and Times of Activist Pobladoras, Chile 1920–1973

Abstract As the term “pobladoras” suggests, women who inhabit this category most frequently appear in scholarly literature and popular discourse in function of their places of residence and activities therein. Scholarship tends to focus on two chronological and thematic areas: women as participants in the precoup pobladores movement for affordable housing (1957–73) and in neighborhood social organizations (e.g., mothers’ centers, subsistence organizations, human rights organizations, and Christian base communities, etc.) during the dictatorship. We still know relatively little about pobladoras’ activism prior to the dictatorship, beyond the housing movement, or how pobladoras accumulated social and political capital and leveraged power. Inspired by recent studies that use a biographical approach to explore the complexity of women’s social and political activism, this article explores such questions through in-depth consideration of oral history conversations with four pobladoras who were born in the 1920s and 1940s. All the women participated in social and political activism before and after the 1973 coup. This article focuses on their precoup trajectories—an especially under-studied subject.