State Formal Education Projects for Rural Girls and Women. Chile, 1929-1960

Abstract

This article seeks to carry out an analysis about the insertion of women and girls living in the rural world in the educational proposals of the State, especially those who lived in the Central Valley of Chile between the years 1929 and 1960. Until now, the Bibliography shows us that the studies carried out on the insertion of women and girls in rural Chile are scarce, as are those that address their education. The analysis is carried out on two axes. The first focuses on tracing the ideas that went through the conception of peasant women and the arguments that founded the need to generate educational spaces for them, based on female voices that during the period took the representation of this subject excluded from society. The second axis proposes to outline the educational initiatives that were generated from state institutions towards rural girls and women in primary and secondary education. It is proposed that the State would have had an “apparent lack of concern” for the education of rural women and girls, except at the level of primary literacy. In this sense, until the sixties he did not think of it as a productive subject. The research has been carried out based on documentation from the Ministry of Public Education fund present in the National Administration Archive, production by graduates of the Elvita Matte Cruchaga School of Social Service of the Catholic University and newspaper material obtained from the National Library From Chile.