"El fruto envenenado del arbol capitalista": Women Workers and the Prostitution of Labor in Urban Chile, 1896-1925

Abstract

This article examines the phenomenon of female prostitution in early-twentieth-century urban Chile through the lens of the labor press, in which the growth of female prostitution was consistently linked to industrial employers and their factories. Labor movements appropriated the symbol of the working-class prostitute for the rhetoric of class struggle and buttressed organizers' promise of a future in which women sold neither their labor nor their bodies for economic survival. Labor's primary concern was not with prostitutes themselves, but with the prostitution of labor: the usurpation of masculine roles and responsibilities by the agents of industrial capitalism.