ABSTRACT
The author looks at the way in which the shift is founded in both the cultural and the political, how it is given life in the cultural expression of a political experience. But, the author attempts to show the complexity of the question, probing the reasons why women have received historically the role of primordial defensors of the private realm, and what this has actually meant in electoral results. The answer was in the air because of the perceived role of female mobilization in the downfall of Allende, which was part of the collective memory of the last experience of the democratic process. What this memory represented was the potential stridency of a cross-section of Chilean women, among who were those who now looked to the immutable, to the steadiness of their own role and to the figure of Pinochet to keep them on course.
