Unemployment and Exacerbated Poverty

For many Chilean shantytown women, the early years of the dictatorship through to the mid-1980s was a period of exacerbated poverty due to their husbands losing their jobs, and often remaining unemployed for a long time or having recurring experiences of unemployment. ¹³⁰ How they experienced this exacerbated poverty reflected the areas of life for which they were responsible as women, namely preparing meals, taking care of the children, and running the house; accordingly, their husband's unemployment meant to them not being able to buy enough food, pay the water and electricity bills, or afford their children's school fees or materials. ¹³¹ These deprivations constituted a downward cycle that was difficult to break, and together with the repression that the women also experienced, produced severe “social suffering.” ¹³² By causing this unemployment and impoverishment, the Pinochet government's adoption of neoliberal economic policies and a national security doctrine set off a process that led women to become active in political resistance. The impoverishment pushed the women to join local groups in which they tried to earn money or procure food cheaply (Chapter 4), and becoming group members caused them to begin participating in resistance against the dictatorship (Chapters 5 and 6).