ABSTRACT
Dictatorships shape almost every facet of the lives of the poor. They affect what they are concerned about, how they feel, and how they behave. To women who live in shantytowns, a dictatorship means repression and increased poverty, if the new economic policies that a dictatorship brings in cause unemployment. Santiago's shantytown women became distressed about not having enough money with which to feed or educate their children, and about having their water and electricity cut off. This pushed them to leave behind their home-bound lives and begin to work for an income or join food-producing groups, even if shantytown gender expectations required them to spend their time at home looking after house and children. Dictatorships also mean repression, to shantytown women, and this repression causes them to worry that their family members might be arrested or killed, and to live with fear and insecurity as their almost constant companions. The repression affects their routines and their movements. Dictatorships are such powerful shapers of the poor's experience, that one might add “degree of authoritarianism” as an additional dimension to the theory, developed by Patricia Hill Collins, that race, class, and gender intersect to shape people's lives.
