A Word on Chilean Women
By: Cara Walker
Photos: Hanna Curlette, Amy Sullivan
Chilean Women Are:
Click through the photos to see the words Chilean women use to desrcibe themselves
“Valiente y Esforzada” (Valiant and Forced – farther than your own strength)
“Valiente” (valiant)
“Valiente” (valiant)
“Valiente y Esforzada” (Valiant and Forced – farther than your own strength)
“Amistoso” (Friendly) - Patricia Riemenschneider
“From my perspective and the way I was raised, my family was loving and hospitable, and that marked my life.”
In a 53-year-old basement with pink popcorn walls, a group of 15 or so Chilean women meet every Tuesday night at Iglesia Evangelica Bautista Argomedo in Santiago, Chile. Each of them are grandmothers from around the community, except for Patricia Riemenschneider, whose daughter Michelle started classes to be a nurse at the local university this year.
Chatter fills the spacious room until the two women seated at a table in the center of the room finally quiet everyone down – about 20 minutes after their 4 p.m. start time, but no one seems to mind the delay. The voices of the women ring out crisp and strong as they follow along in their worn paperback hymnals, singing “Este es el Día,” as Riemenschneider rises to pray.
She was an 18-year-old college student from a small town called Panguipulli in the south of Chile when she started coming to church here, almost 30 years ago. After deciding to quit her job as an IBM secretary to stay home when Michelle was born, Riemenschneider joined the women’s group.
As the youngest member of the group, Riemenschneider says that although she as a stay at home mother is an exception, it was her generation that began working outside of the home, a break from tradition in Chilean culture.
“Before ladies were always dedicated to raising their children,” she says.
But Riemenschneider has noticed a shifting from this traditional idea as a priority for many women.
“I hope [future Chilean women] might be more worried and concerned about their children instead of their professional aspirations.”
As the issue of women’s rights remains a trending topic in Chilean society, many women are not making the decision to stay home as Riemenschneider did. Although the pride of being a Chilean woman still runs deep, the members of this group and other women across the country have a variety of view points on how this change is affecting the culture of being a mother and being a woman.
With the election of its first woman president, President Michelle Bachelet, in 2006, Chile is fighting against the severe wage gap between men and women and other issues regarding equality, as more and more women enter the workforce.
Claudia Sarmiento leads a team of lawyers at the Servicio Nacional de la Mujer (“The National Women’s Service,” SERNAM), who offer technical support to ministers working in legislation to draft projects aimed at promoting equality for women.
“It is an honor leading this work,” Sarmiento says.
SERNAM, which was created in 1991, has recently evolved with a separate Ministry of Genderand Equality as of 2016.
After serving as the Executive Director for the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women) when her first term ended in 2010, President Bachelet was re-elected in 2014. The ministry, which Bachelet signed a bill to initiate in collaboration with SERNAM in 2015, is aimed at promoting equality and women’s rights that reflect the recent cultural changes in society regarding these issues.
“[President] Michelle Bachelet has done a huge work to break the symbolic idea of women not being in power,” Sarmiento says.
Sarmiento says she always uses an illustration to talk about the change for women in Chile.
“When my grandmother was born in this country, she had no possibility to vote or manage her own assets,” she says. “My mother had the right to vote and receive an education, and now my sister and I have gotten to see a woman become president.”
The culture surrounding women in Chile is still very conservative, she says, and many do not share the same perspective on women’s rights that she and her colleagues do. However, she says that the president’s perspective has made it easier to address these topics as whole.
“Female positions still tend to make less money. Women doing ‘male jobs’ make an average of 30 percent less. It is a systematic problem,” Sarmiento says. “I hope to live long enough to see [the ministry] become useless, but I fear it won’t.”
“Aguerridas” (Fighters) –Raquel Vega
“Aguerridas” (Fighters) –Raquel Vega
“[This group] is like the place of tranquility and peace –our space. We can laugh here, we can cry, we can talk about our adventures and our non-adventures, we can serve the Lord and we can comfort one another.”
At 73 years old, Raquel Vega, the president of the church group at Iglesia Evangelica Bautista Argomedo, grew up in a generation that believed in women staying at home to raise their children. After being born in a rough neighborhood with a stigma for crime and delinquents in Santiago, Chile, Vega says her own mother, who was illiterate herself, is responsible for getting her into a private school to receive an education.
“It was good that I got out of that,” Vega says. “God had mercy on me.”
After marrying her husband, her media naranja (“soulmate”), at 18 years old, Vega stayed home and performed odd jobs – making arts and crafts and working as a stylist – that allowed her to be a homemaker and a mother to her two sons.
“Children who are raised by their mothers have different values,” Vega says. “They are more loving, more responsible. It’s what I saw in my kids.”
Although she feels that families have lost something as more mothers begin working outside the home, Vega still embraces being a Chilean woman. They are aguerridas (“fighters”), she says.
“Valiente” (Brave, Courageux) - Judicaelle Dermenghem
Judicaelle Dermenghem, who moved from France after interning in Chile during college, sees that fight every day in the women she works with through Acción Emprendedora, a nonprofit
organization based in Santiago, Chile, that helps train women in poverty to be small business owners.
The women she works with aren’t as lucky as Riemenschneider and Raquel, as many of them are raising their children with no husband and no education. They work not as a choice but to survive.
The program she is in charge of targets women in poverty to empower them to become entrepreneurs and work close to their homes to earn their own income, mostly by selling food and other items they make as street vendors.
“In Chile, you would be surprised to see how many people don’t earn enough,” she says. “The inequality is huge.”
The classes that the women take focus on teaching them the tools they need to begin changing their lives. The new program’s classes will begin in June and will be offered to 30 women for 65 hours over the span of seven weeks.
Although Dermenghem says it is often hard to convince the women that taking the time away from their work to invest in the class is worth it, she knows that they will learn how to find opportunities to grow from these classes.
“I know [these women] are strong. They want to get ahead, but they don’t have the opportunity,”she says. “What we do is improve their lives through entrepreneurship so they can give a better life to their children. We’re not changing their lives – it takes years to do this – what we do is get them to where their lives can get better. Just like plants, like a seed, that’s what we are trying to
do.”
Since moving to Chile from France two years ago, Dermenghem says it was difficult at first to adjust even though the cultures may seem similar.
“We are in a society where the gender issues are not what it is in France for example, or in the United States,” she says. “In this society, the place of the woman is not the same as the man. I
guess with time, it will change.”
She describes Chilean women in one word: brave. “I would say like they always find a way to get out of their situation,” Dermenghem says.
“Liberación y exceso” (Liberation and excess) - Marcela Henriquez
As her husband does chores around the house, Marcela Henriquez finishes mowing the grass and comes inside to wash her hands and set out cookies for her visiting son and his family. Her two daughters are off at school – one a senior at a local private high school, one a nursing student at the local university – and her host son, a college student from South Carolina is upstairs in his room.
After studying everything from cosmetology to culinary arts to construction, Henriquez decided to become a host mother so she could still earn money but be there for her family day by day, despite the growing trend of women working outside the home.
“There are good things about this day and age, but there are also bad things. So to balance it, I kept receiving students because it provided me with income that let me stay at home, so that when my kids come home, they always see me here as their mother,” she says.
Growing up as the youngest of eight children, Henriquez says her older brothers did not allow her to go to military school like she had always dreamed, but she feels what was supposed to happen happened: She was compensated with a wonderful family, even if they don’t have an abundance of income.
“You can be a woman now in this day and age that wants to be in everything, to go out, to have all these friends, to have a house, a car, everything,” she says. “But everything has a price. And
for me, that price is too high.”
Although she chose this model for her family, she says she recognizes how society is changing when it comes to women and has tried to allow her daughters to be independent.
“I didn’t raise them like I was raised, to think that the best thing that can happen to you is to get married, find a good man. I don’t want that for them. I want them to be able to grow and develop as individuals, but I also want, when it comes time for them to be mothers, for them to have thes ame time for their children that I dedicated to them. I want to pass that down, family values,” Henriquez says. “But on the other hand, if my daughters decide they fall in love with their careers and don’t want to have kids, that’s valid too.”
"Women have been held down for so long that now that doors have been opened for us, we have gone overboard.”
As she instills these ideals in her daughters, she warns them of the dangers this rapid change can bring. She says two words sum up the culture of being a Chilean woman: liberation and excess.
“Because now we’ve made it out of the house, we work and everything, but we haven’t known how to hit the brakes,” Henriquez says. “Your kids, your husband stop being priorities. Women have been held down for so long that now that doors have been opened for us, we have gone over board.”
After witnessing the shift in society over the past 30 years or so, Henriquez says she is saddened to see many women take advantage of the way the culture has changed. She knows many women who work long hours to earn more money just to buy more things or stay out dancing or drinking after work so long that their children barely see them.
“That’s a bad trait us Chileans have – we’re very self-seeking, very materialistic,” she says. Henriquez says she thinks the women of Chile still have a long way to go to begin wisely taking advantage of their ability to be free.
“I think it’s very important that we make ourselves heard and that we begin to value and respect ourselves more as women, that we don’t let men and society hold us down, but we also can’t devalue ourselves,” Henriquez says. “I think there needs to be a balance, and the role of the woman here in Chile continues to be a difficult one.”
One of the ladies from the Iglesia Evangelica Bautista Argomedo stands up during a break in the meeting to retrieve a tray of coffee mugs from the attached kitchen – late Mother’s Day gifts for everyone in the group.
As each one gives her appreciation and gratitude towards this simple gesture, Vega looks from the center of the room at the faces of these women and smiles at the community around her.
“This place is like the place of tranquility and peace, our space,” she says. “We can laugh here,we can cry here, we can talk about our adventures and our non-adventures…and we can comfort one another.”
Although much has changed in the 40 years she has come to meetings here, some things remain the same.
Aguerridas, she calls these women and the women of Chile. “Fighters.”