The Global Sixties in Chile: Health, Sexuality, and Rights

• In Event: Histories of Health, Rights, and Nation in Chile and Bolivia: Resolving “Emergencies” and Negotiating Exclusion and Inclusion in Twentieth Century Nations

Abstract

This study explores the debates over health, sexuality, and rights in Chile in the long 1960s, when themes such as voluntary motherhood and sexuality gained new attention not only due to innovative medical technology such as the contraceptive pill, but also in the context of global debates of sexual “revolutions,” and women’s rights. Tracing the multiple translations of such landmark publications as Our Bodies, Ourselves by the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective in the United States, we can explore not only some of the competing gendered definitions of the concept of rights on a global level, but can trace its multiple applications – and implications for debates over women’s health, sexuality, and rights in Chile. We also find that individual women and women’s groups began to challenge the focus on family- and maternal health, widely adapted by Christian Democrats under President Eduardo Frei Montalva (1964-1970).

Author

• Jadwiga E Pieper Mooney, University of Arizona