Changing Housing Policies in Chile: Refashioning Maternalism

• In Event: Public Policy, Reforms and Institutions in Chile

Abstract

In Chile, housing policies have traditionally favoured proper families. A proper family was defined as a heterosexual married couple with children. A proper family also entailed a male breadwinner head of household, and a dependant female mother and housewife. As housing policies developed in the first half of the twentieth century, housing was believed to provide a material base for social order. Family structure and matching conventional gender roles were assimilated to social structure. Proper families needed a place to live so as to reproduce an orderly society. By contrast, post-dictatorial housing policies began to undermine this long-standing tendency of limiting housing benefits to married families headed by a male breadwinner. Fresh data obtained from the Ministry of Housing and Urbanism thanks to newly introduced transparency legislation, shows that increasingly women, and, in particular unmarried women are receiving housing subsidies. This paper explores the driving forces of such substantial change. This article argues that as unmarried mothers are disproportionately present among the poorest of the poor, they have benefited from increasingly targeted housing policies. Conservative powers have not opposed granting housing benefits to improper families (i.e. unmarried mothers). Customary discourses of praised motherhood have been refashioned. Thus unmarried women, traditionally excluded from housing benefits, have improved their opportunities of accessing housing. Yet enhanced housing comes at the price of motherhood remaining at the core of women’s citizenship.

Author

• Alejandra Ramm