The history of women in Chile combines the leading role and the social action with the discrimination and invisibility. Active from the Colonial age in the humanitarian task, by the end of the last century women entered the university (1877), graduating like the first professionals of Latin America. More than fifty years of fight were necessary to conquer their citizenship and with it a slow access to positions of popular representation and government. The great social subjects, world-wide peace and their condition of subordination, impregnated their collective action from the start of the century, and reappeared in the recent decades – under the military dictatorship in a group of organizations who fought to get the respect to the human rights, the recovery of the democracy in all aspects, and the effective equality between women and men.

The Chilean women, for example, went out each 8 of March to confront the capitalist military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1989). When the political parties in Chile, mainly directed by men, negotiated a return to the democracy, these women raised a flag that said “Democracy in the country and the house.”
In the last decades the situation of the woman in Chile has experienced a revolutionary change with the massive and progressive incorporation of women to the different areas of the national life. One of those great examples is that a woman, Michelle Bachelet, is the Minister of Defense, being the first woman having such position not only at a national level but at Latin American level as well. In spite of it, there are still levels of discrimination that don’t allow the total equality of opportunities, among them, the nonexistence of a divorce law and an abortion law. The latter (therapeutic abortion) abolished by Pinochet’s regime in 1989.

The history of women in Chile combines the leading role and the social action with the discrimination and invisibility. Active from the Colonial age in the humanitarian task, by the end of the last century women entered the university (1877), graduating like the first professionals of Latin America. More than fifty years of fight were necessary to conquer their citizenship and with it a slow access to positions of popular representation and government. The great social subjects, world-wide peace and their condition of subordination, impregnated their collective action from the start of the century, and reappeared in the recent decades – under the military dictatorship in a group of organizations who fought to get the respect to the human rights, the recovery of the democracy in all aspects, and the effective equality between women and men.

The Chilean women, for example, went out each 8 of March to confront the capitalist military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1989). When the political parties in Chile, mainly directed by men, negotiated a return to the democracy, these women raised a flag that said “Democracy in the country and the house.”
In the last decades the situation of the woman in Chile has experienced a revolutionary change with the massive and progressive incorporation of women to the different areas of the national life. One of those great examples is that a woman, Michelle Bachelet, is the Minister of Defense, being the first woman having such position not only at a national level but at Latin American level as well. In spite of it, there are still levels of discrimination that don’t allow the total equality of opportunities, among them, the nonexistence of a divorce law and an abortion law. The latter (therapeutic abortion) abolished by Pinochet’s regime in 1989.