Motherhood at the Heart of Labour Regulation: Argentina, 1907–1941

Abstract

This Chapter Analyzes the difficult process that led to the legal regulation of women (and children) work during the first decades of the twentieth century in Argentina. It examines the period initiated by the enactment of the first law aimed to protect women and children in 1907 (Law 5291), the reforms applied to labor legislation derived from the ratification of ILO conventions, and the path to the effective regulation of home work in 1941 (Law 12713)The research focuses on the analysis of the public debate and political struggle regarding the interdiction of women´s work outside home boundaries and the tensions posed for the construction of domesticity by home work, its conditions and consequences. This debate focuses the attention of officials, doctors, lawyers, legislators, industry owners, a nascent militant feminism and social Catholicism during the study period. Despite the variety of trajectories and positions, concerns about motherhood (actual or potential) concentrated an almost unanimous consensus in sectors which had irreconcilable positions on other issues (eg Socialists and Catholics).The paper is based on the reports of experts and reformers, the parliamentary debates records of each of these laws, and particularly the references made in these discussions of experiences developed in northern countries, it is possible to account for the configuration of a specific social problems area ?the working women problem?, full of ?transnational" dialogues and references and, at the same time, the definition of a local domesticity understood as "desirable". A concrete example of these dialogues is given by the repeated references in local debates to minimum wage legislation abroad and the foreign initiatives of national consumers leagues, among other experiences and research trends developed in Europe and North America, as well as the participation of local reformers in international forums.