Textbooks and their discourses: representations of women in Chilean school history (13.000 BC - 1810)

Abstract

This study analyzes the representations of women present in the manuals that address the history of Chile from 13,000 BC (date of the archaeological vestiges of Monteverde) until 1810 (year of the First National Government Council) and explain how they align with or distance themselves from recent historiographic production (2008-2021) about female participation in the aforementioned historical period. For this, first, a hermeneutical analysis of 13 school textbooks published between 2009 and 2017 by four Chilean publishers was developed, using aprioristic categories coming from the textual orientation discourse, the historical discursive method and the discursive modalities of Jurjo Torres. Documentary analysis was then used to evaluate the recent historical research (2008-2021) on the role of women in this period of Chile’s history to contrast their contributions with the results obtained from the analysis of textbooks. On the one hand, we conclude that textbooks tend to marginalize or minimize female participation in pre-republican Chilean history based on a series of conventions, such as partial exclusion, relational historical relevance, suppression, assignment of passive roles and generalized representation; and, on the other hand, there is a clear disconnection between school history and the historiographical production dedicated to the pre-Hispanic, conquest and colonial periods because the Chilean curriculum of History, Geography and Social Sciences focuses on preserving the androcentric history of the country.