Women, Social Issue and Family Allowance in Colombia: A Key Scenario in the Production of Gender Order during the 1950s and 1960s

in the 1950s, economic crisis and social conflicts led to the introduction of family allowance in Colombia. The historiography of women and the feminist critique of political economy highlighted gender representations underlaying social policies such as family allowances, as they contributed to sustain the patriarchal order. They also restored to historical record alternative proposals such as mothers' wages, through which feminist organizations seeking to emancipate women, brought to the public agenda the importance of women's role in social reproduction. The practice -also adopted in Colombia- of paying the family allowance to the mothers of working families, instead of the workers themselves, represents an intermediate position between rampant patriarchalism and feminist alternatives. To understand how cultural gender representations momentarily dominated the debate on family allowance in Colombia, the relationships between managers of the family compensation funds, social workers that administered them and the women and men beneficiaries need to be analyzed.