Rol de las mujeres en la producción familiar: Trayectorias biográficas en el litoral uruguayo

The social invisibility of the role of women, product of the conditions of inequality and dominance over the female population, is a phenomenon that translates, at the rural level, into ignorance of the role that women play in the national agricultural production. The phenomenon is linked to patriarchy and the sexual division of labor, which tends to relate men to the sphere of production and money (considered superior) and to grant women the domestic and reproductive place. To contribute to the understanding of the role of women in family production and make their contributions visible, some research from the qualitative paradigm was used. Its objectives were to comparatively analyze three cases of family producers linked to colonies from the Uruguayan coast, which made it possible to identify and describe female strategies of resistance present in the cases. For this, semi-structured interviews were carried out, which allowed the construction and validation of biographical trajectories. These were analyzed according to the origin and beginning of women as producers, their consolidation and integration into organizations and collective actions. The comparative analysis of the cases generated results about access to the land and the female economic succession and symbolic strategies present in them. The results indicate that women, in addition to contributing with their productive and reproductive job to maintain the autonomy and economic independence of families, develop economic strategies for the valorization of production and its commercialization, which allows them to manage their own money. These economic strategies are also connected to children’s raising and the development of farm succession strategies. Within rural organizations, exchanges of work, knowledge, and tools between neighbors, peer groups, or collective ventures stand out, as well as state projects and programmers.