Women’s letters from the Chilean Nitrate Era: address choice, emotions and patriarchal reciprocity

Abstract This article explores how women from the lower ranks of Chilean society mobilized a dynamic address system through affective letter-writing to negotiate their familial position and identity at the end of Chile’s Nitrate Era. Inspired by the third wave in historical sociolinguistics and in dialogue with the glottopolitical perspective, the study foregrounds the interactive nature of ego-documents by analyzing indexical connections between address choice, emotions and unequal gendered relationships between partners. The pragmatic analysis of a set of letters written by women between 1913 and 1928 shows insightful connections between address choice, speech acts, emotions and politeness strategies. By linking textual evidence to the material conditions in which letter-writing is embedded, the article illustrates how women writers negotiated their position and personae within the family structure by inscribing letter-writing in a system of patriarchal reciprocity. This suggests that address choices and the expression of emotions are an index of gendered reciprocal practices that allowed women to preserve their familial structure in the context of industrialization and labor migration.