Maternity policies during the Peronist period: ruptures and continuities in gender relations

Abstract

In this paper, we aim at assessing how historiography has described and analyzed maternity public policies during the first and second Peronist government. We also aim at assessing the conceptual, analytical and historiographical debates that those policies produced, sometimes in an implicit way.

This approach will allow us to study how feminine identities were historically constituted and how roles, functions and power relationships legitimized gendered distinctions based on biological differences. These differences naturalized the centrality of motherhood in terms of reproductive function in the lives of women and even when based on these binary gender constructs they considered limiting the scope of maternal roles but not the paternal ones.