A post for International Women’s Day by Professor Alison Ribeiro de Menezes (Head of School)
If I’d been told that I’d end up turning my back on an estimated 5.4 million viewers, not once but twice, when I first started researching World University Service’s assistance to Chilean refugees, of course I wouldn’t have believed it. But I did! There I was standing in the background, with my back decidedly to the camera, chatting away to Chileans as my research was profiled on The One Show last Thursday.
The 1973 military coup in Chile resulted in the imprisonment, torture, disappearance, and death of thousands of Chileans. Its legacy is still deeply felt in a country coming to terms with the traumatic memories of the brutal dictatorship that General Pinochet installed for almost two decades. World University Service (or WUS) helped approximately 900 persecuted Chileans whose studies had been interrupted by the coup, and provided them with university scholarships in the UK. I’ve been interviewing some of them, and some of those who worked at WUS to help them, in order to understand how WUS’s support enabled these refugees to continue their careers and rebuild their lives. And Chilean women recount some of the most interesting – and difficult – stories. On International Women’s Day, it seems fitting to tell the story of WUS’s help to these courageous international women.
Some of the Chilean women I’ve met were themselves activists who fled persecution and came to study in the UK. Here they followed courses on a range of things from social studies, education and business administration, to health and engineering. They discovered they’d arrived in a society challenged by feminism and open in some sectors to hearing more. It’s not quite 50 years, after all, since the women’s liberation movement first took to the streets. For one woman refugee I interviewed, studying in a climate in which social and gendered roles were being questioned inspired her continued resistance to patriarchy and dictatorship back home. She became a significant figure in the Latin American women’s movement.
Other ‘WUS women’ were wives of scholarship holders, which is not to say that they hadn’t themselves suffered before leaving Chile. Quite to the contrary, I heard how one had risked her own safety and endured surveillance by the DINA – Pinochet’s infamous political police – to find where her husband was being secretly held, then registered his disappearance with the Vicariate in Santiago and painstakingly applied for WUS sponsorship on his behalf to get him to safety. Many wives, girlfriends and mothers saved persecuted family members this way. After several years in the UK, my interviewee was given a WUS scholarship in her own right, enabling her to gain professional qualifications and restart an interrupted career.
And the WUS staff of course included women, who are equally worthy of celebration today. These were individuals, such as Marilyn Thomson, featured in the BBC’s short film, whose own activism and empathy led to a career dedicated to helping others, and especially Latin American women, through NGO work. Or Liz Morell, who was amazed to see Marilyn on TV holding a 1985 report she’s helped to write about WUS’s achievements. Through researching WUS I’ve met too many brilliant women (and men!) to name.
When I launched the WUS project at Warwick in May 2017, actress Julie Christie gave a masterful reading of poems by Pablo Neruda. Her reflection on the WUS effort to help Chileans fleeing persecution is worth recalling: ‘It is a reminder of how many people in Britain responded in the 1970s to refugees fleeing from oppression. It is sad to think that, as a country, we are no longer so open to many others seeking refuge from violence and imprisonment today.’
Thank you to those women who did make a difference. Happy International Women’s Day!
University of Warwick | School of Modern Languages and Cultures 