Developing Women, Developing the Nation: Public Health and Human Capital in Postrevolutionary Bolivia

My paper analyzes state-sponsored public health programs as a development initiative in post-revolutionary Bolivia. After the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (Revolutionary Nationalist Movement, or MNR) took power in a social revolution in 1952, they embarked on a series of reforms designed to modernize the country and solve the problem of economic dependency. Universal suffrage, nationalization of the mining industry, and agrarian reform have garnered the most scholarly attention, however, my research demonstrates that public health was an essential component of the MNR’s national development goals. Specifically, public health programs were designed to improve the country’s “human capital”—healthy citizens would be more productive workers and better contributors to national economic growth.

Public health officials’ reports show that they targeted rural indigenous women as the primary obstacle to increasing the country’s human capital. During the 1950s, the MNR state expanded rural health services with a particular focus on building maternal and infant health clinics, creating courses for future mothers, and training nurses and midwives in order to professionalize childbirth and childrearing. Using publications from the Bolivian Ministry of Health and other public health organizations, I analyze this public health initiative as a development program that put women and their biological functions at the center of national conversations of political unity and economic prosperity. In this way, I argue, MNR leaders and public health official saw indigenous women as both a threat to the nation and the source of its greatest hope.