In 1877 Miguel Luis Amunátegui, noted historian and Chile's Minister of Education, observed aptly that while the Chinese bound their daughters' feet, his countrymen bound their daughters' minds. Amunátegui's dictum reveals an official concern for women's education that was unique in nineteenth-century Latin America. Chile's efforts to remove the “bindings” from the minds of its young women are important in several respects. Education was in fact the linchpin of an ambitious strategy to revamp and modernize every aspect of Chilean society. Because of the centrality of formal education in this experiment and the intensity of thinking on the subject, when women's education was addressed in official circles, female roles were being defined as part of a coherent national ideology. The Chilean experiments in education thus provide a rare opportunity to observe explicit, detailed reflection on women's roles. Unequivocal official commitment to public education in Chile also resulted in the creation of a large bureaucracy that in turn collected immense quantities of data on household size, family income, occupation, and related subjects. Much of this data concerns women and insofar as it documents the “social bedrock” so often obscured to scholars, it is immensely useful for women's history.