From the perspective of social and present time history in terms of gender, this article aims to analyze the relationship of mutual dependence between familialism and neoliberalism based on the experience of rural mothers’ centers in the provinces of Llanquihue and Chiloé. during the 1980s. Likewise, specifically, it aims to caracterize the promotion of artisanal work in rural Mothers’ Centers, and the initial entry of women to the salmon farming industry in these provinces; also, it intends to identify the elements that strained the familialist ideal proposed by the civil-military dictatorship in these areas. Our working hypothesis is that this mutual dependence is determined by a controversial ideology regarding “being a woman” that came into dispute in this context and is characterized by the promotion of two supposedly incompatible figures: on the one hand, the devoted motherwife, enabled to carry out crafts understood as “feminine” in the framework of the mothers’ centers; and on the other, the enterprising and independent woman, who finds a job market in the emerging salmon industry in the Los Lagos region. Based on the analysis of primary written, oral and visual sources from a gender perspective, it is shown that this tension blurred the boundaries between public and private in the trajectories of women from southern Chile and had a specific weight in the construction of the dictatorial family ideology in the rural sectors of the country, through a double gender standard expressed in women as workers inside and outside the home.