Public Policy Toward the Mother–Worker in Colombia (1960–2025): Recognition Without Emancipation

Colombian public policy directed at women as mothers and workers between 1960 and 2025 does not constitute a cumulative expansion of rights but a dialectic of recognition that operates against effective emancipation. This article develops a phenomenological reading of that trajectory from Hegel, Honneth, and Han. Four figures of state consciousness are identified: the tutelary mother (1960–1974), the abstract worker (1974–1991), the differentiated rights-bearing subject (1991–2010), and the administered contradiction (2010–2025). Drawing on legislative reconstruction (12 laws, 11 Constitutional Court rulings), official statistical series (Departamento Administrativo Nacional de Estadística [DANE], Profamilia, International Labour Organization [ILO]), and phenomenological interpretation, the analysis demonstrates that each figure emerges from the negation of the previous one without suppressing it, reproducing the split between Honnethian spheres of recognition as the operative mode of the peripheral capitalist state. The fourth figure is analyzed through Han’s burnout society: the mother–worker who has internalized the demand to reconcile productive and reproductive roles embodies the achievement-subject who self-exploits in the name of freedom. Colombia’s fertility collapse to 1.2 children per woman in 2023 may be read as an indication that the dialectic has reached a demographic threshold. The central thesis holds that state mediation without synthesis is not institutional deficiency but a mode of governance that reveals a structural limit of recognition theory.