Prostitutes and Guardian Angels: Women, Work, and the Family in Porfirian Mexico

Abstract

I K E their counterparts in Europe and North America, middle-class Mexicans have often utilized gender and morality to delineate class boundaries and separate themselves from social others. During the regime of Porfirio Diaz (18761911), members of this class advocated a new cult of female domesticity in which they carefully prescribed women's role: women were to serve as properly educated mothers and guardian angels of the home. They thereby utilized gender not only as an important means of class differentiation but also as a way to champion moral reform. The Mexican bourgeoisie hoped to eradicate vice and inculcate values of thrift, sobriety, hygiene, and punctuality in succeeding generations of workers. In short, they subscribed to a developmentalist ideology, in hopes of turning a new, and feared, floating population (poblacion flotante) of rural and urban workers-born of the mining industry, the railroads, the textile industry, and factory production-into a peaceful, hardworking, and suitably motivated work force.' Middle-class Mexicans expected the state to regulate