Revolutionary women in postrevolutionary Mexico

Abstract

Review of Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico by Jocelyn Olcott, Duke University Press, Durham, 2005 Based on three rich case studies, Jocelyn Olcott's book Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico brings together a comparative analysis on Mexican women's political participation during the period of long Cardenismo-from Lazaro Cardenas' 1928 instauration as Michoacan's governor until the 1940 initiation of Avila's Camacho presidency (p. 24). The book's thesis states that Mexican men and women experienced citizenship as gendered, as contingent to specific historical and political and less as a legal framework than a set of social, cultural, and political processes (p. 6). Olcott's research rediscovers a comprehensive history of feminist social movements and demonstrates that Mexican women were politically organized revolutionary citizens, in spite of the sexist social order of that time. With concomitant attention to regional, national, and transnational contexts, this study surveys competing gender ideologies during a period of state-formation. It draws on individual and collective stories of feminine political organizing, rather than relying on official discourses, to approach the specificities of women's performance of citizenship. Olcott's nonlineal work of historiography combines materials from national and regional archives, popular histories, and public epistles. The three main case studies presented in the book cover regions with contrasting characters: the central state of Michoacan, the northern region of Comarca Lagunera, and the southeastern Mayan state of Yucatan. In addition, the author surveys the national implications of radicalism in the port city of Acapulco, and feminist political organizing in Mexico City. The book's first chapter surveys the roots of Mexican feminist political organizing. It starts out by tracing women's activism for expanded social, economic, and political rights back to the time of the Revolution. It periodizes the First Feminist Congress in Yucatan in 1916, which was able to garner more than seven hundred women in Merida, as the formal origin of organized feminine political mobilization. Culminating with discussions on the national women's congresses of the early 1930s, this chapter states that by that time, although contested and fragmented (p. 51) a national women's movement had developed. In this same chapter, a discussion on the 1917 Constitutional Congress focuses its attention on the citizenship articles, finally rejecting women's suffrage. A reference to the Catholic Cristero Rebellion in Michoacan as recasting women's piety from antimodern to potentially violent and disruptive (p. 41), portrays the tensions between competing gender ideologies formulated by the government's anticlerical project on one side, and the Church on the other. Finally overcome by the ruling party, the end of the Cristero Rebellion consolidated Cardenas' mandate as Michoacan's governor. Chapter two surveys the trajectory of women's organizing in Michoacan during the 1920s and early 1930s. It gives attention to the role of the state-founded Revolutionary Labor Confederation of Michoacan (CRMDT) and other associations at linking the national bureaucracy with local organizations, which rendered women support and leadership for political organizing. Women's political organizing was thus concomitantly dependent on regional and national political scenarios. While Cardenismo offered women opportunities for organizing, feminist mobilizing was, however, constrained by national and regional structures of power and their respective political agendas. …