The Women’s Revolution in Mexico, 1910 – 1953

Abstract

Stephanie Mitchell and Patience Schell have produced a classroom-friendly volume that teachers in undergraduate and even high school classes will find extremely useful. Mitchell’s introduction offers a concise narrative of Mexico’s 1910 – 17 revolution and its immediate aftermath, which could easily be assigned in combination with one or more of the essays that follow. Each chapter contains the text of a primary document cited in the essay, creating an easy opportunity for assignments and discussions about primary sources. The essays also frequently reference one another, guiding readers to elaborations on themes. Finally, the authors all adopt a style and language that most readers should find quite accessible.The first chapter following the introduction, Martha Eva Rocha’s prosopographical essay about women seeking recognition as revolutionary veterans, reminds us why volumes like this one remain necessary and indispensable to our arsenal of teaching resources. In March 1916, Venustiano Carranza’s minister of War and Navy announced, “All the military appointments given to señoras y señoritas, whatever may be the services that they have given, are declared null and void” (p. 16). The following year, women were expelled from all branches of the military. As Rocha’s essay and others in this collection remind us, women merit historical study as women because that status, however contested and problematic, mattered (and in many ways still matters) in the realms of law and public policy as well as social practice. While we might teach these essays alongside discussions that trouble the notion of “woman” as a unified or discernable subject, the experiences documented in this collection remind us that it would be a mistake to ignore the tangible impact of “womanhood” in the political and social imaginary.The chapters cover a broad array of women’s experiences during the decades during and immediately after the revolution, including Rocha’s chapter on veterans, Andrew Grant Wood’s on Veracruz rent strikers, Patience Schell’s on Catholic activists, and Katherine Bliss’s on prostitutes in Mexico City’s syphilis clinic. While the volume does not claim to offer a comprehensive account, and experiences and representations of indigenous women are conspicuously absent, it admirably covers considerable social and geographic territory.Building on a well-developed literature on postrevolutionary public education, several essays focus on the opportunities created by women in the teaching professions. During a period when the distinction between revolutionary activism and public education remained blurry, many women found that becoming schoolteachers not only allowed them access to middle-class respectability and a modest (if often unreliable) income but also offered an avenue for pursuing political or ideological aspirations as community organizers. Most of these contributions also grapple with the complicated role that motherhood has played for Mexican women, not only as a lived experience but also as a political motivator and as a role that overlapped with vocations as diverse as teaching and prostitution. In the realm of politics and policy making, as Nichole Sanders and Sarah Buck point out, maternalist claims could be simultaneously constraining and emancipatory — a paradox that invites a lively classroom discussion.Piecing together documentation that often provides only passing glimpses of women’s lives, several chapters adopt biographical or prosopographical strategies to illuminate the connections between women’s private and public lives and between their social efforts and their political ones. These approaches can tend toward hagiography or an awkward familiarity and raise questions, of course, about whether we can generalize from what are often quite unusual experiences or particular perspectives. Nonetheless, these vivid, engaging narratives promise to hold readers’ attention and demonstrate the human stakes of more abstracted or analytical discussions.The contributors keep the volume accessible in part by avoiding sophisticated or jargon-laden theoretical analyses. The essays avoid the citational practices and historiographic reviews that specialists and graduate students find indispensable but that most undergraduates would probably skip. The very elements that make this collection such a valuable asset for teaching will, no doubt, frustrate some readers. The chapters’ length, while suitable for classroom use, requires a simplification of narratives and analyses with which specialists might quibble. The volume contains copyediting errors — incorrect dates, and citations that do not correspond with the textual references, for example — that will probably pass unnoticed by the intended undergraduate audience but that some readers might find distracting.These minor criticisms aside, the editors and authors of this collection have produced a volume that could be used productively in courses on not only Mexican and Latin American history but also comparative women’s history.