Women, Class, and Education in Mexico, 1880-1928

Abstract

Finally this paper is not an exhaustive treatment of Mexican women as participants in class struggle although it makes observations about the Mexican womens movement at a particular point in historical time. Essentially it is argued here that during the Mexican Revolution educated petty-bourgeois women reformers employed by the state sought to develop and strengthen the subordinate role of working-class women in the home and in production in reaction against the mobilization of peasants and workers in the Mexican Revolution. Their implemented ideology in the field of education and other social services was a manifestation of the level of class struggle in the Mexican Revolution. Secondly the failure of the workers movement to generate an effective womens movement to counteract that of bourgeois feminism lay in the youth size composition and ideological immaturity of the Mexican working class which likewise determined its inability to dominate the Mexican Revolution. (excerpt)