This outstanding study goes well beyond the excellent dissertation on which it is based. Marie Francois has brought new information and understanding of how everyday life functioned in Mexico from 1750 to 1920. She demonstrates how individuals from the middle through the lowest orders lived their daily lives in the capital city and how they valued their possessions, no matter how meager, and utilized them in strategies to meet everyday needs, celebrate important events, and survive major disasters, that is to say, how they made ends meet. The essential individual and institution, no matter how disliked, was the pawnbroker (usually a Spaniard) and his shop, whether the government-run Monte de Piedad or the private casa de empeños. Francois narrates in detail how collateral credit operated; what goods were hocked, by whom, and how often; and how frequently pawned items were redeemed during the years from the late colonial era through the first decade of the revolution. This produces a daunting, detailed narrative with several supporting appendixes.She concludes that ordinary Mexicans made possible their daily activities by credit obtained by women through loans on their possessions. They constantly pawned goods and often redeemed them by pawning other goods. Clothes were the most common object pawned, but numerous other items were pawned, including utensils, sewing machines, and irons. By examining how credit operated on a daily basis, Francois provides an account of the possessions of ordinary Mexicans from a more reliable source than tax and testament inventories, in which individuals often tried to omit items to avoid payments or probate. The author shows how major events such as independence, the U.S.-Mexican War, the French Intervention, the Porfirian seizure of the presidency, and the first decade of the Revolution affected everyday life. For example, many capital city resident women offered support to the revolution following the decision to close the pawn shops during the Huerta era.The book provides an exhaustive bibliography of the scholarship on women, gender, and Annales studies. The author evaluates daily life during Mexico’s three fundamental revolutions, first against Spain for independence, second against conservatives and France for a Liberal-Republican regime, and third, the social revolution against the foreign-influenced elites. In this regard, her volume needs to be placed explicitly in the conversations involving T. H. Breen’s The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (Oxford, 2004). Moreover, with the rise of both criollo nationalism following independence and popular nationalism promoted by the great social revolution, the book needs to be connected to the interesting list of works that either challenge or expand the essential interpretation of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983), and the older but perhaps more relevant work by Daniel Boorstin, The Americans: The National Experience (1973). All three authors talk about the creation of communities larger than those in which the individual knows all members and values are shared. Anderson leans heavily on the importance of literacy and publications while Breen and Boorstin look to consumer behavior. Francois significantly points scholars toward the issues of both nationalism and consumerism.Francois’s book just may be the investigation that finally shatters the widely held conviction that Mexican society was governed by a patriarchy and that men dominated everywhere but in the kitchen. Alone, this discussion of the preeminent position of women in supporting daily life through their financial activity would not be enough to change this commonplace assertion, but in the company of other recent studies that alter our understanding of gender relationships (such as those by Susan Porter, Patience Schell, Mary Kay Vaughan, Heather Fowler Salamini, Stephanie Mitchell, and several others, neatly summed up for all of Latin America by William E. French and Katherine Bliss in Gender, Sexuality, and Power in Latin America since Independence [2007]), it brings us to the point of a major paradigm shift in both the periodization of the national history and the behavioral practices of everyday life. It was no secret that women in both the city and the countryside controlled finances and bought, sold, and pawned to make possible the lives of the family, and this simply does not square with arguments of patriarchy. How men and women related to this pattern needs explicit explanation.Both for what she narrates explicitly about everyday life and what she suggests implicitly about the historiography, consumerism, and patriarchy, Marie Francois has written a significant and thought-provoking book that all Mexican scholars should read and ponder.