The Women's Revolution in Mexico, 1910-1953

by Mitchell, Stephanie; Schell, Patience A.; Bliss, Katherine Elaine; Buck, Sarah A.; Mitchell, Stephanie E.; Escandón, Carmen Ramos; Rocha, Martha Eva; Sanders, Nichole; Smith, Stephanie; Wood, Andrew G.

• ISBN13: 9780742537316
• ISBN10: 0742537315
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-12-12
• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Summary

This book reinvigorates the debate on the Mexican Revolution, exploring what this pivotal event meant to women. The contributors offer a fresh look at women's participation in their homes and workplaces and through politics and community activism. Drawing on a variety of perspectives, the volume illuminates the ways women variously accepted, contested, used, and manipulated the revolutionary project. Recovering narratives that have been virtually written out of the historical record, this book brings us a rich and complex array of women's experiences in the revolutionary and post-revolutionary era in Mexico.

Table of Contents

Introduction	1
Stephanie Mitchell
1 The Faces of Rebellion: From Revolutionaries to Veterans in Nationalist Mexico	15
Martha Eva Rocha
Primary Document: Letter Regarding the Political-Revolutionary Activities of Señora Guadalupe Narváez Bautista	20
2 Educating the Mothers of the Nation: The Project of Revolutionary Education in Yucatan	37
Stephanie J. Smith
Primary Document: A Report from the Chief of the Revolutionary Office of Information and Propaganda (1915)	42
3 Challenging Legal and Gender Constraints in Mexico: Sofia Villa de Buentello's Criticism of Family Legislation, 1917-1927	53
Carmen Ramos Escandón
Primary Document: An Extract from Sofia Villa de Buentello's La mujer la ley (Mexico, 1921)	62
4 The Meaning of the Women's Vote in Mexico, 1917-1953	73
Sarah A. Buck
Primary Document: A Letter from Margarita Robles de Mendoza to Plutarco Elias Calles	84
5 Of the Sublime Mission of Mothers of Families: The Union of Mexican Catholic Ladies in Revolutionary Mexico	99
Patience A. Schell
Primary Document: Of the High and Sublime Mission of Mothers of Families	105
6 Theater of Operations: Reform Politics and the Battle for Prostitutes' Redemption at Revolutionary Mexico City's Syphilis Hospital	125
Katherine Elaine Bliss
Primary Document: Hospital Morelos	141
7 "The Proletarian Women Will Make the Social Revolution": Female Participation in the Veracruz Rent Strike, 1922-1927	151
Andrew Grant Wood
Primary Document: Excerpts from "I, Woman in the Ideal"	157
8 Por la liberación de la mujer: Women and the Anti-Alcohol Campaign	165
Stephanie Mitchell
Primary Document: Letter from Anti-alcohol and Anticlerical Committee of Nahuatzen, Michoacán to President Lázaro Cárdenas	173
9 Improving Mothers: Poverty, the Family, and "Modern" Social Assistance in Mexico, 1937-1950	187
Nichole Sanders
Primary Document: Call to the Women of Mexico	194
Conclusion	205
Patience A. Schell
Bibliography and Suggested Further Reading	217
Index	225
About the Contributors	231