The Women's Revolution in Mexico, 1910-1953

Stephanie Mitchell, Patience A. Schell

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9781461646105
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Mexican History
• Index: History

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. They show how women of diverse backgrounds with differing goals were actively involved, first in military roles during the violent early phase of civil war, and later in the state-building process. Drawing on a variety of perspectives, the volume illuminates the ways women variously accepted, contested, used, and manipulated the revolutionary project in Mexico.

All too often, attention has been limited to elite, pro-revolutionary women's formal political activities, particularly their pursuit of suffrage. This timely volume broadens traditional perspectives, drawing on new scholarship that considers grassroots participation in institution building and the contested nature of the revolutionary process. 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

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1 - The Faces of Rebellion: From Revolutionaries to Veterans in Nationalist Mexico
• 2 - Educating the Mothers of the Nation: The Project of Revolutionary Education in Yucatán
• 3 - Challenging Legal and Gender Constraints in Mexico: Sofia Villa de Buentello’s Criticism of Family Legislation, 1917-1927
• 4 - The Meaning of the Women’s Vote in Mexico, 1917-1953
• 5 - Of the Sublime Mission of Mothers of Families: The Union of Mexican Catholic Ladies in Revolutionary Mexico
• 6 - Theater of Operations: Reform Politics and the Battle for Prostitutes’ Redemption at Revolutionary Mexico City’s Syphilis Hospital
• 7 - “The Proletarian Women Will Make the Social Revolution” : Female Participation in the Veracruz Rent Strike, 1922–1927
• 8 - Por la liberación de la mujer: Women and the Anti-Alcohol Campaign
• 9 - Improving Mothers: Poverty, the Family, and “Modern” Social Assistance in Mexico, 1937–1950
• Conclusion
• Bibliography and Suggested Further Reading
• Index
• About the Contributors
• LATIN AMERICAN SILHOUETTES