Gender and the Mexican Revolution: Yucatán Women and the Realities of Patriarchy

By Stephanie J. Smith

The state of Yucatan is commonly considered to have been a hotbed of radical feminism during the Mexican Revolution. Challenging this romanticized view, Stephanie Smith examines the revolutionary reforms designed to break women's ties to tradition and religion, as well as the ways in which women shaped these developments.

Smith analyzes the various regulations introduced by Yucatan's two revolution-era governors, Salvador Alvarado and Felipe Carrillo Puerto. Like many revolutionary leaders throughout Mexico, the Yucatan policy makers professed allegiance to women's rights and socialist principles. Yet they, too, passed laws and condoned legal practices that excluded women from equal participation and reinforced their inferior status.

Using court cases brought by ordinary women, including those of Mayan descent, Smith demonstrates the importance of women's agency during the Mexican Revolution. But, she says, despite the intervention of women at many levels of Yucatecan society, the rigid definition of women's social roles as strictly that of wives and mothers within the Mexican nation guaranteed that long-term, substantial gains remained out of reach for most women for years to come.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Jun 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9780807888650

Stephanie J. Smith

Stephanie J. Smith is assistant professor of history at the Ohio State University.

Book preview

001

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Introduction

One - Redefining Women

Alvarado—The Women’s Revolutionary? (1915-1918)

Mexico’s First Feminist Congresses

Revolutionary Education

Carrillo Puerto and ModernistReforms (1922-1924)

Educated Revolutionaries,Revolutionary Women

Ligas Feministas

Conclusion

Two - Broken Promises, Broken Hearts

Women’s Use of the Courts before the Revolution

Revolutionary Justice

Justice for All!

Legal Defense for the Poor

Science and the Courts during the 1920s

Rape and Women’s Use of the Courts

Conclusion

Three - Honor and Morality

Before the Revolution

Religion and Revolution

The Church and State duringthe1920s

Morality and Honor in the Theaters of the Court, Street, and Home

Conclusion

Four - If Love Enslaves ...Love Be Damned!

Divorce as Separation of Bodies (1872-1915)

Revolutionary Divorce Laws (1915-1922)

Revolutionary Divorce Cases

Carrillo Puerto and Liberal Divorce (1922-1924)

The World Seeks a Divorce

Opposition to Divorce

The End to Radical Divorce (1925-1930)

Men and Women Return to Court (1925-1930)

Conclusion

Five - Women in Public and Public Women

Bustling City,UnrulyWomen before the Revolution

The Years of Salvador Alvarado:Sex,Drugs,and Alcohol

Hygienic Reforms,Prostitutes,and Felipe Carrillo Puerto

Conclusion

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

001

Publication of this book has been made possible by generous grants from

the Ohio State University Department of History and College of Humanities.

© 2009 THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

A section of chapter 1 was previously published in "Educating the Mothers of the Nation:

The Project of Revolutionary Education in Yucatán," in The Women’s Revolution in Mexico,

1910-1953, edited by Stephanie Mitchell and Patience A. Schell

(Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 37-51.

Chapter 4 was previously published in condensed form as "‘If Love Enslaves . . . Love

Be Damned!’ Divorce and Revolutionary State Formation in Yucatán," in Sex in Revolution:

Gender, Politics, and Power in Modern Mexico, edited by Jocelyn Olcott, Mary Kay Vaughan, and

Gabriela Cano (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006).

Set in Joanna and Manufactured in the United States of America

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of

the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the

Council on Library Resources.

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member

of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Smith, Stephanie J.

Gender and the Mexican Revolution : Yucatán women and the realities of patriarchy /

Stephanie J. Smith.—1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8078-3284-4 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8078-5953-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)

eISBN : 29-4-000-01969-4

1. Women revolutionaries—Mexico—Yucatán (State)—History—20th century.

2. Women political activists—Mexico—Yucatán (State)—History—20th century.

3. Yucatán (Mexico : State)—Politics and government—1910-1946. 4. Political

participation—Mexico—Yucatán (State)—History—20th century. 5. Women’s rights—

Mexico—Yucatán (State)—History—20th century. 6.Yucatán (Mexico : State)—

History—Revolution, 1910-1920—Women. I. Title.

HQ1236.5.M6S65 2009

305.48’8687207265—dc22

2008050480

cloth 13 12 11 10 09 5 4 3 2 1

paper 13 12 11 10 09 5 4 3 2 1

for eva and Jim

002

Acknowledgments

In 1997 I visited the Yucatecan state archives in Mérida, where I randomly ordered a box of documents from the municipal archives of Valladolid. What I discovered inside inspired this book. The dusty container held no less than forty-eight judicial records of poor people, including many Maya women, who appealed their situations before revolutionary military tribunals. While all of their testimonies were remarkable, what surprised me most was the large number of women who revealed astonishing stories of bravery through long years of hardship. These were not retiring, shy women who asked for help while deferring to the commanders’ authority. Rather, the women boldly addressed the state officials, demanding that the revolutionaries specifically address their needs. Years later, I remain entranced with the women who participated in the Mexican Revolution, and through this book I hope to share my joy in uncovering their many contributions.

It is with great pleasure that I acknowledge the intellectual support and assistance that I received during the writing of this book. My greatest debt is to Barbara Weinstein, who has helped me in more ways than I can express. Her scholarship provided a formidable example to follow, while her astute observations guided my research. Barbara served as my Ph.D. thesis adviser at Stony Brook, and she has remained an admirable friend and colleague ever since. Barbara read this book more times than I can remember, and I am grateful for her continued support. Mary Kay Vaughan also provided valuable comments throughout the years. Not only did her smart work influence my own, but she also generously gave her time and ideas. Florencia Mallon’s suggestions on patriarchy and gender were incredibly helpful, as were her overall insights. Terry Rugeley first sparked my interest in Latin America, and I am quite appreciative that he agreed to mentor me in the history of Yucatán. At the Ohio State University, Donna Guy and Ken Andrien carefully read my manuscript, offering constructive counsel not only on the book but also on life in academia. I also want to thank Gene Lebovics, Temma Kaplan, Paul Gootenberg, Brooke Larson, Jocelyn Olcott, Ben Fallaw, Charles Hale, and Gilbert Joseph for their advice and intellectual inspiration.

Various funding sources allowed me to complete the research and writing of this book. First of all, a Fulbright-García Robles Fellowship and an American Association of University Women Dissertation Fellowship granted crucial financial support, without which I could not have carried out this project. The Ohio State University History Department also provided generous financial resources for the book, as did OSU’s College of Humanities. While working in Mérida, Yucatán, I was affiliated with the Unidad de Ciencias Sociales, Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, where I met a number of outstanding scholars who offered valuable resources and ideas. Lastly, I am also thankful for the support of the history department at Stony Brook while I was in graduate school.

Throughout this project, I have benefited from the encouragement of numerous colleagues, archivists, and friends, both in Mexico and in the United States. In Mérida, Alejandra García Quintanilla from the Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán generously offered her home to me, inviting me to live with her and her family. I am also immensely grateful for the friendship of Piedad (Susy) Peniche Rivero, director of the Archivo General del Estado de Yucatán in Mérida, who kindly opened the doors to the state archive and shared numerous crucial sources. In addition to their positions at the university and the archives, Alejandra and Susy became wonderful friends and intellectual colleagues with whom I enjoyed many long conversations. At the Yucatecan state archives, Andrea Vergara Medina and Candelaria (Candy) Flota García not only helped me find documents over the years, but they also invited my daughter and me into their homes. I also thank the staffs of the Centro de Apoyo a la Investigación Histórica de Yucatán, including Jorge Canto, who is now director; the Hemeroteca del Estado José María Pino Suárez; the Archivo Histórico de la Arquidiócesis de Yucatán; and the Archivo Registro Civil del Estado de Yucatán.

In the United States, Leslie Alexander has been a true companion, and I have thoroughly enjoyed our long conversations on a number of scholarly issues and decidedly nonacademic topics as well. Illeana Rodríguez, Debra Moddlemog, Jennifer Siegel, Lilia Fernández, Margaret Newell, and Judy Wu all have made my time in Columbus, Ohio, a great experience. My friend Juliette Levy and I first met while doing research in Mérida, where we spent long hours in the archives and at any other place that had air-conditioning. Susan Gauss and I shared the same Ph.D. defense date and party afterward at Stony Brook, and she has remained a true confidante ever since.

I owe a great debt to Elaine Maisner and the staff of the University of North Carolina Press. Elaine is a superb editor, and working with her was an absolute joy. The two readers of the manuscript provided immensely valuable comments, and their comments made the book significantly stronger.

Lastly, I want to thank my family. My mother, Erma Smith, died before I finished this book, but she always encouraged me with unconditional support; without her I could not have pursued yet another dream. My father, Jerry Smith, and his wife, Lee, have provided lasting confidence in my work. My daughter, Eva Smith Pietri, and my husband, James Genova, have played incredibly important roles in my life and in the writing of this book. Both have traveled with me to Mexico numerous times, and Evie even spent many childhood summers with me in the archives and at friends’ homes in Mérida. Jim, a fellow historian, has read my manuscript countless times, and our long conversations have been a source of inspiration and fun. I am so lucky that Jim, Evie, and I all share similar passions, and I thank them for being an integral part of my life in every way.

The State of Yucatán, ca. 1925

003

Introduction

Women and the Radical Revolutionary Laboratory

Simona Cen, Catalina Chimal, Prudencia Cauich, Rosalía Almeida de Rivas, María Rosa Guillermo, Juana Duran, and Narcisa Alcocer all appeared before the revolutionary military tribunals in Yucatán in 1915.¹ At first glance, it would appear that these seven women had few traits in common and little to do with the epic events of the Mexican Revolution. Simona, Catalina, and Prudencia were poor, rural Maya orphans whose parents had died when the girls were young. Although they could have remained with relatives after their parents’ deaths, local officials instead forced them to work as domestic servants in the households of wealthy families. Simona, Catalina, and Prudencia never received payment for their years of hard labor, except perhaps a few items of cast-off clothing and an occasional inexpensive trinket. All three women experienced even greater challenges after they became pregnant by their bosses, who then abandoned them without money or means of taking care of themselves.

Rosalía and María Rosa, meanwhile, lived very different lives from these orphaned Maya women. Both came from urban areas; Rosalía grew up in Yucatán’s capital of Mérida, and María Rosa resided in Valladolid. Wealthy and educated, the women benefited from strong, supportive families with fathers who protectively guarded their daughters’ well-being. When they grew old enough to marry, Rosalía and María Rosa assumed that they had chosen men who would be proper spouses and that their marriages would be happy and productive. After all, Rosalía and her husband were exceptionally rich, owning several haciendas and other assorted properties throughout the state, and María Rosa was engaged to marry a well-respected local teacher. Ultimately, however, Rosalía’s husband abandoned her and their children to live with another woman, and María Rosa lost her honor when her fiancé refused to marry her after she became pregnant with his child. Even worse, he testified that he could prove that María Rosa was involved with three other young men, all of whom recently had engaged in loving relations with her.

Unlike the other five women, Juana and Narcisa were neither impoverished Maya orphans nor particularly wealthy. They came from fairly comfortable family circumstances, but they also lost their honor along with their virginity. Juana’s lover refused to marry her after she became pregnant, although according to Juana he continually promised marriage as a way of inducing her into having sex with him. Similarly, Narcisa’s novio attempted to seduce her after he asked for her hand in marriage. Narcisa resisted his advances until her father’s death, when her boyfriend finally trapped her in his net and she surrendered so that he could take the satisfaction of his instincts. She eventually gave birth to a baby who died, and although they continued to see each other for eight years, her boyfriend refused to repair Narcisa’s damaged honor by marrying her.

Despite their differences in class, ethnicity, and geography, all of these women demonstrated considerable initiative before the tribunals.. Most did not know how to read or sign their names to the court documents, yet they effectively argued their circumstances before the revolutionary commander. Revealing their awareness of widening political and social opportunities, all seven women utilized the judicial system to challenge patriarchal forms of power and to demand that the courts restore their honor or improve their lives. Far from being anomalies, these women were representative of many throughout Yucatán during this era who, despite the burden of their past hardships and an apparent disassociation from the revolutionary struggle, utilized the courts to insist that officials take their cases seriously and live up to the revolutionaries’ promises to specifically address the needs of women.² Under these novel circumstances, women became adept at using emergent opportunities within the revolutionary judicial structures to fight against years of oppression. The process of becoming involved in the court system could empower women as they pressured the revolutionary government to transform rhetoric into concrete actions.

Beyond their individual resourcefulness, these seven women argued their cases before a revolutionary military tribunal instead of a traditional court. General Salvador Alvarado, Yucatán’s governor and military commander from 1915 to 1918, implemented these Tribunals of the Revolution as a means for the poor to receive retribution for past grievances and as a way for officials to respond legally to the complaints of workers against rich landowners, the needs of widows and orphans, and innocent women affronted and abandoned.³ While Yucatán’s conventional courts continued to function during the revolution, hearing penal matters and civil issues such as child custody and divorce cases, the military tribunals operated parallel to the standing judicial system as alternative revolutionary courts. With the exception of Rosalía, all seven women received some sort of restitution, either in the form of monetary compensation or a marriage decree. Originally, Rosalía appeared before a military commander to request an end to her marriage; however, the civil courts were the appropriate judicial venue for divorces, and the commander turned her case over to the proper authority. This decision turned out to be unfortunate for Rosalía. For the most part, conventional courts were more conservative in nature, and the civil judge who decided her case decreed that Rosalía was an unfit mother, perhaps because she rather than her husband had initiated the divorce proceedings. Regardless of the judge’s motives, Rosalía lost all rights to her children, who were to spend the rest of their childhood years with their father.

Women such as Rosalía often encountered legal obstacles in the midst of the Mexican Revolution, when policy makers created laws for women’s development but the cultural climate and revolutionary personnel generally upheld men’s patriarchal claims to power and opposed women’s rights. Military tribunals provided women with an opportunity to win at least a small settlement, but the traditional courts continued to operate as they had for years, led by judges who rarely supported women’s cases and instead preferred to privilege men’s testimonies. This was especially true in the case of divorce, since most authorities still contended that women should be married, or at least a virgin if not married. Moreover, beginning with Alvarado’s creation of the Department of Legal Medicine in 1918, the courts increasingly turned to notions of modern science when carrying out justice, especially in cases involving women’s honor. By the 1920s the postrevolutionary judicial system frequently utilized medical tests to determine the condition of a woman’s hymen as a gauge of her integrity and the veracity of her declarations in court. Such accentuated biopolitical measures sought to sanitize and medicalize society, and their implementation reinforced separate and unequal gender spheres while maintaining a distinction between good women (chaste and married) and bad women (prostitutes and adulteresses). Not only did the laws and regulations emphasize such distinctions, but society did also, ensconced in the state apparatus and its multiple expressions in Mexican culture. The limited dimensions of revolutionary initiatives meant the further devaluation of women’s testimonies in court and a growing reliance on the examination of women’s bodies as a source of evidence. While the military tribunals gave ordinary poor women and men the opportunity to have their grievances heard before sympathetic judges, they were a short-lived but radical anomaly within the revolutionary and postrevolutionary judicial system.

Understanding these remarkable historical events requires the rethinking of women’s roles within the Mexican Revolution to create a gendered analysis of the revolutionary process. Gender and the Mexican Revolution addresses such concerns by considering issues of women and gender during this transformative era to analyze revolutionary patriarchy and its liberal precedents that thwarted women from becoming full Mexican citizens. Discursively linking women and Yucatán’s Maya population, revolutionary officials argued that both women and indigenous people remained in perpetual backwardness, forever tied to the Catholic Church. To help facilitate the state’s entrance into the modern era, Yucatán’s two revolutionary governors, Salvador Alvarado and Felipe Carrillo Puerto (1922-24), responded with putatively progressive laws designed to improve women’s status in education, law, family issues, health and sanitation, labor, and freedom from control of the church. While at first glance the nominally egalitarian legal decrees appear to have provided women with increased opportunities, a closer analysis reveals the limiting nature of the reforms. Alvarado and Carrillo Puerto professed an allegiance to socialism and even founded and directed the state’s official Socialist Party, but they mirrored liberal philosophy in the faith they placed in the inherent differences between men and women and the corresponding natural functions they were to carry out within society.⁴ Accordingly, the governors took a traditional approach to gender roles when they argued that the fundamental place of women was within the home, performing their instinctive duties as wives and mothers, while rational, superior intellectual skills and common sense made men better suited for public duty. The official discourse of this time may have championed changes aimed at women’s improvement, but a close consideration of the gendered assumptions that shaped the revolutionary reforms helps us to understand how the class and gender politics reflected in the policy makers’ revolutionary rhetoric failed to address or fundamentally challenge patriarchal privilege.

As Mary Kay Vaughan observes, even while the Mexican Revolution of 1910 was a quintessentially patriarchal event for rural women, women were still able to open new spaces for themselves.⁵ The governors’ progressive laws provided some opportunities for women to participate in the revolutionary process in varied ways, and women responded by interacting with policy makers to create better lives. My research investigates revolutionary reforms designed to break women’s ties to tradition and religion, but I also uncover the ways in which women influenced these new transformations. For example, educated women wrote letters to local newspapers to publicly demand that revolutionary officials live up to their promises to help women, especially in the areas of family life. An examination of court cases also reveals that both poor and wealthy women appeared before the military tribunals to insist that revolutionary commanders address the unique circumstances that affected their lives. In the countryside, rural teachers informed poor Maya workers of their rights, often instigating resistance among the laborers even while state administrators attempted to limit women’s activities to teaching. And feminists united in meetings or leagues to pressure leading members of the revolutionary government through more direct political action. In this manner, this book points to historical continuities in policies and attitudes that relegated women to the roles of wife and mother, yet it simultaneously highlights the importance of women’s individual and collective agency.

To explore the complicated process of women’s involvement in nation-state formation, my study follows two paths.⁶ First, in an effort to explore the social and legal traditions that structured the revolution’s foundational principles, both on the federal and Yucatecan state levels, I analyze the various regulations introduced by Governors Alvarado and Carrillo Puerto. The second direction utilizes court documents to explicate the changing roles of women and how they negotiated their places within society. Ultimately, this approach demonstrates that a nuanced understanding of revolutionary engagement can reveal surprising ways in which ordinary people subverted dominant paradigms, even in highly circumscribed contexts.⁷

004

Patriarchy and Revolution

An analysis of revolutionary and postrevolutionary Yucatán provides an exceptional opportunity to examine a society in transition, where the continuities of the old regimes of patriarchy coexisted with emerging systems of gender subordination, especially in areas of scientific medicine and hygiene.⁸ Here my work parallels Susan Besse’s and Sueann Caulfield’s studies of Brazil. While Besse analyzes the modernization of patriarchy and Caulfield focuses on modernized constructions of honor and citizenship, both imply a kind of hybrid discourse that draws on traditional notions of patriarchy and honor and new constructions of gender and difference.⁹ As in other recent studies of Latin America, these scholars emphasize a shift from women’s history to gender as a category of historical analysis to move beyond the recognition of women’s active participation in historical events and to consider the ways in which gender identities and negotiations pervade political processes.¹⁰ This book utilizes gender as an analytical framework to examine relations of power (including among women and among men), but it also considers notions of patriarchy to provide an understanding of the revolutionary state’s reproduction of male privilege where men and women occupied differentiated and unequal positions in the home and society at large.¹¹ Through an examination of the manners in which ethnicity, class, and generation complicate gender and patriarchy as explanatory frameworks, this work mediates the seemingly contradictory conceptual tensions between gender and patriarchy to analyze the connections between systemic and contingent relations of power and women’s agency.¹² As a system of concentrated male power, patriarchy relates to how a particular division of power is created and reproduced. Gender hierarchies may have systemic dimensions as well, but this is a more flexible and contingent framework that can be used to examine different relations of control. While patriarchy subjects all women—regardless of class, literacy, or ethnicity—to male domination, gender relations are part of a more fluid and diffuse, yet also pervasive, set of contingent power relations that can, in the end, contest, reproduce, and reconstruct male dominance.¹³

It is useful to consider the establishment of patriarchy as a historical process, not created by a single event or preserved by one group of men alone.¹⁴ The historicizing of patriarchal practices is integral to an analysis of revolutionary Mexico, as is the consideration of the ways in which the policies and cultural restraints of different geographical regions maintained patriarchal authority across class and ethnic boundaries.¹⁵ As Steve Stern points out, scholars of Mexico cannot separate patriarchy from issues of class and ethnicity; patriarchy intersects with gendered color-class hierarchies and thus encompasses more than simply an alliance of men to subordinate women.¹⁶ By taking such factors into account, Stern’s analysis elucidates the pervasiveness and complex nature of patriarchy throughout Yucatán from the highest level of government to the most humble household. For one, women wrote intimate and revealing letters to Governor Alvarado, politely addressing him as if he were a father of the oppressed who could solve all of their problems. After all, the governor presented himself as the paternal guardian of women, promoting their roles as mothers and wives within the safety of their homes and creating new laws to protect them from society’s dangers, including religious propaganda.¹⁷ On the local level, elite men inscribed patriarchal forms of power rooted in class- and ethnic-based roles within Yucatecan society by practicing patriarchal authority not only over the women of their households, but also over poorer, Maya male laborers. Ultimately, such gendered hierarchies reinforced cultural divisions, exacerbated social tensions, and further institutionalized the practice of revolutionary patriarchy. Moreover, not all Yucatecan women struggled against the patriarchal state; indeed, many supporters of the church contributed to their own disenfranchisement by working to repeal revolutionary reforms such as birth control or increased civil responsibilities, which theoretically promised women greater freedoms.

As with other great societal transformations, the Mexican Revolution ushered in new forms of state discipline, while old institutions, including the Catholic Church, temporarily lost control to the revolutionaries. Paradoxically, the radical leadership of Alvarado and Carrillo Puerto constructed policies aimed at modernizing the Mexican nation and producing a society of equal citizens, but it continued to reaffirm women’s subordinate positions within society at large—and, more specifically, within the home—in the name of achieving freedom from the tyrannies of the past. Such contradictions, of course, were not unique to the Mexican Revolution.¹⁸ Although Mexico’s was the first of several great twentieth-century Latin American revolutions that espoused the language of women’s emancipation, others followed, including those in Cuba (1959) and Nicaragua (1979).¹⁹ Even in these historically significant social upheavals, however, women continued to encounter male-centered power structures organized to keep them at home, raising children and dependent on males. In each case, the rhetoric of female emancipation was an integral element in revolutionary legislation designed to weaken existing power structures, but as in Yucatán, the revolutionaries presented few fundamental challenges to patriarchal authority and the dominance of the male-headed household.

To uncover the source of women’s secondary positions, even during such seemingly egalitarian revolutionary moments, feminist critiques have analyzed the historical elaboration of liberal thought that legitimized the persistence of traditional patriarchal authority across cultural and national divides. ²⁰ As these scholars stress, liberalism’s division of the social universe into separate, theoretically equal, but essentially gendered public and private spheres is key to this accommodation.²¹ Males dominated even in the liberal definition of the household’s feminine private sphere, marking the extension of patriarchy beyond the explicitly male public sphere. Historically, the concept of separate spheres has had important implications for the definition of rights and the drawing of the boundaries along gendered lines for citizenship, and revolutionary Yucatán was no exception.²² While Governors Alvarado and Carrillo Puerto deemed a few women, such as the middle-class feminists, to be eligible for political activity, they considered most women to be inadequately prepared for public political participation and thus more suitable for the private domestic space, protected by their husbands or other appropriate male figures. Moreover, Alvarado’s and Carrillo Puerto’s legal reforms reflected the notion that unreasonable emotion determined women’s actions, meaning they required special measures to keep them safe from those who might take advantage of their weakness. In response, revolutionary officials argued that women should be educated to be freed from such traditional ideas, but the goal of such projects was to mold women into suitable (and cooperative) mothers and wives within the protected environment of the home while their husbands worked and deliberated in the public sphere.²³

Jürgen Habermas defines the public sphere as a domain of our social life where citizens form public opinions through rational debate without being subject to coercion from the state.²⁴ But as Pablo Piccato argues, Habermas’s definition implies a normative model of an egalitarian and rational public sphere and not a particular expression of such.²⁵ Piccato’s insistence on a historical specificity is fundamental to this study, especially when one considers that Habermas’s concept of the public sphere ignores gender issues and the particular inequalities that prevented women from participating in the realm of the public as equals. Significantly, while Habermas traces the historical emergence of the liberal public sphere as rooted in the concept of a marketplace where private individuals conduct their business, women’s lack of economic and political independence, in addition to deeply entrenched patriarchal social customs, marginalized women and excluded most from equal access to the public sphere. Because revolutionary reforms failed to dismantle existing economic and social inequalities, the laws intended to liberate women still reified a sharp division between the public and private sphere and contributed to growing gender disparities.²⁶

Despite a normative discussion of nineteenth-century liberalism often found in European gender historiography, the context of multiple readings of the liberal tradition in nineteenth-century Mexico, as well as its ambiguities, confirms Piccato’s call for contextualization. Liberal, intellectual thought in modern Mexican history unfolded not as a single or stable ideology that persisted unchanged over time, but rather as an ideological system that reflected people’s unique struggles and experiences within particular geographical and temporal parameters.²⁷ For instance, Charles Hale astutely notes that intellectual trends, such as positivism’s faith in science as a catalyst for Mexico’s social and economic development, impacted and transformed liberalism throughout the nineteenth century and into the years of the Mexican Revolution.²⁸ Even here, scholars continue to debate liberalism’s diverse meanings.²⁹ Some position Francisco Madero’s (1911-13) revolutionary platform of effective suffrage, no reelection as the heir to the liberal traditions and constitutional principles of the nineteenth-century Reforma and the Restored Republic, while others consider Madero’s refusal to carry out significant agrarian and labor reforms as indicative of a government that was less liberal in nature.³⁰ Either way, after the counterrevolutionary period of Victoriano Huerta (1913-14), the Constitutionalists’ first chief, Venustiano Carranza (who became Mexico’s president in 1917), resurrected a liberal vision for the country in 1915, but with a more interventionist state than Madero’s laissez-faire approach would have allowed.³¹ In 1917 participants in the Constituent Congress created Mexico’s new constitution, modeling the document after the 1857 liberal charter. More nationalist in nature than its predecessor, the 1917 constitution incorporated protections for Mexico’s land and natural resources and provided measures of social welfare by guaranteeing workers’ and peasants’ safeguards and banning dangerous or unhealthy work for women and minors under age sixteen.³² In this respect, the constitution’s stance toward women was one of paternal protection, separating women from men into distinct categories and restricting women from working situations that could possibly endanger their moral or physical well-being.³³ Although the 1917 constitution did not overtly exclude women from having the right to vote, the reality was that women could not participate in Mexico’s federal elections until 1958.³⁴

Despite the revolutionaries’ enunciation of women’s and men’s separate gender roles, the revolution still brought great changes to women’s daily lives.³⁵ Indeed, to situate women solely as the passive or unwilling targets of reforms that sought to modernize them is to view the revolutionary state as an oppressive, all-powerful entity and to deny women their due agency. The revolutionary process was neither entirely resistant to new ideas concerning gender relations nor devoid of popular input. Indeed, women’s participation within elite political endeavors, including liberal laws and