For a collection committed to recovering the diversity of women's roles in Mexico's Revolution, the essays in this volume cohere remarkably well. As witnessed in these chapters, common to women's sundry revolutionary experiences was their profound, though hardly uniform, politicisation. Women expressed this not just through their participation in formal politics, such as efforts to achieve suffrage or amend family law. Amid the exuberance of post revolutionary civic life in the 1920s and 1930s, activities that had been historically largely female or domestic concerns, such as welfare, social reform, education, temperance and housing, now earned the attention of the state. Women in turn used this new status to press for equality, social justice, or at the very least an improvement in women's condition. Notably, despite these varied objectives, the contributors to this volume show that women's means often were quite similar. For example, upper-class, conservative women seeking to defend the Catholic Church, liberal feminists fighting for universal equality, and working class communists striving to overcome the oppression of capitalism found common ground in their efforts to uplift prostitutes and modernise the poor. By reclaiming their complex history, the contributors not only recognise women's participation in Mexico's Revolution; together, they simultaneously attempt to answer whether this participation resulted in a revolution for Mexico's women.
Women in Mexico ultimately gained full rights as citizens in the 1940s and 1950s by employing a politics of difference that emphasised their distinct feminine contributions to the public sphere. This is not surprising to scholars of comparative women's history. Yet, as Sarah Buck illustrates, what is noteworthy about Mexico is just how close women came to full citizenship in the 1930s, when revolutionary radicalism almost ushered women into the voting booths on a platform of universal equality. However, the conservative shift in the 1940s and 1950s soon eliminated this possibility, and moderate feminists found themselves in the vanguard of the suffrage movement. Their ultimate success in earning the vote was in large measure determined by their ability to move maternalist concerns into the public sphere and assure conservative leaders of women's moderate political aspirations. Yet even women who fully respected this difference found their authority in the public sphere in dispute. For instance, just as women temperance workers learned to negotiate the male-dominated world of local politics, Stephanie Mitchell shows that their efforts were frustrated by the reluctance of often self-interested regional and national politicians to grant women state-backed authority over the social life and moral values of their communities. Moreover, as seen in Carmen Ramos Escandón's well-conceived chapter, the articulation between women's political ideas, public practice and revolutionary expectations was not straightforward. According to Ramos Escandón, moderate feminist Sofía Villa de Buentello lobbied tirelessly for full legal equality for women based upon traditional liberal ideals, even though she did so in order to improve women's condition within marriage and the family.
Women's public activities, whether in search of political equality or social improvement, were frequently portrayed as transgressive by political, religious or labour leaders manoeuvring for power in the tumultuous decades after the Revolution. Previous scholars generally reproduced this depiction, in the process failing to question the motives of these leaders or even the veracity of this transgression. By contrast, Patience Schell asserts that Mexico's Catholic women had long been active in public social reform efforts with the support of both the Church and their communities. Schell adds that it was only when this activity became politicised in the 1920s in defence of Church authority that it became a target of the revolutionary state. Nevertheless, the state was less interested in confining women to their homes than in confining them to passive, productive forms of public activity that supported its authority. In this, the state viewed women as both targets and carriers of revolutionary reform. In her tightly-argued chapter, Stephanie Smith shows how the state sent women into the countryside ostensibly to educate the rural poor, but also to mediate the projection of state authority at the local level. Women's mobilisation was quickly reversed however, when the state saw the capacity of revolutionary reform to change both the minds and habits of rural workers in ways that threatened production and elite authority. Soon confined to the traditional activity of teaching, these women educators found themselves marginalised from the Revolution. Likewise, Martha Eva Rocha demonstrates that even women who had participated in the violent phase of the Revolution as soldiers, spies, propagandists and suppliers struggled, usually in vain, to receive recognition and benefits from a revolutionary state intent on expunging their participation in order to curry favour among moderates.
As the revolutionary leaders reinscribed the Revolution as a patriarchal event, the outcome was the erasure of women from the Revolution in practice, in nationalist mythology, and even in the scholarly literature. But as Patience Schell affirms in her incisive conclusion, the recent maturation of women's studies and the cultural turn in scholarship on post revolutionary Mexico have generated new spaces for locating women's participation in the Revolution. This is seen in Andrew Grant Wood's contribution on working class rent strikers in 1920s Veracruz. Though their initial participation stemmed from existing community social networks that had been forged from women's efforts to relieve the deplorable conditions of urban tenements, women strikers soon were politicised by revolutionary promises and communist leadership. While the strikes failed to lower rents, they did compel the state to expand its reform efforts in order to forestall communist organising of the working class.
The revolutionary state's interest in welfare, education, housing and public health was intended in part to contain the influence of conservatives and radicals over Mexico's poor and working classes. Yet it had the unanticipated result of providing women with openings to negotiate variants of revolutionary citizenship. Katherine Elaine Bliss shows Mexico's City's syphilis hospital as a proving ground where Catholic and moderate feminists debated whether the uplift of prostitutes should be a private or public endeavour. Regardless of their perspective, Bliss expertly illustrates that all feminists were caught between a Church that emphasised morality and a state that insisted on maternity, and neither institution seemed ready to promise women full citizenship. Consequently, as Nichole Sanders demonstrates, by the 1940s, state social assistance promised not equality, but rather improvements in the home. Even as welfare programmes provided professional opportunities for educated women, the state confined their work to monitoring and modifying the behaviour of the nation's poor in order to encourage the reproduction of future citizen-workers.
This is not a book without problems. Poor rural women appear largely as objects of reform, or sometimes even just of the reformers' gaze, though editor Patience Schell acknowledges this by recognising their participation in the Revolution as a promising site for future research. Moreover, one of the book's finest features is its inclusion of a relevant primary source in each chapter. Yet the sources are neither mentioned by the editors nor contextualised by the contributors. Nevertheless, it remains highly suited for course adoption, and should be of interest to scholars of modern Mexican history as well. The inventive use of a rich array of primary sources by almost all of the authors distinguishes this collection as a solid empirical contribution to the study of the diversity of women's experiences in post revolutionary Mexico. The chapters reveal that women most often met seemingly insurmountable obstacles in their efforts to achieve social justice or citizenship. Yet this collection also shows that Mexico's patriarchal post revolutionary state was in part constituted by and through the very women it sought to subjugate. Therefore, though in isolation the gains that women made appeared insignificant, together they initiated a sea change in the gendered attitudes and practices that composed political life in twentieth century Mexico.
