Relatively little has been written about Mexican women’s contributions to the labor movement. In Señorita Telefonista, Susie Porter tackles the topic by examining the role played by telephone operators—an occupation comprised exclusively by women—in Mexico’s early twentieth-century labor struggles. She unearths a forgotten history of the crucial contributions women made to the union movement. The book goes beyond a straight-forward labor history about women’s growing role in the blue- and white-collar workforces. It instead explores the elastic nature of class identity and “the countervailing forces of class—both material and cultural—that have shaped women’s work experiences” (1). Central to that class identity was sexual respectability and the capacity for women to control their bodily autonomy (2). Porter offers a focused examination of the Ericsson Telephone Company, which began operations in Mexico in 1905, and its telephone operators, tracing their increasing labor organizing and mobilization into the 1930s. Because telephone operators wore attire and practiced work routines that suggested white-collar status, while being paid blue-collar wages, Porter reveals a complex class identity. Some operators engaged in a working-class activism of collective action seeking better wages and treatment. Others endorsed middle-class values, which emphasized feminine respectability and limited demands for better working conditions and greater rights. Yet bridging these groups was the demand for bodily autonomy that, although engaged differently depending on class identity, aimed to end sexual harassment—by customers, management, and male coworkers—and discriminatory policies that fired women because of pregnancy or marital status.

Porter begins the study during the Porfiriato (1876–1911), when the Ericsson Telephone Company began operation in Mexico City. Both management and operators emphasized a middle-class worker identity. The Ericsson company sold an image of a cultured and respectable labor force that interacted with customers. Operators viewed their wages (which were slightly better than factory workers) and the educational requirements of the job as an indicator of middle-class respectability. Newspapers of the era, likewise, celebrated the image of the middle-class operator while also normalizing sexually charged encounters between customers and operators—for example, in comedic cartoons published in middle-class periodicals (38). With the coming of the Mexican Revolution (1910–20) and the consolidation of the revolutionary state, along with the labor rights enshrined in the Mexican Constitution of 1917, Porter details the growing labor activism of operators, homing in on key labor disputes in 1914, 1916, 1921, and 1923. At the same time, Porter weaves in a narrative about how new ideas regarding female autonomy articulated in the working-class press (especially the anarchist press) and in the Constitution and Family Relations Act of 1917, which redefined women’s personal, bodily, and relational autonomy and, in so doing, created “conditions of possibility” that framed labor disputes and operators’ demands in subsequent years (103).

An examination of two competing unions that emerged in 1922 at the Ericsson Telephone Company ties together several of the book’s themes. Porter shows how in the wake of the 1921 General Strike—in which the Ericsson operators’ union played an important role forging alliances across the labor movement—management and Catholic organizations across Mexico encouraged the formation of more conciliatory, alternative worker organizations. The competing unions at Ericsson represented a microcosm of broader national labor struggles. The more conservative Unión Libre—whose workers identified as señoritas—and the more radical Worker and Employee Union—whose workers identified as compañeras—attracted members based on different cultural values. According to Porter, competing class-based conceptions of gender allowed the Ericsson Company to insist that workers were respectable señoritas and, as such, could be fired for pregnancy or for getting married. The Worker and Employee Union repeatedly challenged these firings.

Porter spends little time discussing the broader national landscape. The examination of the operators’ labor organizing is often divorced from the enormous changes that took place between 1890 and 1930, especially the consolidation of the revolutionary state and how it differed from the Porfiriato or the most violent years of revolutionary war. Nevertheless, Porters’ work represents an incredibly valuable addition to the historiography. Señorita Telefonista breaks new ground in the gender history of labor, forcing readers to reconsider not only women’s contributions to Mexico’s labor movement but how gendered discourse and bodily autonomy shape shifting and malleable class identities.