Gender and Welfare in Mexico explores three aspects of Mexican efforts to develop a welfare state from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s. First, it investigates how, despite its nationalist overtones, the creation of welfare programmes was the product of a transnational dialogue and reform movement. Second, it examines the gendered nature of these programmes by addressing their assumptions and describing the roles they prescribed to women as proponents, agents, and targets of reform. Finally, it inserts the careers of female welfare workers into a broader account of the importance of a burgeoning middle class in Mexican politics. Though she does not set out to do so explicitly, along the way Nichole Sanders also sheds light on ways the state promoted economic growth.
Sanders demonstrates that a confluence of international and national factors shaped the establishment of social assistance programmes for mothers and children in Mexico. Catholic charitable practices dating from the late nineteenth century combined with inter-war neo-Lamarckian eugenics and mid-twentieth-century ideologies about the state's role in generating social harmony. These practices and ideas provided the framework for the Mexican government's response to industrialisation, urbanisation and economic dislocation. Based on materials from the archive of the Secretaría de Salubridad y Asistencia, the proceedings of international congresses on child and maternal welfare, newspapers and periodicals, and UNAM theses written by welfare workers, Sanders produces a compelling narrative of the centrality of women, both as mothers and middle-class professionals, to attempts to transform and modernise Mexico's social relations.
Chapter 1 examines the participation of Mexican reformers in the Seventh and Eighth Pan-American Child Congresses, held in Mexico City in 1935 and in Washington, DC in 1942 respectively. The discussions on how to bring about progress to the hemisphere are mired in prejudices. The poor were considered culturally inferior denizens who needed to be racially uplifted and integrated into society by the scientific methods of welfare professionals. The job of turning children from poor families into good citizens and docile workers fell on women. As poor wives and mothers, women had to learn how to create healthy, clean home environments for their worker-husbands and children. As female middle-class social assistance practitioners they had to design and implement programmes to train mothers and children and, when necessary, monitor and intervene in the domestic lives of the poor. These were appropriate gender roles because women were natural caregivers. The debates also highlight the period's growing role of the state in social and economic transformation. The poor had to accept its tutelage and learn to be hygienic, disciplined, and productive if they were to contribute to the region's development.
Mexican reformers adjusted the policy prescriptions of the Congresses to the Mexican context. Their efforts gained momentum with the creation of the Secretaría de Asistencia Pública (SAP) in 1937. Chapter 2 chronicles this ministry's determination to enact programmes to buttress nuclear families in Mexico City through civil marriage campaigns, the creation of family dining halls, and the substitution of orphanages by a foster-care system. Chapter 3 describes how reformers assisted single mothers at mother-child centres where volunteers and SAP employees provided healthcare and training in marketable skills that could be performed from the home. In these cases the state would fill in for absent male heads of household, along the way promoting state paternalism. Chapter 4 moves on to the post-war years. Following the lead of UNICEF and the conclusions of the Ninth Pan-American Child Congress held in Caracas in 1948, the successor to the SAP, the Secretaría de Salubridad y Asistencia (SSA), expanded its mission to include disease eradication and improved sanitation. Moreover, as the result of international welfare trends and the economic priorities of the federal government, urban social assistance programmes were now transplanted to the countryside. These three chapters reveal that the values reformers promoted were often contested by the target populations. The evidence presented, ranging from poor males' attitudes towards marriage, the reluctance of poor families to sign up for dining halls, to the complaints by foster mothers about welfare workers' interventions, suggests that most of the initiatives were more popular among SAP/SSA employees than with those whom they tried to serve. It is telling that the most accepted programmes were the day-care centres and schools where working mothers could leave their children all day for a subsidised fee.
Chapter 5 tracks the professionalisation of social work from the 1930s to the 1950s. It emphasises one of the book's overarching arguments, namely that the creation of maternal and child-welfare programmes was key to the rise of the middle class as a powerful segment of society. On the one hand, women of lower or marginal middle-class backgrounds climbed up the status ladder thanks to education and government employment. On the other hand, social assistance workers disseminated middle-class values and aspirations among their poor clients, most importantly around what proper motherhood meant. The official party might have capitalised on both, as the goals of the reform movement were propagandised as the goals of the state. However, the link between the SAP/SSA and the political success of the PRI is enunciated but not demonstrated. The book is more successful at evincing the connection between social assistance and Mexico's economic model. The emergence of import-substituting industrialisation in the 1930s, and the support for capitalist agriculture after WW2, both to feed the growing cities and to bolster exports, required the government's commitment to the welfare of the Mexican family.
Gender and Welfare in Mexico is a significant contribution to the literature on twentieth-century Mexico. It will also be of interest to scholars of Latin American and global histories of gender and welfare policies. However, this is not a book about the construction of a welfare state in post-revolutionary Mexico, as the introduction promises. Instead, it is a carefully researched study of a particular subset of social assistance programmes that targeted poor families. Sanders's translation of asistencia as ‘welfare’ obscures the distinction between the different components of a welfare state. The book does not analyse the development of social insurance and labour rights, which were complementary to social assistance programmes. The connection to other agencies such as the Mexican Social Security Institute, the Ministry of State Education, and the Ministry of Labour and Social Welfare is only mentioned in passing. Nonetheless, the topic is timely and of growing importance. Conditional cash transfers that give a prominent role to mothers and to children's health and education were pioneered by Mexico's Progresa programme in the 1990s, and have spread across Latin America and beyond. Sanders shows that this gendered focus has deep historical roots.
