Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico: Politics, Culture, Identity, and the Body

In 2001, scholars convened at a Yale University conference titled "Las Olvidadas [the forgotten ones]: Gender and Women's History in Postrevolutionary Mexico." The conference spawned the majority of the essays in the two edited volumes under review, and since that time, several scholars have completed monograph-length studies based on their participation in the conference. Inspired by path-breaking work in the 1980s on early feminist congresses, suffrage movements, and soldaderas (female soldiers and camp followers during the Mexican Revolution), these historians have moved beyond the early project of recovering women's voices from the past and the narrower question of political rights.¹ In the last decade or so, a proliferation of scholarship has not only configured women as historical subjects but also examined the relationships between women and gender, and how these categories relate to state formation, nationalism, modernity, identity, and popular culture. Historians of Mexico can now claim that these female subjects are no longer "forgotten," and that more recent histories employ the diverse methodological and thematic scopes explored at the 2001 conference.

Decades ago, groundbreaking work in women's history argued that the category "women" is heterogeneous and therefore differs tremendously with regard to class, race, sexual orientation, and age. Mexico's history of Spanish colonialism, a multiplicity of indigenous groups, and mestizaje (racial mixing) over the centuries complicate any discussion of women in Mexico. Moreover, men are not the only oppressors: as several authors show, women have also oppressed other women, in modern Mexico as elsewhere. While it is difficult to isolate the multiplicity of identity categories that interact with relationships of power, the scholars reviewed in this essay have taken up this task.

The period of the Mexican Revolution is particularly meaningful for the study of women and gender because male revolutionary officials, eager to create a cohesive revolutionary rhetoric to promote nationalism, effectively silenced, marginalized, and stereotyped women's contributions to that narrative. Yet the very definitions of the revolution and its periodization are not easily defined. The 1910 Revolution, the first social revolution of the twentieth century, ravaged the nation's population, infrastructure, and economy, introducing a new political regime after ending thirty-four years of dictatorial rule. Historians have considered the military phase of the revolution (1910-1917) as distinct from the implementation of revolutionary reforms in subsequent decades (1920-1940). New research examines the fractured and fragile nature of revolutionary reforms, the emerging revolutionary state and the ruling party, with an eye to how women and gender fit into and altered this narrative. Similarly, women and gender historians have heeded the calls of other Mexican scholars to explore the regional nature of the revolution, demonstrating how regional histories of Mexico's revolutionary period have excluded women or failed to adequately include gender as a category of analysis.

The anthology Sex in Revolution offers an engaging variety of essays on women's presence and power during and after the Mexican Revolution and the nature of gender roles and gender struggles during the first half of the twentieth century. Eleven essays are divided into four major topics: "Embodying Revolutionary Culture," "Reshaping the Domestic Sphere," "The Gendered Realm of Labor Organizing," and "Women and Revolutionary Politics." They are wide-ranging in topic and approach, including a transgendered colonel in...