Women in Mexico: A Past Unveiled (review)

Women in Mexico: A Past Unveiled. By Julia Tuñón Pablos. Translated by Alan Hynds. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999. xi + 144 pp., preface, introduction, bibliography, index, illustrations. paper.)

Julia Tuñón Pablos’s Women in Mexico: A Past Unveiled is a revision of her Mujeres en México: Una historia olvidada, originally published in Mexico in 1987. This English-language edition has been rewritten to provide historical background for an audience unfamiliar with Mexico. It incorporates findings from recent scholarship and extends the time frame through the October 1996 creation of a Women’s National Assembly. Although thus quite different from (and considerably longer than) the first edition, it maintains the readability of a work aimed at popular diffusion. The author’s goal remains that of "constructing a historical memory" for women so that they can get a true picture of their options as they struggle for a better world in the future.

In a brief 116 pages Tuñón Pablos masterfully synthesizes Mexican women’s history–and Mexican history–from Mexica times to the present. She skillfully navigates between the prescriptions about how women should behave and their actual experiences. She presents superb analyses of Mexico’s three female archetypes: Malinche, who represents sexuality; Sor Juana, who represents the intellect; and the Virgin of Guadalupe, who represents unselfish motherhood. She covers women’s heroic exploits during the independence movement and revolution. Yet Tuñón Pablos also goes beyond these figures to describe "ordinary" women during "ordinary" times, using novels, folk songs, and travel accounts to enliven descriptions of everyday life. Her balanced narrative portrays women of all social classes and races in rural as well as urban settings. Her graceful prose, admirably translated by Alan Hynds, never degenerates into pedantry, even when pointing out the contradictions within the discourses on women, the gaps between laws and their implementation, or the limitations and possible biases of the sources on which her history is based.

Tuñón Pablos avoids the pitfalls of triumphalist feminist history. She presents the negative as well as positive aspects of women’s participation in the revolution, covers conservative as well as radical women, and recognizes that women’s work in the domestic sphere was often satisfying and socially valued. Instead of depicting women’s past as a long period of undifferentiated oppression, or as a slumber from which they awoke with the feminist movement, she explores subtle changes in women’s position, as during the Enlightenment, and emphasizes women’s contributions to historical change, as when both indigenous and Spanish women played a central role in creating a new mestizo culture during the sixteenth century.

As with any synthetic work, this one will not satisfy everybody. Some readers may find the treatment of the 1940s to 1960s too cursory, while others may find that the discussion of Sor Juana assumes too much prior knowledge of her life. Specialists may quibble with a few conclusions, such as that most colonial marriages were arranged by parents (30), that divorced women were normally placed in a house of seclusion (31), or that motherhood in the nineteenth century excluded women from the spheres of business, politics, and the cloister (43). Some statements are misleading. For example, instead of "banning the usual mechanisms by which people managed to marry the person of their choice" (31), the Royal Pragmatic on Marriage of 1776 merely required parental consent for the marriage of minors. In addition, a few mistakes crept into the English edition. For example, Sor Juana lived in the seventeenth century, not the eighteenth (35). Noble titles were abolished in 1826, not 1829 (47). La "Güera" Rodríguez’s long last name is misspelled (it should be de Velasco y Osorio) (41). On the whole, however, this book works remarkably well, with most of its broad generalizations well informed, sensitive, and intelligent.

Women in Mexico has much to offer the English-language public interested in Mexican women’s history. It will...