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Reviewed by:
  • Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico
  • Kristina A. Boylan
Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico. By Jocelyn Olcott. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Pp. ix, 337. Illustrations. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $79.95 cloth; $22.95 paper.

Jocelyn Olcott's study opens and closes with radical activist Concha Michel leading a land invasion of the Hacienda Santa Barbara, estate of former president Plutarco Elias Calles, in January 1936. Michel's immediate goal was to provide women with access to ejido land, but this incident also was something larger: a "gender inversion" (p. 2) meant to challenge political leadership in general as well as Calles in particular. While brave and extraordinary, Michel's action failed on both levels: immediately, Calles kept his land; and more broadly, such actions did little to destabilize the vision of the Mexican woman as a "rebozo-shrouded madre abnegada," and have it "give way to the ciudadana revolucionaria" (p. 244).

Olcott provides a detailed, well-documented history of women's activism to become the latter after Mexico's armed revolution (1910-1917). Rather than select one or a narrow range of groups active in the 1920s and 1930s as a focus, Olcott ambitiously aims to demonstrate the "chains of equivalence" (p. 23) that bound different women's mobilizations together and established their relationship with the consolidating state. These relationships, formed in women's struggles for land, [End Page 103] labor rights, resources, social reform, and voting rights in turn drew a "frontier" between revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries, against which the regime held women as they requested political rights and material support. Ultimately, too many partisans maintained that women were not sufficiently 'prepared' for full citizenship at the end of Lázaro Cárdenas' presidency; this, along with state cooptation of radically-inspired movements, ensured the stalling of the expansion of women's political rights until the 1950s, which political leaders recast as a chivalrous act of patronage, erasing activist women from that history.

To "illuminate the dynamic nature of revolutionary citizenship" as a "contingent, inhabited, gendered" process (p. 25), Olcott alternates chapters with a broader, topical focus with regionally focused chapters. This structure also successfully illustrates the paradox of many struggles for women's rights: citizenship consists of more than suffrage, but no one can enjoy complete citizenship without the vote and full political participation. Olcott's examples show that women "practiced citizenship far from the voting booth" (p. 200), but were foiled repeatedly by the assumption that the political subject was male. Women across Mexico proved wrong assertions of their weakness and apathy, but whether they did so in regions deemed overburdened by cultural conservatism and indigenous history (Michoacán, Yucatán), or those deemed a tabula rasa for state-led revolutionary reform (the Comarca Lagunera, somewhat incorrectly), their status was frozen in the abnegada stereotype. Women's organizations that strove to interact with revolutionary programs were pressured to fit into models first cast locally and then by the national revolutionary party and government. Even if it were appropriate or realistic, neither organization leaders nor grassroots organizers could contain all women in a "bloc" that could be incorporated into the Cardenista model.

Olcott's enthusiasm for certain participants at times affects her perspective. She ascribes much importance to the Mexican Communist Party (PCM), much of it due, but it is not apparent that the PCM's tactics always "informed" those of others. For example, according to Olcott the PCM's organizational model was copied variously by the Mexican Catholic Action and fascist groups, the FUPDM, and the reorganized Mexican Revolutionary Party (PRM). But common historical roots and prior exchange may be indicated here as well, rather than just imitation of the left wing by the right. Olcott asserts the PCM's commitment to women's suffrage, but some prominent radicals, including PCM militant and FUPDM secretary-general Cuca García, endorsed limitations of women's participation in political processes if they didn't belong to the 'right' organizations; Olcott mentions this position (similar to restrictions imposed by the PRM) quickly, rather than analyzing its contradictory nature. Olcott also collapses the spectrum of postrevolutionary Catholic organizing into more unity than it possessed. Thus, Michoacan's Cristeros gave...

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