Domestic Economies: Family, Work, and Welfare in Mexico City, 1884–1943 (review)

While mothers as idealized figures are not unfamiliar to Mexican history, the work people in fact do to raise children is less well understood, and is the subject of this exciting new book. Ann Blum makes an important contribution to the history of childhood, family, and labor and helps tie together labor, cultural, and political histories. Making company with the wonderful scholarship of Marie Eileen Francois (A Culture of Everyday Credit, published in 2006), Blum traces relations of work and power across the divides of public versus private. While Francois focuses on the work necessary to keep up middle-class appearances such as pawning goods and domestic labor (remunerated and unremunerated) like laundry, Blum examines the ways women did the work of childrearing in such a manner that supported distinct class formations—both ideological and structural.

Blum shows the ways new ideas regarding hygiene, health, and motherhood that developed during the late nineteenth century lent themselves to new conceptions of childhood as a unique phase in the life cycle that should be characterized by the absence of labor. This sentimentalization of childhood informed an expanding public culture that celebrated childhood in pageants, baby contests, and advice literature. It was accompanied by a professional culture of doctors, social workers, judges, and bureaucrats that shaped the circulation of children, labor, and sentiment. The metaphor of family lent political legitimacy to the revolutionary regime, as it sought to strike an inclusionary tone. Child-centered policy, Blum points out, claimed to address the interests of working-class families and provided a veneer of shared interests with those opposed to the revolutionary regime, including conservative Catholics. Nevertheless, legislation that followed the Constitution of 1917 that identified child labor as the root cause of social ills, did not, in fact, ameliorate the conditions that led children to work. Blum surfaces rich archival records that reveal these contradictions and the way some doctors, lawyers, and bureaucrats sought to alter their work to address those inequities.

Sentimentalized childhood was fundamental to class formations, not only because it served to distinguish between those who could protect their children from laboring and those who could not, but because it was sustained by the everyday labor of women who themselves could not afford to stay home to nurse and care for their own children. Interlocking domestic economies channeled the flow of value out of poor families into privileged ones. As women moved from villages to Mexico City to work as wet nurses, for example, they also transferred wealth from rural to urban economies. Blum’s work is particularly exciting as she explores the relationship between the circulations of labor (including the labor of love) within the context of shifting, often racist, discourses regarding wet nurses.

Shifting assumptions about childhood and work also informed adoption practices. Blum traces a shift away from the long-standing practice of child adoption for work to adoptions for the formation of families based on sentiment, a shift encouraged by the revolutionary government. However, while some adoptions were brokered by agencies (e.g., orphanages), patron-client relations often served as the means by which employers gained access to children. Assumptions regarding the supposedly beneficial effects of patronage also informed the practice of juvenile courts to assign domestic work as a form of probation, or for bureaucrats to approve adoptions that moved children from poor to better-off families.

With a decrease in the centrality of wet nurses in the postrevolutionary period, protected childhood required new full-time workers. As Ann Varley (2007) argues, the Law of Family Relations (1917) and the 1928 Family Code declared equity between husband and wife and at the same time reasserted women’s responsibility for domestic work and childrearing. As increasing numbers of middle-class women sought remunerated work outside of the home, many as social workers as seen in work by Nichole Sanders (2006), those who could hired domestic workers. Working...