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  • Forging a Gender Path in Modern Mexican History
  • Mary Kay Vaughan (bio)

In 1975, Richard Graham asked me to give a paper on Mexican women at the Southwestern Social Science Association meeting. Surely, he asked me only because he thought that as a woman I would know something about women—I am sure that was my only qualification in his mind. Thankfully, he also asked Dawn Keremitsis, who had done work on Mexican women workers.1 Fortunately, I had included in my 1973 dissertation a chapter on women’s vocational education. I wrote my entire dissertation on José Vasconcelos’s educational crusade in a state of shock at the race and class biases I encountered in the documents. In the case of women, my outrage soared, propelled by my second-wave-feminist conviction that women had to be liberated from the slavery of the home. So I had written a dogmatic chapter and paper on how revolutionary educators wanted to remove women from the workforce, restore them to domesticity, train them to work in small, badly paid, homebased industries, and subordinate them to men and motherhood. Middle-class women prescribed class practices of motherhood and domesticity as if, I argued, women of the subaltern classes knew nothing of homemaking and mothering.2

As I completed the delivery of this paper, I noted an older woman in the audience agitated, near tears, and seeking the support of colleagues who comforted her. She said, in essence, about my presentation, “This is terrible. I was there. It was nothing like that. We were helping those women and their families. It was a glorious time!” Quickly, I learned I had stepped on the toes of the grand dame of Mexican history, Nettie Lee Benson, who had apparently taken part in José Vasconcelos’s grand crusade for civilization. I truly regret [End Page 255] this unhappy encounter, not only because I had not intended to insult anyone, but also because as time went on, I became aware of the insensitively presentist perspective I brought to my analysis. I came to recognize the ways in which maternalism empowered women by advocating for their strong role in the home as its organizers, accountants, and nurturers of sentiment, and as partners with the state—often too, the church and private sector—in the raising of healthy, productive, disciplined children.

In 1996 I wrote an essay about this modernization of patriarchy.3 I had observed some of its empowering dimensions for teachers, for girls and mothers, when I looked at education in rural Puebla and Sonora in the 1930s.4 I reaffirmed my convictions as I wrote the biography of the painter Pepe Zúñiga who, growing up poor in Mexico City in the 1940s and 1950s, benefitted from his mother’s unflagging advocacy.5 I have become further convinced through living in a Zapotec town, where the effects of reforms aimed at domesticity in education, health, production, and household organization are as important—likely more important—than the assistance provided to male farmers.

However, the modern patriarchy is still patriarchy and, thank goodness, younger women—as well as my contemporaries—have lent their scholarship to the examination of women’s struggles in the labor movement. Among them are María Teresa Fernández, Susan Gauss, Jolie Olcott, and Heather Fowler Salamini; in the Communist Party, Jolie Olcott and Veronica Oikión; and in the struggle for women’s rights, Katherine Bliss, Sarah Buck, Jolie Olcott, Susie Porter, Carmen Ramos, and Esperanza and Enriqueta Tuñón.6 Similarly, fine [End Page 256] work has been done on women who served the state in social policy and led the struggle for women’s rights; here we can recognize the work of the late and ever so gifted Ann Blum, as well as Gabriela Cano, Alicia Civera, Jolie Olcott, Susie Porter, and Nikki Sanders.7

I need to mention some of the critically important research on the nineteenth century, particularly that of Silvia Arrom, Francie Chassen López, Marie Francois, Florencia Mallon, Carmen Ramos, and Susie Porter.8 I also need to recognize studies of Catholic women opposed to the postrevolutionary state, some of whom came to collaborate with it in...

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