From Angel to Office Worker: Middle-Class Identity and Female Consciousness in Mexico, 1890–1950 by Susie S. Porter (review)

This book follows Susie S. Porter’s earlier study of working women in revolutionary Mexico City, now targeting female employees of the postrevolutionary central bureaucracy. Porter argues that as these empleadas públicas entered and then expanded their roles in federal administration through 1950, they also transformed definitions of the “middle class” in the capital. Her research is extensive, and often enlightening.

As Porter remarks, class was often “fluid” during this period, making firm definitions difficult (29). What exactly constituted the “middle class” that office workers transformed during and especially after the Mexican Revolution? Part of the answer comes in Porter’s title, as “household angels” of earlier decades now sought work in new postrevolutionary bureaucracies. But Porter’s goals are different: instead of assigning a particular class to her protagonists, she blurs these definitions—focusing more on working life than class identity (15–16). This move allows Porter to broadly characterize the experience of women office workers in Mexico City—for example, by arguing that empleadas who published novels or convened conferences “advanced the cause” for all working women (13)—but it also obscures important divisions. This issue seems particularly pointed in the case of postrevolutionary Mexico, where empleadas públicas stood in legal opposition to working-class obreras (12, 170) and a word like feminism meant “the possibility of work outside the home” (17).

Porter does mention office discord, but she does not fully address the ways that women in different class positions might clash politically, even if they did work in the same office. It is striking, for instance, that this book does not once mention the middle-class opposition party Acción Nacional (PAN), nor does it significantly address other concerns of middle-class women’s politics, such as alcohol regulation, or the relationship between the Mexican state and the Catholic Church.

Porter productively argues that gender oppression “served as the basis of women’s subordinate class position and their social and emotional subjugation to men” (200), but this does not appear to have erased class divides among working women themselves. Indeed, Porter must downplay uncomfortable details as she builds a multi-class analysis of gender oppression. A female union leader calling her staff “an inferior social class” is only “controversial” in Porter’s analysis, not structuring (187). Porter also asserts that official lectures on how to manage domestic servants “missed the mark” because most of the audience did not have a maid (147). But could such lectures not have been targeting an elite minority from the start? Skin-whitening creams also pass without interrogation (150), as does a well-attended Racial Uplift Conference in 1925, which Porter describes as a “proving ground” for later organizing (107). The question of what “racial uplift” meant—or if such uplift was even suggested by a conference titled Congreso Mujeres de la Raza—is left unexamined.

These examples suggest the need for a greater interrogation of Porter’s sources, which often skew toward an “office elite” of once-and-future movie stars (Otilia Zambrano, María Félix), famous anthropologists (Eulalia Guzmán), and the personal secretaries of famous politicians (Leonor Llach). But there were other office workers as well. The 32-year-old Emma Emilia Otero Pablo, for example, arrived at the Mexican Ministry of Communications from Huatabampo, Sonora, with an incomplete high school education, around 1934. The “masculine” box she checked in her job application was subsequently overwritten as “female,” and she was later accused of reading novels and selling trinkets instead of doing her assigned work (136-7). That Porter uncovered such a compelling figure is testament to her tenacious archival research; I only wish there was a bit more analytical and narrative space in this book for the Oteros of Mexican office politics, not just the Llaches.