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

Feminist scholars may be surprised to find that a concurso feminista (feminist contest) held in 1905 in Mexico City was not a competition of feminist theory acumen, but a typing and stenography contest! Porter argues that "by the turn-of-the-century, one use of the word feminism in Mexico was to describe middle-class women's changing workforce participation. By the 1920s, the word shifted from a description of women's workforce participation to a way of describing the origins of a movement for social change" (10). However, the work's main contribution is not the use of the word feminism per se, but the women who imbued it with a labor identity. With this goal in mind, "the study highlights the role of women in government offices in organizing and shaping the direction" of activism along with working-class women (11). It was through their activism (founding the Frente Único Pro Derecho de la Mujer in 1935) that women government employees, or empleadas who were the typists, clerks, post office scribes, and secretaries of government offices, contributed to the transformation of Mexican feminism to mean the "right to work, equal wages, and full citizenship" (12). The historian asserts that it was this continued activism within the ranks of the labor parties and the influence of the cultura escrita (a concept developed by Carmen Castañeda) where women took to media, film, and wrote about their struggles, that led to full suffrage in 1953.

The author presents a compelling history of Mexican women leaders in labor who led others to full citizenship in the years spanning the Porfiriato through the consolidation of Lázaro Cárdenas's PRI. Some of the activists who emerge in her pages merit mention: Maria Arias Bernal established the Club Feminil "Lealtad" to protest Madero and Pino Suarez's assassination in 1913; Soledad Gonzalez, Madero's secretary typed La sucesión presidencial (1910) and publicly protested his death, risking imprisonment by the Huerta regime; María Ríos Cárdenas founded the journal Mujer (1926–29); and Leonor Llach who published articles on women and labor rights.

This volume is also a complex study of class identity/status and the blurring of boundaries among these. We learn that in the 1930s the empleadas "tapped into politically privileged identities within populist rhetoric" and as a conscientious, political strategy articulated their demands for an eight-hour maximum workday along with obreras, campesinas and domestic workers (170). While obreras were granted rights such as access to day-care facilities and maternity leave in the Constitution of 1917, empleadas had to fight for these benefits well into the 1930s because as government employees they were excluded from such social services. Porter also discusses Sarah Batiza'Berkowitz s novel Nosotras, las taquígrafas (1950), where the novel represents female office workers with a "blurring of borders" of class identity (214). Yet, middle-class status is valued over education and merit (217).

Porter documents how the very word empleada transitions to connote middle-class status. Caste and Indian women were not associated with that identity, since education, acculturation and consumption as well as social status were markers of the middle class. Work in public administration was coded middle-class, and when women of humble origins took these jobs, they were considered to be overstepping their boundaries (128). Notably, in the text, empleadas who appear in the photographs are mostly light-skinned women. Some are fashionably and impeccably dressed, sporting modern hairstyles and beautiful shoes (113, Fig. 11). Pointedly, Senda Nueva, a magazine published for working women, included home remedies to whiten one's skin (150).

Indeed, one of the shortcomings of this study is that it elides the interconnection of ethnicity and social class or class status in Mexico. Although in the introduction the author recognizes that in "the Americas, class and ethnic identities shaped...