Frida Kahlo: The Lady with One Eyebrow

Since today is the 99th anniversary of the end of World War I, I had been planning to either wrap up or launch a series on women in World War I. AND it’s also Native American Heritage Month, so I had planned some posts on Native American Women in history too – but, I have perennial amnesia about just how much time and energy these posts take.

Alas, the best laid plans of mice and women…

ANYWAY: I may as well finish up my series on Mexico before I go on hiatus (again) until after Thanksgiving.

Frida Kahlo was born in Mexico in 1907, but always claimed to have been born three years later, in 1910. Although it is impossible to know Kahlo’s true reasons for doing anything (her diaries are quite convoluted and misleading), it is probable that this particular lie was not for the vain purpose of appearing three years younger (although, she probably was vain) but to align her birth with the birth of the new Mexican nation. (Recall from previous posts that the Mexican Revolution began in 1910.) Her proclaimed birthdate is actually rather appropriate. Despite the fact that Kahlo did not directly participate in the revolution that provided a backdrop for her childhood, she lived a revolutionary life and her artwork is often a symbolic commentary on the tumultuous changes of Mexico’s 20th century – among other things.

Frida Kahlo was born in an upper middle class family that epitomized the cultural and racial blending of Mexico. Her father was of German-Jewish heritage, and her mother, Spanish Catholic, with some indigenous heritage. Growing up, Kahlo had a closer and more loving relationship with her father, while her relationship with her mother remained cold throughout her life. Despite this, as an adult, the identity Kahlo chose to project to the world emphasized her indigenous Mexican roots on her mother’s side.

A painting of Kahlo, her parents, and grandparents.

Two Fridas: the self-portrait, among other things, shows Kahlo's mixed heritage.

As an icon, Frida Kahlo is best known for her proclivity for native Mexican dress, love of Mexican folk art, and preference for wearing her hair in indigenous style. As with just about everything Kahlo did, there is no single definitive answer for why she had these preferences. One possible explanation is that the flowing Mexican dresses hid Kahlo’s physical deformities in her lower extremities. As a child, Kahlo contracted Polio, which resulted in an atrophied leg. Since Kahlo did not wear a brace to accommodate her shriveled leg, she developed subsequent deformities in her pelvis and spine. These were further exacerbated in 1925 when a bus that Kahlo was riding with her lover/art instructor was struck by a trolley. As a result of the accident, Kahlo suffered several fractured ribs, fractures in her spine, and in her pelvis. Although plausible, Kahlo’s desire to hide her injuries doesn’t seem to be the entire explanation for her fashion choices, especially since her art made her injuries quite public.

The Broken Column: Kahlo's fractured spine represented by a broken Ionic column.

Kahlo painted this picture after a visit to the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit where her pregnancy ended either in miscarriage or abortion. 

In fact, Kahlo seems to some degree to have reveled in her injuries and illnesses due to the attention and affection she received as a result, beginning with the attention her parents showered on her during her polio recovery, right up to her dying days when she had her hospital bed moved to a museum where her art was on display.

Another possible explanation for Kahlo’s fashion choices could have been the artistic and political preferences of her husband, the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, a communist whose artwork celebrated industrial workers, peasant guerrillas, and Mexico’s indigenous heritage. As a child, Frida Kahlo became obsessed with Rivera, who was 20 years her senior. The couple married in 1929, and by all definitions had a strange and unhealthy relationship.

One of Rivera's murals, showing Kahlo distributing arms to rebels. 

Rivera was an incurable philanderer, who gloated that a physician had once declared him “incapable of monogamy.” Kahlo, who loved to baby Rivera, was undoubtedly injured by his infidelities, and carried on a string of affairs herself – with both male and female lovers. Some of them, such as an affair with the Soviet exile, Leon Trotsky, were as much vengeance against her unfaithful husband as for personal gratification.

But coming back to Kahlo’s iconic dress. Her choices were probably a combination of factors: part to hide her deformities, part to match her husband’s style, politics, and preferences – but I think most of all, Frida Kahlo dressed that way because she liked it, and the attention she gained from it.

By the time Kahlo died in 1954, age 47 (possibly by suicide, possibly from complications of her ever-mounting health problems, but no autopsy was ever performed to confirm her cause of death) she left behind a portfolio of 143 paintings, 55 of them self-portraits. She was described at times as a realist, and at other times a surrealist, exemplifying the painters’ version of a uniquely Latin American genre: fantastical realism, where the real and surreal mesh seamlessly. Her art was admired by artistic giants such as her own husband and Pablo Picasso. In 1995, one of her portraits sold for 3.2 million dollars: at the time the greatest sum ever paid for a work of Latin American art, and the second highest ever paid for work by a female artist. (To date, the highest sum paid for work by a female artist was the 2014 sale of a Georgia O’Keefe painting for 44.4 million dollars).

Self-portrait with a monkey and parrot - the painting that broke sales records in 1995.

Kahlo’s art represented the specific turmoil of 20th century Mexico, but also continues to resonate with viewers for her messages about identity, gender, sexuality, illness, and disability.

This self-portrait at the Mexico-U.S. border represents the unequal trade relationship between the U.S. and Mexico.

She was the Madonna or Lady Gaga of 20th century Mexican painting.

What a babe. 

Sources:

Vanity Fair: The Diary of a Mad Artist

PBS: The Life and Times of Frida Kahlo

The Frida Kahlo Foundation

Artists helped make the Mexican revolution an international phenomenon

Exhibit on Kahlo, Rivera shines welcome spotlight on Detroit museum

Women in the Mexican Revolution

So now that you know something about the Mexican Revolution, let’s talk about the women.
When I ask my world history students to discuss gender roles in any given time/place, they usually start by saying that women “didn’t work” but “stayed at home.” It is a statement that is usually in the right ballpark, but isn’t quite accurate. A more accurate statement for most times and places since the emergence of civilizations would be: Women were expected to not to work outside of the home, but for most families, this ideal was out of reach. This statement acknowledges that even when women have “stayed at home” most were still working, even if it was not wage labor. It also shows that a separate domestic sphere was an expectation, and an ideal of patriarchal societies that was seldom lived up to, simply because it is not a practical economic arrangement for most families and never has been.
The statement is certainly true of 19th century Mexico. Dominated by the Catholic Church from the 16th century Spanish conquest, Mexican society was a dyed-in-the-wool patriarchy – and yet, when the revolution started in 1910, women accounted for more than half of the industrial Mexican work force. Similar to the United States, female factory workers received lower wages than men – making them more cost effective for factory owners. Manufacturing jobs tended to be gender segregated, with most female factory workers working in the tobacco and textile industries. A third of the female workforce was employed in domestic service. Women also participated in agricultural labor, but in smaller numbers. Historians debate the exact figure, but one historian claims that in Oaxaca in 1907 women – being “cheaper than machines” – constituted as much as 15 percent of the agricultural work force.
Middle class women had also begun to enter the workforce by the end of the Porfiriato, mostly taking jobs as teachers and government workers, but with some women also becoming doctors, dentists, and lawyers.
Women always have a stake in the revolutions, wars, and civil wars that ensnare their homelands. Before the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution, women workers and intellectuals were already organizing to protest working conditions and the presidency of Porfirio Díaz, among other grievances. Throughout the course of the revolution, women who remained in the factories periodically went on strike.
Women also participated actively on the battlefield and in the militaries of the revolution – a role for which they are more well known. Women supported and fought for all sides of the revolution, including support for the existing government (Federales). Each camp differed in its approach to women’s support and participation. Women who played a material role in the revolution are collectively called Soldaderas. Derived from the Spanish word for daily wages, many of these women were camp followers. Women have historically played an important role as support service for the military. Women – frequently wives or other relatives of male soldiers – would “follow” the soldiers as they moved from one encampment to the next, sometimes bringing their children with them. Their roles included cooking, maintaining camp, sex work, nursing, and smuggling or spying. Many of the militaries of Europe and the U.S. halted these practices in the late 19th century and reassigned many of the camp follower roles to rank and file military men. Even after the military officially took control of these roles, women continued to serve in some of these capacities– i.e. serving in WWI as nurses and ambulance drivers.
Camp followers were never far away from the battlefield, and, as happened in the American Revolution and the American Civil War, camp followers sometimes became female soldiers: sometimes temporarily, and openly female, and sometimes long-term in male guise. Compared to other camp followers in history, soldaderas were more frequently, and more openly, fighting as female soldiers. Notably, the Mexican Revolution also provided opportunities for some transgender expression. Famously Amelio Robles Avila, born female, was able to express his male identity as a soldier in the Revolution, and was even able to get his birth certificate changed by the Mexican government and maintain male identity after the war was over. (On a side note, we are accustomed to talking about women disguising as men to be in the military, and I wonder how many were women who wanted to be in the military, versus how many were transgender. I think it would be a challenging but interesting research project!)

Amelio Robles Avila, formally Amelia.

Photography played a notable role in our perceptions of women in the revolution. The prevalent photos of female soldiers in bandoliers were still the exception rather than the rule, with most female participants maintaining the traditional roles of camp followers. It is also true, as in most 20th century wars, that the lines were more frequently blurred between civilian and combatant, meaning that women who did not intentionally fight on a regular basis, might still become combatants from time to time, especially if they or their families were under attack. Depending on who is counting, between 1 and 2 million Mexicans died as a result of the revolution between 1910-1920, including hundreds of thousands of women. Causes of death not only included battlefield violence, but also violence against civilians, and the starvation and disease that usually accompany war.
Female soldiers were a minority: most women participated in the revolution in other ways, such as camp following or political activism. Not only were the ranks of female soldiers small to begin with, but they had mostly disappeared by 1915. As armies ran out of supplies, and moved towards a guerrilla model (requiring small, extremely mobile units) they not only dumped their female soldiers, but sometimes even the soldaderas (camp followers) as well.
Despite their participation in the revolution, women largely saw a decline in status afterwards. Recall that in 1910, when the revolution started, women accounted for more than half of Mexico’s industrial workforce. By 1940, they were only thirteen percent of the industrial workforce. In almost every Mexican state, the percentage of women in the workforce declined from 1900 to 1940. (This example is evidence that the status of women is not on a constant trajectory of improvement, but remains vulnerable to backsliding – something many American women are now becoming acutely aware of.)  Like the United States’ own current labor crisis, this was largely because the mechanization of factory work meant a decreased need for factory workers. Those factory jobs that remained were offered to male workers and female workers were pushed increasingly into the service sector. As with before the revolution, most working women worked in domestic service. Other new service careers opened to women, such as telephone operators, and in urban areas, many women worked as street vendors, mainly selling food.
For educated and middle class women, the post-revolutionary period of the 1920s and 30s offered greater job opportunities as teachers and government workers, with well over a third of government workers in Mexico City being female in 1938.
In addition to these mixed economic results, women also received mixed political gains from the revolution. The constitution of 1917 made the protection of working women and their children the law of the land, by protecting a woman’s right to paid maternity leave, a guarantee of keeping her job, and accommodations for nursing/lactation upon return to work. Unfortunately, this law was not enforced very well during the 1920s. Minimum wage laws did not protect women, and it remained acceptable to pay women less than men under the assumption that women’s wages were only to support themselves and not a family, despite the fact that many women were heads of households. The new laws were written with many of the same expectations of the pre-revolutionary patriarchy: mainly, that women should be married, and that women should not seek employment without their husbands’ permission. Additionally, despite calling for suffrage during the revolution itself, as well as throughout the 1920s and 30s, Mexican women did not receive full suffrage until 1953. Prior to that, women’s voting rights were determined at the state level. When women could vote, it was only in local elections or elections within political parties.
The recasting of the soldadera and female soldier in the popular imagination also undermined many of the gains that women had fought for during the revolution. Post revolution, depictions of female soldiers and soldaderas tended to emphasize their loyalty towards men, such as by explaining their involvement as being motivated by loyalty to their husbands or lovers, rather than any kind of political goal. Corridos – love ballads – artwork, and film, also tended to sexualize the soldaderas, emphasizing beauty over bravery and turning them into femme fatale: characters who are dangerous for their rejection of normative female behavior and expectations and are only redeemed when they agree to become subordinate to men.
Historian Anna Macias best summarizes the importance of this topic, so, I will leave you with the words she used to close her own article:
“Women, then, played a very important and varied role in the Mexican Revolution, on the front, behind the lines, in favor of or against one of the most significant social revolutions of the twentieth century. Yet, except for occasional references to soldaderas, most historians of that epic struggle have ignored the active role of Mexican women in the Revolution as precursors, journalists, propagandists, political activists, and soldiers. Only artists and novelists have given serious attention to the way the Revolution victimized millions of women and, outside of religious publications, there has been a vast silence concerning the active role of women in opposing the Mexican Revolution in its anti-clerical aspects. In addition, to date very few historians have noticed that the Revolution acted as a catalyst for the acceleration of the women’s movement in Mexico during and immediately after the struggle. By ignoring the active participation of millions of women in the Mexican Revolution, historians have helped to perpetuate the myth of Mexican women as weak, inert, passive, and dependent human beings. The contrary is true, and in the course of the Mexican Revolution women, individually and in groups, demonstrated great courage, deep conviction, enormous resourcefulness, and a willingness to be actively involved in a cause in which they fervently believed.”

Sources:

Born in Blood and Fire by John Charles Chasteen

Library of Congress: The Mexican Revolution and the United States

History Channel

Mexican American War

Cinco de Mayo

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (Yale, the Avalon Project)

Wikipedia: Porfirio Díaz

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo: National Archives - Lesson Plans!

PBS: Mexican American War: Also a great classroom resource!

Oxford Research Encyclopedias: Latin American History. Working Women in the Mexican Revolution, by Susie S. Porter

McNair Scholars Journal, Grand Valley State University, “From Soldadera to Adelita: The Depiction of Women in the Mexican Revolution,” by Delia Fernández, 2009.

Macias, Anna. Women and the Mexican Revolution, 1910-1920. The Americas, Vol. 37, No. 1 (Jul., 1980), pp. 53-82. Cambridge University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/981040

Reséndez Fuentes, Andrés. Battleground Women: Soldaderas and Female Soldiers in the Mexican Revolution. The Americas, Vol. 51, No. 4 (Apr., 1995), pp. 525-553. Cambridge University Press. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1007679