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!)
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| 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
History
Channel
The Treaty of
Guadalupe Hidalgo (Yale, the Avalon Project)
The
Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo: National Archives - Lesson Plans!
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
