Working Woman in The Mexican Revolution

Working Women in the Mexican Revolution
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American

History
Susie S. Porter
Subject: History of Mexico, 1889–1910, 1910–1945, Gender and Sexuality, Revolutions and
Rebellions
Online Publication Date: May 2016 DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780199366439.013.16
Summary and Keywords
From la Adelita to the suffragette, from la chica moderna to the factory girl dressed in red
shirt and black skirt—the colors of the anarchist—women’s mobilization in the midst of
Mexican Revolution was, to a large degree, rooted in their workforce participation. The
evolution of gendered occupational segregation of the workforce, sex-typing of
occupations, and gendered wage differentials marked women’s experiences and the way
they organized to take control of their lives and to shape working conditions and politics.
While women’s employment nationwide contracted during the period 1890–1930, it was
nevertheless a moment of significant cultural change in the recognition of women’s work
outside of the home. Women shifted public debates over their right to work and mobilized
around the issues of maternity leave, equal pay for equal work, and respect for seniority.
Across the workforce, women fought for the application of the rights afforded by the
Mexican Constitution (1917) and then, in the 1930s, by federal labor law. By the fact of
their work and because of their activism, women shifted the conversation on the rights of
women—single or married, mothers or not, and regardless of personal beliefs or sexual
morality—to dignity at work and the right to combine a life of work with other activities
that informed their lives and fulfilled their passions.
Keywords: women, work, occupational segregation, unions, labor protest, Mexican Revolution, Mexico
Introduction
The Adelita icon has so dominated narratives of the Mexican Revolution that the great
diversity of women’s experiences has long remained hidden.1 Recent scholarship serves
as a rich corrective to narrow depictions of women’s activism. Women’s mobilization in
the midst of revolution was, to a large degree, rooted in their workforce participation
(1879–1940). The first half of this article charts the evolution of gendered occupational
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segregation of the workforce, sex-typing of occupations, and gendered wage differentials.

The second half of the article shows the ways work informed women’s labor mobilization
and their role in the broader women’s movement. The Mexican Revolution can be thought
of and defined in many different ways and, in this article, is broadly conceived of in at
least two ways. From one perspective, the Revolution was a civil war, a political battle,
and a violent adjustment in the way different sectors of society negotiated conflict and
access to resources. From another perspective, revolutionary Mexico was an era of
socioeconomic, political, and cultural change associated with larger historical processes
of industrialization, migration, urbanization, expansion of the educational system, and
shifts in commercial culture. It was a time of changing ideas about the body and fashion;
new uses of technology, from the telephone to the typewriter; and of legal frameworks,
especially the Mexican Constitution (1917) and the Ley Federal del Trabajo (1931).
Women generated and were affected by all of these long-term processes in ways informed
by shifting gender norms regarding women’s place at work and in the public sphere.
Women and Occupational Segregation of the

Workforce, late 19th century
The late-19th-century workforce was marked by occupational segregation and gendered
wage differentials. Nationwide as many as a third of working women labored in domestic
service. Manufacturing was also marked by occupational segregation. A study of Mexico
City industry conducted by Emiliano Busto (1879), for example, found that women
constituted 37 percent of that workforce. Women were concentrated in twelve of the
thirty-eight occupations included in the census, with 70 percent of all women working in
the female-dominated industries of tobacco products (85 percent female) and ready-made
clothing (100 percent female). Women also worked in mixed-sex settings and constituted
31 percent of the Mexico City cotton textile industry (compared with 22 percent of the
adult cotton and wool textile workforce nationwide). Women also worked in the
production of consumer goods such as matches and paper (50 percent of the workforce),
chocolate (24 percent), shoes (23 percent), and hats (16 percent).2
Scholars have explained occupational segregation of the workforce in several different

ways. Silvia Arrom, in her study of Mexico City, finds that despite the 1799 decree
abolishing barriers to women’s participation in trades regulated by guilds, their
workforce participation shifted only slightly.3 John Lear emphasizes the influence of
women’s position within the organization of domestic labor in shaping their skills and
inclinations for employment.4 Jeffrey Bortz claims that cultural values that emphasized
women’s domestic responsibilities inhibited the entrance of women into factory work and
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that therefore, unlike the situation in the United States, women did not participate in
early industrialization—a claim that is thrown into doubt by women’s early domination of
the tobacco industry workforce.5 Carmen Ramos Escandón argues that in the transition
away from artisanal production of textiles—dominated by indigenous women—women
were displaced by male artisans employed in modern factories, in part owing to
conceptions regarding the limited physical capacities of women. Nevertheless, she shows
that industrialist Estéban Antuñano considered factory work an important remedy to
female poverty. Whereas Mario Camarena Ocampo finds that men and women took
distinct jobs within textile production, Ramos Escandón, in her study of La Hormiga
factory in 1869, warns that it was not until the late 19th century that women were
restricted to lower-paid positions.6
Women at Work in the Countryside, 1850–1910

Despite the importance of rural work, research on women’s role in this history remains
modest. For the period 1850–1910 robust international demand for agricultural goods led
investors to favor agricultural enterprises, especially henequen, rubber, and coffee.
President Porfirio Díaz (1876–1911) facilitated the political stability that allowed for the
continued expansion of large-scale agricultural production. According to Teresa Rendón
Gan, women were 0.4 percent of agricultural workers nationwide in 1895 and 2 percent
of agricultural workers in 1910. Put a different way, Rendón Gan contends that a mere
1.3 percent of economically active women (compared to 72 percent of men) worked in
agricultural production in 1895 and 8 percent of economically active women (and 73
percent of men) in 1910.7 Francie Chassen López questions the reliability of national
statistics. Her study of Oaxaca found women—“cheaper than machines”—were 15
percent of agricultural jornaleros (day laborers) in 1907. Women of different social
classes participated in agricultural production as landowners, wage laborers,
sharecroppers, and communal landholders.8 The expansion of commercial agriculture
displaced women in some regions and created opportunities in others, especially in
processing agricultural products—coffee in Veracruz or Chiapas, for example. Sonia
Hernández examines the important role women played in agricultural production,
especially in processing raw materials in the Mexican northeast—an economic
powerhouse that had its origins in 1860s Monterrey and the rise of a merchant class
involved in the cotton trade during the U.S. Civil War. Despite a vibrant economy, by the
late 19th century laborers were migrating to higher-paying Texas farms, draining the
labor market in northern Mexico. Women’s labor, generally paid less than that of men,
filled that gap, allowing for the expansion of ixtle- and piloncillo-producing haciendas and
of other commercial agricultural enterprises.9
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The Impact of Revolution on Women’s

Employment
The soldadera would become the dominant icon of female participation in the Mexican
Revolution, varyingly celebrated for her valor and as an object of affection or scorn.
While reliance on female camp followers had been abandoned in France in 1840 and
Britain in 1890, it was still the practice in Mexico in the 1910s. As fighting spread across
the country and in the absence of a formal military commissary, women took to the work
of providing a range of services that included foraging, food preparation, arms
smuggling, nursing, sex, and companionship. The word soldada, or daily wages, suggests
the low-wage status of the work, which was nonetheless so crucial to the war effort that
almost all military factions hired and sometimes forcefully conscripted women into the
work.10 Indeed, some have argued that the Zapatistas were unable to secure territory
outside of Morelos for any significant amount of time due to their lack of female camp
followers. On the battlefield women faced dangers similar to those faced by men—
violence, displacement, and hunger—but women, owing to economic and sexual
vulnerability, also suffered sexual exploitation. John Reed, in Insurgent Mexico, narrates
the disrespect and abuse suffered by women camp followers in northern Mexico.
Women also took up the work of soldiering, as rank-and-file troops and as commanders.
Some women chose soldiering while maintaining their female identity, while for others
the Revolution opened up space for masculine self-expression. Amelio Robles (née
Amelia) found more full and authentic personal expression living as a man. Robles
dressed as a man, rode a horse, and fought in battle. Gabriela Cano shows how Robles,
dressed handsomely and with gun in hand, also used the modern technology of
photography and media spectacle to express his masculinity. While some women returned
to life as women at the culmination of war, Mexican law allowed Robles to change his
birth certificate to reflect his masculine identity.11
By mid-1915 there was a sharp decline in the number of women working on the
battlefield. Francisco Villa discouraged female camp followers as his food supplies
became too thin to sustain troops and followers. He then resorted to guerrilla warfare—
without the women. Venustiano Carranza’s decision to professionalize the army led to
hundreds of women losing their jobs. Marta Eva Rocha shows that despite the importance
of the work they had performed, women faced difficulty in obtaining veteran status or
pensions.12 After the war, some women returned home, while many took up new residence
in Mexico City, provincial capitals, and across the border in the United States. While
some may have continued their work in food preparation and sales, others, like Jesusa
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Palancares, interviewed by Elena Poniatowska for the book Hasta no verte Jesús mío,
shifted to sewing, nursing, and work as a cabaret dancer. Mary Kay Vaughan considers
the soldadera as a mobile, modern woman and forerunner of the chica moderna, who
made her appearance in 1920s silent films and then in streets, dance halls, and
schoolrooms across the country.
The Revolution also had an impact on industrial production and therefore on women’s
work in factories. Stephen Haber argues that the Revolution affected industry with
interruptions to supply routes, production, and sales affected working conditions (factory
closures, wage reductions, and poor quality materials with which to work).13
Nevertheless, long-term trends in industrialization had a more significant impact on
women’s lives than the temporary interruptions posed by the Mexican Revolution.
Women in the National and Regional

Workforce, 1895–1940
Women’s workforce participation did not follow a linear process toward growth.
According to Teresa Rendón Gan, the fragmentation of hacienda production and the
modernization of traditional industries led to a 60 percent decline in women’s national
workforce participation between 1895 and 1930.14 Rendón Gan argues that the most
significant decline occurred in the countryside, where women’s work became restricted
to ancillary participation in family-based agricultural production. Nevertheless, women
did work in processing agricultural goods in, for example, the coffee and fruit industries.
Women went from over half of the national industrial workforce (1910) to 13 percent
(1940). The modernization of the textile, clothing, and tobacco industries contributed to
the contraction of women’s employment, both as mechanization reduced labor demand
and women, who historically had dominated the latter two industries, were replaced with
men. Rendón Gan also found a slight decline in the number of women working in
domestic service and in business. In 1930, 60 percent of women worked in the service
sector, primarily domestic service. While Rendón Gan characterizes the contraction of
women’s employment as a “return to the home,” the period 1900–1930 marks a major
transformation in the acceptance of women’s work outside of the home. Beginning in
1930, as Mexico pursued a model of industrial production oriented toward the domestic
market, women’s declining employment in the industrial sector was compensated by
growth in the service sector, office work, and commerce.
Women’s employment in the industrial sector was higher in Mexico City than in most of
the country, but women’s workforce participation declined there as well. With the
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exception of clothing and knitwear production, the 1920s marked the decline of female-
dominated industries in Mexico City. Between 1879 and 1921 women as a percentage of
Mexico City tobacco workers declined from 85 percent to 68 percent of adult workers,
and by 1929 women accounted for only 52 percent of workers in this industry, a shift
explained later in this essay as in part the result of a campaign on the part of the
Confederación Regional Obrera Mexicana to secure jobs for men. Women’s role in what
Department of Labor census takers considered the industrial labor force increased
between 1921 and 1929, from 25 percent to 35 percent. (This census information should
be taken as suggestive and not definitive, as the occupations included in the two censuses
are not directly comparable.) Occupational segregation was accompanied by gendered
wage differentials. In 1929, throughout Mexico City industry, women earned 55 percent
of men’s earnings. In industries historically dominated by women (tobacco, clothing),
women’s wages were approximately 67 percent of those paid to men.15
Important occupations, such as telephone operator, street vendor, and domestic worker,
fall outside of industrial census material. The first telephone conversation in Mexico
occurred in 1878, and as telephone wires crisscrossed the nation in the first decades of
the 20th century, women staffed exchanges and connected callers making business deals,
fretting over labor disputes, or checking in on family. As the telephone operator made her
way home at the end of the day, she would surely have passed women on the street and
in markets selling goods and services. Market vendors sustained industrialization,
providing a warm atole or a tamal to people on the way to work and selling manufactured
and industrially produced goods via street networks. Mario Barbosa Cruz documents the
work of women and men who sold fruits, vegetables, crockery, and kitchen utensils in a
network of indoor markets and street stands.16 At the Mercado Sonora, for example,
women sold herbs for ailments and dead hummingbirds to place under one’s pillow for an
unrequited love. Women sold products placed on a petate on the sidewalk and so
combined family subsistence agricultural production with small-scale commerce. To date,
few historians have turned their attention to the sectors of the workforce where, in fact,
most women have been employed—domestic work. Mary Goldsmith Connelly finds that
during the 1930s about one in three women participating in the labor market did so as a
domestic worker. According to the census of 1930 there were 186,359 domestic workers
across the country, and of these 70 percent (131,970) were women; ten years later there
were 181,030 domestic workers, of which 84 percent (151,912) were women. Employed
primarily in private homes, domestic workers also made hotel beds, cooked in
restaurants, and cared for children in public institutions.17
Women’s employment in the sex industry is not easily documented, but we do know how
working conditions have changed over time. Mexican regulation of prostitution originated
in French public policy that allowed for government-regulated tolerance zones
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(Reglamento para el ejercicio de la prostitución, 1865, 1872, 1898, 1926).18

Primarily concerned with controlling sexual activity and the prevention of contagious
diseases, the Mexican government attempted regular inspections and medical treatment,
with little impact. Government officials categorized prostitution in ways that may or may
not have corresponded to how women themselves thought of the work but that
nevertheless are suggestive of the circumstances of that work: en comunidad
(working in a brothel) or aislada (independent). The impact of the violence of revolution
was, as with other sectors of the economy, an interlude in more long-term processes.
Katharine Bliss shows the ways sex work became more dangerous during the violent
phase of revolution.19 With the termination of regulated prostitution in 1940 and its
criminalization, women moved out of brothels and onto the streets to find business.
Government focus on control of the urban geography of the city more than on the people
engaged in prostitution resulted, Pamela Fuentes shows, in a lack of protections for sex
workers—who increasingly faced extortion, corruption, and violence as men gained
control of street prostitution.20
Women’s unpaid domestic labor contributed to maintaining households, subsidized

production, bolstered class distinction, and was intimately linked to the conditions of
some women’s paid labor outside of the home. Ann Blum, for example, argues that
conceptions of labor (who works and who does not) shaped family formation, the
circulation of children, and the labor market. “Sentimentalized childhood,” or the middle-
and upper-class ideology that children should be protected from working, she maintains,
was fundamental to class formation, not only because it served to distinguish those who
could protect their children from laboring and those who could not but also because such
conceptions informed the work of women who themselves could not afford to stay home
to nurse and care for their own children. Interlocking domestic economies channeled the
flow of value out of poor families into privileged ones. As women moved from villages to
Mexico City to work as wet nurses, for example, they also transferred wealth from rural
to urban economies, with one result being the reinforcement of ethnic stratification of the
labor force.
Women who identified as middle class began to enter the workforce during the Porfiriato
(1876–1911). The teaching profession offered women intellectual, social, and economic
opportunities. Gabriela Cano and Luz Elena Galván and Oresta López, in separate works,
have documented the ways the teaching profession was construed as an extension of
women’s domestic roles and therefore appropriate work for women.21 Within such
restrictions women nevertheless found opportunities for intellectual growth and perhaps
social mobility, as Mílada Bazant delightfully narrates in her intimate biography of Laura
Méndez de Cuenca.22 Women first worked as doctors, dentists, and lawyers during the
Porfiriato as well. Growing numbers of women sought out commercial education and took
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office jobs, both in the private and public sectors. Women began working in government
offices as early as the 1890s, and in order to carry out the mandates of revolution—land
reform, education, and health care—the federal bureaucracy boomed during the 1920s.
Women as a percentage of Mexico City public employees increased dramatically over the
years, from 7 percent in 1900 to 13 percent in 1920 and from 22 percent in 1930 to 33
percent in 1938.23 These numbers are all the more dramatic when we consider that data
for 1930 includes both teachers and other public employees, while the 1938 data does not
include teachers.24 Between 1932 and 1938 an important shift occurred in women’s role
in federal offices: the number of female public employees (12,838) surpassed the number
of female teachers (12,126).25 A growing number of women trained in professions such as
nursing and social work and played a crucial role in defining and carrying out
revolutionary programs. Professional women, Nichole Sanders shows, contributed to the
legitimacy of the ruling political party.26
Women Mobilize and Become the Revolution,

1890–1916
Women’s workforce participation informed their activism. Women, like other workers,
formed mutual aid societies that flourished during the late 19th century. They came
together as wives of workers, as with the Mutua de Señoras “Unión y Amistad María de
Jesús Huerta,” and as workers themselves, as with the Fraternal de Costureras. Their
societies were religious and secular. Mutual aid societies offered support to members in
times of need with, for example, cooperative savings banks, funding for burial, and social
gatherings. Women’s mutual aid societies often sought out the patronage of society
women and held fundraising events at prominent downtown theaters. By the 1890s,
working women in Mexico City built upon their associational life to confront employers.
In 1894 cigarreras protested increased production quotas. Teachers supported the
cigarreras, their strike, and eventual efforts to establish a cooperative tobacco
manufactory. In 1897 seamstresses disputed the terms of their contract to produce
military clothing and appealed to government, distinguished members of society, and the
press to aid them in their cause. Women had shifted their methods of mobilization from a
reliance on patronage and pleas to negotiation and direct confrontation with employers.
On the eve of revolution workers debated the relative value of different forms of
organizing, and many questioned the effectiveness of the mutual aid societies in which
women played a visible role. Despite negative portrayals that construed women as
engaged in frivolous gatherings and as ineffective in representing working-class
grievances, it was precisely women’s rich organizational culture that prepared them for
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an active role in the labor movement associated with the Revolution. Indeed, by the time
Francisco I. Madero declared his Plan de San Luis Potosí (1910), workers had long been
calling not only for better working conditions but also for the ouster of President Porfirio
Díaz. In 1907 textile workers Maria del Carmen and Catalina Frías, along with teachers
and other women, formed Las Hijas de Anáhuac in Mexico City to make labor demands
and to protest against the Porfirian government. Women in the mutual aid societies
founded by Governor Guillermo de Landa y Escandón (meant to counter labor agitation)
mobilized as their patron fled the country and were among the several women’s societies
involved in founding the Casa del Obrero Mundial (COM) in 1912.27
During the early years of the Revolution, 1911–1916, working women frequently
mobilized to demand wage increases and against factory closures. They protested abusive
treatment by employers and affronts to their honor as women and as workers. In the
years 1911–1912, strikes broke out across the region of Mexico City. In 1911 women
went on strike at La Sinaloense clothing factory and San Antonio Abad textile factory, and
by 1912 up to thirty thousand people—when women, men, and their families were
included in the count—filled the streets in a protest that came to include more than a
dozen textile factories. Seamstresses staged major strikes in 1913 and 1914 and were
supported by the Casa del Obrero Mundial (COM). By 1914 COM membership was
flourishing, in part owing to the increasing numbers of women who joined, including the
cigarreras of La Companía Mexicana. In 1915 women, most of them seamstresses,
enlisted in Ácrata, the COM nursing brigade. This same year Ericsson operators, also
COM members, went on strike. In 1916 women were integral to both the organization of
the Federación de Sindicatos Obreros del Distrito Federal and the Mexico City General
Strike. Ester Torres and Ángela Inclán, both seamstresses, served on the strike
leadership committee. When arrested, President Carranza did not punish them with jail
time and claimed they had been duped by male labor agitators. “You’ve sold yourself like
prostitutes,” Carranza is reported to have said.28 President Carranza’s insult of women’s
public activities may have been in part a reaction to the increasingly public role of women
in Mexican society more generally.
Throughout the 1910s, many women built on their workplace activism to take up political
causes, which served as a springboard for political and professional advancement. In
Jalisco, for example, Atala Apodaca Anaya (1884–1977) was attracted to the Francisco I.
Madero anti-reelection campaign and his run for the presidency. Trained as a teacher and
raised within a Liberal tradition, Apodaca was attracted to Madero’s freethinking
spiritism and support for education. The Huerta coup in 1913 sparked a wave of protest
by women, including Apodaca. While in Mexico City women staged daily protests at
Madero’s grave, Apodaca appeared in the neighborhoods and theaters of Guadalajara,
giving talks to mixed audiences of men and women, workers and intellectuals. Apodaca’s
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anticlericalism crystalized in the formation of the Centro Radical Feminino, composed

primarily of teachers and workers, in 1918.29
Constitution of 1917
In the midst of labor unrest, the Constitutional Convention convened in late 1916.
Convention delegates drew on both the Constitution of 1857 and international currents of
thought regarding labor. They were also aware of and concerned about dealing with the
status of working women. For example, in 1912 a proposal had circulated in Congress
that would have required employers of more than twenty-five female workers to provide
day care. With the Constitution of 1917, the protection of working mothers and their
children became law. Section V of article 123 stipulated, among other things, that a
pregnant woman not be allowed to perform heavy work three months prior to giving
birth. She had the right to a month’s rest after childbirth, during which time she should
receive her full salary and benefits, without threat of losing her job. Upon returning to
work and during lactation, employers were to provide women with two extra half-hour
breaks per day and a designated space for nursing.
During the 1920s, employers largely disregarded maternity legislation. Department of

Labor records reveal only scattered evidence of such privileges actually being granted. El
Buen Tono cigarette factory, with just under four hundred employees who among them
had 123 children, did not provide maternity benefits. The owner of several tortillerías, a
Señor Atherton, made no special provisions for pregnant women or new mothers, which
he justified by stating that his workers had never requested any such special treatment.
When further pressed by Department of Labor inspector Juan de Beraza as to why he did
not provide any of the legally mandated services for women, Atherton replied by
questioning the women’s sexual morality: “How is it possible that the factory must give
assistance to women who are not legally married? Such assistance would be immoral
given that many of the women lead irregular lives or live catch as catch can in this
sense.”30
The Constitution of 1917 also guaranteed a minimum wage, but it was defined in a way
that excluded women. Article 123, section VI, established that “the minimum wage . . .
will be based on regional differences in the cost of living, and meet the normal
subsistence needs of a working man, his education, and honest forms of leisure,
considering him as head of household.”31 In 1923 the government did pass the By-Laws on
Women’s Work in Commercial Establishments, which established the vague criterion that
“the minimum wage which the female employee should receive will be that considered
sufficient for her indispensable needs.”32 The by-laws defined women’s wages as for
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individual use, not the support of a household, despite the fact that significant numbers of
women were heads of household. Congress also passed protective labor legislation that
restricted women’s work at night and in “dangerous” occupations. The Constitution did
guarantee equal pay for equal work, regardless of sex.
The same year as the promulgation of the Constitution, President Venustiano Carranza
oversaw the enactment of the Ley de Relaciones Familiares, which also touched on
women’s right to work. Building on the 1884 Civil Code, the law allowed for the increased
agency of women within marital relations, it also reiterated that a woman needed her
husband’s formal permission to take a job. The law also reinforced women’s obligation to
attend to all domestic matters, especially child care and maintaining the home.
Impact of Occupational Segregation on

Women’s Labor Mobilization
While some authors argue that occupational segregation of the workforce weakened
women’s collective bargaining power, for others it has been a source of organizational
strength. Heather Fowler-Salamini maintains that the concentration of women in the
coffee industry in Veracruz informed their social lives, sense of community, and labor
activism.33 Her research broadens our understanding of the factors that shape the
successes and failures of organized labor. Charles Berquist has contended that workers
were most likely to succeed when they were employed in industries strategic to the state
and national development, especially when tied to exports. Those industries tended to be
male dominated: oil, ports, and steel, for example. Fowler-Salamini reasons that while
coffee production may have been a second-tier industry, the strategic importance of
seasonal workers gave coffee sorters (escogedoras) leverage in collective bargaining.
Furthermore, the concentration of women in the coffee-sorting industry and the
community life that evolved around that work informed their labor activism. While some
historians emphasize workers’ consciousness and cohesion as based in community (John
Lear), labor regimes (John Womack, Jeffrey Bortz), or the long history of class formation
that dates back to the rich culture of artisans (Carlos Illades), Fowler-Salamini focuses on
the overlapping spaces of work, community, and home, noting how this overlap allowed
union activists to cultivate a cohesive cadre.34 To be sure, coffee sorters were a
heterogeneous group in terms of education, civil status, housing, residential patterns,
and political and religious allegiances. At the same time, the sorter community was an
extended family, with all the ups and downs that family implies. Community dances,
theater performances, and an all-female brass band brought women together as friends
and as fictive kin (madrinas). Occupational segregation and an array of social activities
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grounded union solidarity and served as an important basis of power for women labor
leaders.
By contrast, Susan Gauss argues that in Puebla, occupational segregation of the

workforce left knitwear workers (boneteras) in a weak bargaining position, and as a
result they were unable to push for the enforcement of their constitutional right to
maternity leave. Gauss finds that in 1930s and 1940s Puebla, the prevalence of the
ideology of domesticity among the working class informed how workers unionized and
the demands they made. The Confederación Regional Obrera Mexicana (established in
1918) especially emphasized the importance of reproduction and motherhood and
supported protective legislation that reinforced the relegation of women to unskilled,
lower-paid jobs. By the 1940s, women made up less than 5 percent of the textile
workforce in Puebla, though they dominated the lower-wage knitwear industry—80
percent of the workforce between 1935 and 1950.35
Of Socialists and Señoritas: Labor Organizing

during the Decade of the 1920s
The government by no means had full control of the country during the decade of the
1920s. Not only were there regional rebellions, the church-state conflict went from
simmering conflict to explosive confrontation. And according to Jaime Tamayo, the
largest number of labor strikes in Mexican history occurred between 1920 and 1924.36
For weeks on end, the red-and-black anarchist flag hung from the doorways of bakeries
and theater marquees as bakers, cinema workers, operators, and other workers joined in
solidarity. Between work shifts and getting their hair bobbed; donning streamlined, loose
flapper dresses; and attending school, working women participated as integral members
of the unionization movement. The Confederación Regional de Obreros Mexicanos
(CROM) had formed in 1918, the Partido Comunista Mexicano in 1919, and the Central
General de Trabajadores (CGT) in 1923. The latter of these three was the most
welcoming of women’s leadership and committed to solidarity with women’s specific
labor demands.
Heather Fowler-Salamini deepens our understanding of how different sectors of

organized labor related to working women, while enriching the emerging picture of
regional variation. From its inception, the CROM claimed to support the rights of working
women in article 9 of its founding document. And when the CROM organized workers in
the Veracruz coffee industry in 1925, it did so with the slogan “For the Rights of Women.”
Despite such proclamations, coffee sorters fought to keep men from taking control of
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their organization and resources. By the late 1920s the male-dominated CROM
increasingly stifled coffee sorters’ feminist stance and sought to marginalize women from
jobs and leadership positions. In 1932 a splinter group left the CROM-allied Sindicato de
Obreras Escogedoras de la Ciudad de Córdoba.
The CROM also engaged in at least two labor campaigns in Mexico City detrimental to
women workers—at El Buen Tono cigarette factory (1920) and with waitresses (1925).37
In January 1920 a group of mechanics at El Buen Tono cigarette factory initiated a
conflict with management that led to the formation of a union that would eventually
affiliate with the CROM. Women members of the Communist Party and a rival Catholic
union alike were either dismissed or marginalized within the union movement. CROM
gains were further consolidated during mechanization of cigarette production and when
the union redefined certain occupations as “unhealthy,” thus disqualifying women from
those positions. Moreover, the CROM supported protective labor legislation that
prohibited women from night shifts. Waitresses also protested against the CROM’s
exclusionary practices. Restaurant owners required that they obtain a CROM union card
in order to gain or retain employment, but when the women requested membership, they
were told by the CROM that only those who worked in “first-class” restaurants could join.
As a result, men worked in first-class restaurants, “where respectable families dine,” and
women in second-class restaurants. In a distinct lack of class solidarity, the Waiters’
Union accused the waitresses of strikebreaking and resorted to racist excuses that
blamed “nefarious” Chinese for the exploitation of “poor Mexican women.” While the
CROM supported waiters, waitresses took to the streets, and in the 1925 May Day parade
they dressed in black and red and held up signs that read: “Bourgeois: Do not prostitute
woman; love her, raise her up morally” and “Bourgeois: We proletariat are people too.”38
Women found more sustained support for their demands within the CGT, where they
were integral to the union’s establishment and leadership. María del Carmen Frías served
on an early executive committee. The CGT embraced female-dominated unions. Even in
the male-dominated textile industry in Mexico City, CGT strikes (1922, 1923) included
women’s demands for an end to piece-work pay and to the poor treatment of women at La
Abeja textile and knitwear factory. Protesters included women from La Carolina and La
Fama Montañesa textile factories, cigarreras from El Buen Tono, and women from the
embroiderers’ union. Operators at the Ericsson telephone company also played an active
role in the CGT throughout the decade of the 1920s, when they repeatedly went on strike
for better wages and working conditions and in protest of the dismissal of women who
became pregnant. The CGT leadership, which included Gudelia Gómez, also fought tooth
and nail for maternity leave, as stipulated in the Constitution. Management tried to argue
that the operators were “señoritas” and not “obreras” and therefore were not deserving
of the workers’ rights provided by the Constitution. The moral and class distinctions that
Page 13 of 28


came into play at Ericsson were not an isolated incident, but rather were integral to
Catholic organizing in the workplace.39
The encyclical Rerum Novarum, issued by Pope Leon XIII in 1891, had raised the
legitimacy of addressing “the worker question,” and by the 1920s Catholic organizations
and industrialists alike focused on nonwage benefits for workers. In separate works,
Patience Schell and Kristina Boylan show that the Asociación de Damas Católicas
(established in 1912) organized working women—seamstresses, secretaries, cigarette
workers, and others—in Monterrey, San Miguel de Allende, and Mexico City and would
come to claim more than double the membership of the feminist Frente Único Pro
Derechos de la Mujer (established in 1935).40 The Confederación Nacional Católica del
Trabajo included 219 organizations with a total of 21,500 workers in 1924, and the
Secretaría de las Obras Femeninas oversaw activities that drew in working women.41 The
organization supported the family wage—not equal pay for equal work—and held
meetings that provided education, spiritual enrichment, and conviviality. Members like
Señorita Sofía del Valle established connections with employers who welcomed Catholic
organizers into the workplace. Del Valle helped shape management practices such as
hiring, firing, and organizing at El Nuevo Mundo and La Britania clothing factories, the
perfume producer Casa Bourgeois, and El Buen Tono cigarette factory. Señorita del Valle
was herself employed as an executive secretary at the Ericsson telephone company,
where she had a profound impact on the workplace.42 Del Valle was a member of the
Unión de Damas Católicas and a founder of Juventud Católica Feminina Mexicana. The
paternalism of Monterrey industrialists, Michael Snodgrass shows, led employers to
create associations that tapped into worker culture, and offered nonwage benefits such
as education, cultural events, and kind words from overseers and owners at Cuauhtémoc
Brewery.
Women Collaborate Across the Workforce

Women often collaborated across occupations. María Teresa Fernández Aceves focuses
on women’s networks formed within and beyond the context of a specific workplace or a
given industry. In late 1920s Jalisco, she writes, the number of working women in the
textile sector declined as the result of mechanization, economic crisis, and a labor
movement that tried to protect male employment. Meanwhile, the number of women
professionals grew—teachers and public employees especially, and their political
organizations became more robust. In 1927 teachers and textile workers allied to support
women in the tortilla industry and formed the Centro Feminista Occidente (CFO). The
CFO worked to establish schools for workers and to support the needs of single working
Page 14 of 28


mothers. Their agenda was, however, overshadowed by the family wage movement that
privileged male heads of household. Despite this, the CFO made important gains for its
members and served as political intermediary between the rank and file and city, state,
and federal politicians. By 1940 Guadalajara had 511,215 women workers, most in
domestic work but also in industry (7,514) and in commerce (7,988). By the early 1940s,
there were forty-three women’s organizations in Guadalajara: Catholic (two), labor
(twenty-five), professional (seven), and political (nine). Women organized in tortilla
production (thirteen) and the garment industry (nine) as well as within the ranks of office
clerks, tobacco workers, and those employed in food preparation.
How and Why Working Women Mobilize

Scholarship on the mobilization of working women during the first half of the 20th
century has delineated several debates regarding women’s motivations for protest and
their construction of social and political identities. María Teresa Fernández Aceves, for
example, rejects narrow depictions of women as housewives and consumers and the
concomitant elision of their identity as workers. The women of the Centro Feminista
Occidente may have fought for schools and the rights of single mothers, but they also
formulated demands for the minimum wage and the right to work and to form their own
organizations—demands also made by working men. Scholars like John Lear and Heather
Fowler-Salamini, inspired by the work of Temma Kaplan, have argued that women’s
protest has, historically, been based on their role within the home and informed a female
consciousness. John Lear for Mexico City and Andrew Wood in his study of the tenant
movement of Veracruz have shown the ways collective actions sometimes have
revolutionary consequences when the networks of everyday life become politicized.
Jocelyn Olcott contends that women activists in the 1930s were limited in their success,
in having defined their demands for financial, political, and sociocultural resources based
on the identity of “mother.” By construing their demands around motherhood, Olcott
argues, the interests of women remained indistinguishable from those of their families
and communities.
Historians have begun to distinguish between how women and men have used
conceptions of gender in different contexts. While previous generations of scholarship on
caciquismo identified men as power brokers, María Teresa Fernández Aceves and
Heather Fowler-Salamini explore women’s role in cacique politics and, in so doing,
deepen our understanding of political culture—and, indeed, redefine what constitutes
political culture. Fowler-Salamini, in her study of coffee sorters in Veracruz, maintains
that in many ways women’s exercise of cacical power did not differ from that of men. She
Page 15 of 28


states that in times of intense mobilization, women’s activism tends to reflect that of men
in order to legitimate their claims. However, if the power of a cacique could be
authoritarian and paternalist, women were less likely to use violence and more likely to
use the threat of violence as well as manipulation. Female labor leaders manipulated
political power within a field of norms defined by coffee sorters’ religious practices,
gender norms, and social ties rooted in women’s work culture. Nevertheless, cacicas
exercised power in differently gendered ways. While one female labor leader wore men’s
pants and shoes, spoke coarsely, and carried a gun, another relied on a style of
persuasion more in accordance with norms of femininity. Women in male-dominated labor
organizations in Guadalajara also appropriated and refashioned official gendered
discourses of church and state in ways that empowered them, even in the absence of
women’s full right to vote (granted in 1953). Women drew on different traditions to open
opportunities and to empower themselves: 19th-century anticlerical liberalism and new
opportunities for women’s professional training, Catholic traditions, the rise of the labor
movement, and the incipient feminist movement. Fernández Aceves found that women
did not enter into positions of political authority under the same circumstances as men
because, according to the author, the public world of politics was considered a man’s
world. She argues that women combined patronage in the so-called masculine style with
customs of women’s culture and patronage. In Jalisco, Veracruz, and Mexico City, female
leaders often married men active in labor organizing and politics.
Ley Federal del Trabajo, 1931

The Constitution of 1917 had established an impressive array of rights for workers, but
legislation and enforcement were left to state and municipal authorities, with the
exception of the Federal District, which remained under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of
Industry, Commerce, and Labor. President Emilio Portes Gil (1928–1930) pushed for the
passage of the Federal Labor Code that went into effect in 1931 under the presidency of
Pascual Ortiz Rubio (1930–1932). The law guaranteed the eight-hour workday, vacation,
and the right to collective bargaining and contract, among other rights. It also
represented increasing recognition of women’s rights as workers, though it also limited
their work options by building upon the corpus of protective labor legislation that had
developed over the previous decades. Article 21 stipulated that a married woman did not
need her husband’s permission to enter into a labor contract or join a union. At the same
time, article 77 prohibited women from working at night, and article 107 prohibited
women from work in places that dispensed alcoholic beverages for immediate
consumption and from dangerous or unhealthy work, except in cases where protective
measures, as deemed by a judge, were installed. The By-Laws on Unhealthy and
Page 16 of 28


Dangerous Work (1934) prohibited women from cleaning or repairing machinery and any
moving parts or working with saws. Women could not work underground, in submarines,
in explosives factories, or in workplaces emitting dangerous gases, dust, continuous
humidity, or other noxious emissions.
The Ley Federal del Trabajo did establish important guidelines for the regulation of
outwork, of particular importance to women employed in the clothing industry, and
domestic work. Chapter 18 of article 213 sought to abolish the distinctions in working
conditions and wages between those employed inside and outside of the factory, which
pitted workers against each other. Despite such laws, in 1936 the Office for the
Investigation of Working Women found that only 10 percent of seamstresses claimed
union membership. Two of every fifteen clothing shops were organized. The seamstresses
who claimed union affiliation belonged to the Confederación Regional Obrera Mexicana
or the Frente Regional de Obreros y Campesinos, affiliated with the Partido
Revolucionario Mexicano. Only 20 percent of seamstresses worked under a collective
contract, and 77 percent held individual contracts, which were more likely to benefit
employers. In her study on domestic workers, Mary Goldsmith Connelly reasons that the
passage of the Ley Federal del Trabajo spurred the unionization of domestic workers. The
Constitution of 1917 did not specifically mention domestic workers, while codes at the
state level defined domestic workers in feudalistic terms of honesty, loyalty, decency, and
discretion. Within the context of the growing nationalist and populist spirit that
culminated with the Lázaro Cárdenas regime and the vibrant activism of women on the
national political scene, domestic workers claimed their right to unionize.
The Ley Federal del Trabajo was also important for the way it framed and perhaps
accelerated public employee demands for the rights afforded to workers. Public
employees, as government workers, were not covered by the 1931 law; nevertheless they
used its passage as political leverage. The Estatuto Jurídico (1938) allowed public
employees limited rights to organize and a range of rights for which women had
mobilized for nearly two decades—maternity leave, recognition of seniority, and equal
pay for equal work. The formation of the Tribunal Federal de Conciliación y Arbitraje
gave public employee a space to file grievances, akin to the Junta de Conciliación y
Arbitraje for workers.
Sonia Hernández shows that to gain a full understanding of women’s labor mobilization
we must look to the state-level Junta de Conciliación y Arbitraje. In her work on
Monterrey, a city characterized by a male-dominated labor movement, Hernández finds
women made good use of institutions like the juntas. Dotted with the faded purple ink of
fingerprints and crisscrossed with signatures, an archived document from the Linares
labor board tells of one woman who in 1936 brought a complaint against her employer,
who had drastically cut her workload, paid by the piece, with the effect of reducing her
Page 17 of 28


take-home pay to such an extent that she could not make a living. After six months of
negotiation, her coworkers had joined in, and by the time the case was resolved, the
cigarreras had formed the first female cigar workers union in Nuevo León. Hernández
pays equal attention to women not affiliated with unions who appealed to the Junta de
Conciliación y Arbitraje, thus reminding us that the lack of a visible union movement in a
given sector of the workforce or among a particular group of workers does not mean that
those workers were necessarily quiescent to the demands of their employers.
Shifts in Conceptions of Women and Work

The early 20th century saw important changes in conceptions of women and work.
Whereas at the beginning of the century many people expressed concern over “mixing of
the sexes”—men and women working in the same place—by the 1920s and 1930s the
women’s movement shifted debates over women’s right to work. Women with access to
the press and to the world of publishing wrote in defense of the right of women, including
mothers, to work. For example, Leonor Llach and María Ríos Cárdenas often wrote of the
changing balance of work, love, and domesticity for women. For both women, writing and
intervening in public conversations was integral to their activism. Ríos Cárdenas wrote in
the 1920s on the compatibility of motherhood and work. “If she does not need to work,
she should stay home and care for kids, husband. If she needs to work, she should, and
her children will thank her for it.”43 Leonor Llach was more likely to center the
importance of work for women. “For a cultivated woman, love is a secondary concern, the
home a refuge, at times very agreeable, but not so much so as to isolate her from the
world; and maternity is a masterly work of art, to which she can dedicate all of her
inspiration, but not an absolute and definitive objective in life, a sentence without appeal,
that separates her from all material or intellectual work.”44 In another piece, Llach
decried the power of the trope of maternity to limit women’s freedom of movement. “It is
comical, the argument that men make when they want to argue that women are wrong,
and when they have no logical argument to put forth: maternity, the home. In other
words, fantasy.”45
In many instances women were able to use their labor activism as a stepping-stone to
professional advancement, which empowered them to speak out for women’s rights.
Textile worker María Arcelia Díaz (1896–1939) a founder of the workers union at La
Experiencia textile factory in Jalisco, built on her labor activism in a way that eventually
benefited her career. After serving on the executive committee, Díaz went on to
collaborate in the foundation of the Centro Feminista Occidente. In 1925 Díaz served as
the worker representative to the Junta Municipal de Conciliación y Arbitraje and was
Page 18 of 28


later named to the Consejo Superior de Salubridad. Eventually, as María Teresa

Fernández Aceves writes, Díaz was named the worker representative to the Partido
Nacional Revolucionario. In this latter position, Díaz continued her work on behalf of
working women for education, medicine, and the right to vote, among many other things.
Citizenship
“Effective suffrage, no reelection,” served as a rallying cry during the Mexican
Revolution, and yet women did not receive full suffrage until 1953. The fight for women’s
right to vote was particularly vigorous during the decades of the 1920s and 1930s.
During the 1920s some states allowed women’s participation in local elections (Chiapas,
Tabasco, and Yucatán in 1925), and women could vote in political party elections in
1935.46 During the 1920s the Consejo Feminista Mexicano brought together teachers,
office workers, and other women who advocated for the vote. Ana Lau Jaiven argues that
women’s activism allowed them to act as citizens despite their lack of the formal right to
vote.47 Drawing on evidence from Yucatán, Mexico City, Michoacán, the Comarca
Lagunera, and Guerrero, Jocelyn Olcott argues that, in the absence of formal citizenship,
women nonetheless engaged in the performance of revolutionary citizenship in the 1930s.
That performance derived from three traditionally masculine activities: military service,
civic engagement, and labor. With regard to labor, Olcott asserts that female wage
earners “passed” in male territory rather than subvert the distinction between gendered
spheres of productive and reproductive labor. Labor traditionally marked as feminine
remained either invisible or an impediment to political consciousness. Women’s
commitments to popular mobilization and success in engaging traditional political
patronage, however, allowed them to make gains in access to resources.
The Frente Único Pro Derechos de la Mujer drew on women’s activism around suffrage
and a wide range of social and labor issues that coalesced in a series of congresses in the
1930s. The Congreso Nacional de Obreras y Campesinas (1931, 1933, 1935) included a
large number of women who worked as public employees, professional women, obreras,
campesinas, and women organized in neighborhood associations. The 1931 congress
called for the formation of cooperatives for empleadas, obreras, and campesinas; a
minimum wage for obreras and empleadas; an eight-hour maximum workday for
empleadas, obreras, and domestic workers; and maternity benefits for public employees,
who had been excluded from such benefits in the Constitution.48
Page 19 of 28


Conclusion
While the period 1890–1930 saw a contraction of women’s employment, it was also a
period of significant cultural shifts in the recognition of women’s work outside of the
home. During the 1890s working women shifted from making pleas and polite petitions to
protest. Mutual aid societies served as a rich cultural and associational space within
which women supported one another not only through fund-raisers and personal support
networks but increasingly also in negotiating with employers. Women also engaged in
political protest, calling for the ouster of President Porfirio Díaz. So when the Revolution
formally broke out in 1910, women were already politically engaged in and integral to the
labor movement. Occupational segregation of the workforce, with roots in 19th-century
organization of production, shaped women’s work experiences and forms of organizing.
Union culture and the politics of the labor movement also shaped women’s work and
organizing. Women interested in engaging in union politics ran into significant barriers
within the Confederación Regional Obrera Mexicana and found opportunities within the
Central General de Trabajadores. They played an important role within the Partido
Comunista Mexicano, though they found their concerns marginalized within discussions
and the formulation of an agenda. Catholic organizations offered women spiritual,
educational, and social benefits that many employers were eager to welcome into the
workplace.
Women’s activism at work and in the streets, as well as their writing and public
engagement, shifted conceptions of women and work. During the early phases of
industrialization, employers’ concerns as to the physical abilities of women and any
resistance to women working outside of the home were tempered by concerns regarding
female poverty. At the same time, public commentary questioned the morality of women
who worked outside of the home. In the wake of the outbreak of revolution, the rhetoric
of change filled the air, and women leveraged promises of new rights and social relations
to their advantage, questioning conceptions of gender norms. Activists with a facility for
writing or public speaking and access to the press and public venues shifted public
debates regarding the rights of women at work—maternity leave, equal pay for equal
work, respect for seniority, and the vote. They also shifted the conversation on the rights
of mothers to work at all. Across the workforce, women fought for the application of the
rights afforded by the Constitution and then, in the 1930s, by federal labor law. After
1940, as the number and percentage of women active in the workforce grew and growing
numbers of women shifted into the service sector and commerce, women’s work
experiences would be profoundly shaped by the mobilization of women during the
Revolution.
Page 20 of 28


Primary Sources
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Reed, John. Insurgent Mexico. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1969.
Further Reading
Blum, Ann. Domestic Economies: Family, Work, and Welfare in Mexico City, 1884–1943.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009.
Cano, Gabriela. “Género y construcción cultural de las profesiones en el Porfiriato:

Magisterio, medicina, jurisprudencia y odontología.” Historia y grafía 14 (2000): 207–243.
Cano, Gabriela. “Unconcealable Realities of Desire: Amelio Robles’s (Transgender)

Masculinity in the Mexican Revolution.” In Sex in Revolution: Gender, Politics, and Power
in Modern Mexico. Edited by Jocelyn Olcott, Mary Kay Vaughan, and Gabriela Cano.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.
Cano, Gabriela. Se llamaba Elena Arizmendi. Mexico City: Tusquets Editores, 2010.
Chassen-López, Francie. “‘Cheaper Than Machines’: Women and Agriculture in Porfirian

Oaxaca (1880–1911).” In Women of the Mexican Countryside, 1850–1990: Creating
Spaces, Shaping Transitions. Edited by Mary Kay Vaughan and Heather Fowler-Salamini,
27–50. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1994.
Fernández Aceves, María Teresa. “Once We Were Corn Grinders: Women and Labor in
the Tortilla Industry of Guadalajara, 1920–1940.” International Labor and Working-Class
History 63 (2003): 81–101.
Fernández Aceves, María Teresa. “Engendering Caciquismo: Guadalupe Martínez and

Heliodoro Hernández Loza and the Politics of Organized Labor in Jalisco.” In Caudillo and
Cacique in Twentieth-Century Mexico. Edited by Alan Knight and Wil Pansters, 201–224.
London: ILAS, 2005.
Fernández Aceves, María Teresa. “El trabajo femenino en México, 1920–1940.” In

Historia de las mujeres: España y América Latina. Edited by Gabriela Cano, Dora
Barrancos, and Pilar Canto, 845–859. Madrid: Cátedra, 2006.
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Fernández Aceves, María Teresa. Mujeres en el cambio social en el siglo XX mexicano.

Mexico City: Siglo XXI Editores, 2014.
Fowler-Salamini, Heather. Working Women, Entrepreneurs, and the Mexican Revolution:

The Coffee Culture of Córdoba, Veracruz. Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2013.
Fowler-Salamini, Heather, and Mary Kay Vaughan, eds. Women of the Mexican
Countryside, 1850–1990. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1994.
Galván, Luz Elena, and Oresta López. Entre imaginarios y utopías: Historias de maestras.
Mexico City: CIESAS, UNAM-PUEG, COLSAN, 2008.
Gauss, Susan. “Masculine Bonds and Modern Mothers: The Rationalization of Gender in
the Textile Industry in Puebla, 1940–1952.” International Labor and Working-Class
History 63 (2003): 63–80.
Goldsmith Connelly, Mary. “Política, trabajo y género: La sindicalización de las y los

trabajadores domésticos y el Estado mexicano.” In Orden social e identidad de género:
México siglos XIX y XX. Edited by María Teresa Fernández Aceves, Carmen Ramos
Escandón, and Susie S. Porter, 215–244. Guadalajara, Mexico: CIESAS, Universidad de
Guadalajara, 2006.
Hernández, Sonia. Working Women into the Borderlands. College Station: Texas A&M
University Press, 2014.
Lau Jaiven, Ana. “Mujeres, feminismo y sufragio en los años veinte,” In Un fantasma
recorre el siglo luchas feministas en México 1910–2010. México DF: UAM-X, CSH, Depto.
de Relaciones Sociales, 2011.
Mitchell, Stephanie, and Patience A. Schell, eds. The Women’s Revolution in Mexico,
1910–1953. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006.
Olcott, Jocelyn. “Miracle Workers: Gender and State Mediation among Textile and
Garment Workers in Mexico´s Transition to Industrial Development.” International Labor
and Working-Class History 63 (2003): 45–62.
Olcott, Jocelyn, Mary Kay Vaughan, and Gabriela Cano, eds. Sex in Revolution: Gender,
Politics, and Power in Modern Mexico. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.
Porter, Susie S. Working Women in Mexico City: Public Discourses and Material
Conditions, 1879–1931. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2003.
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Porter, Susie S. “Empleadas públicas: Normas de feminidad, espacios burocráticos e

identidad de la clase media en México durante la década de 1930.” In Orden social e
identidad de género: México, siglos XIX–XX. Edited by María Teresa Fernández Aceves,
Carmen Ramos Escandón, and Susie S. Porter, 189–214. Guadalajara, Mexico: CIESAS,
Universidad de Guadalajara, 2006.
Ramos Escandón, Carmen. “Mujeres trabajadoras en el México porfiriano: Género e

ideología.” Revista Europea de Estudios Latinoamericanos (1990): 27–46.
Ramos Escandón, Carmen. “Gender, Work, and Class Consciousness among Mexican
Factory Workers, 1880–1910.” Border Crossings: Mexican and Mexican-American
Workers in Transition. Edited by John Mason Hart, 71–92. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly
Resources, 1998.
Rendón Gan, Teresa. Trabajo de hombres, trabajo de mujeres en el México del siglo XX.
Mexico City: PUEG, 2003.
Sanders, Nichole. Gender and Welfare in Mexico: The Consolidation of a

Postrevolutionary State, 1937–1958. University Park: Pennsylvania State University
Press, 2012.
Smith, Stephanie J. Gender and the Mexican Revolution: Yucatán Women and the
Realities of Patriarchy. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.
Snodgrass, Michael. Deference and Defiance in Monterrey: Workers, Paternalism, and

Revolution in Mexico, 1890–1950. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Vaughan, Mary Kay. “Women School Teachers in the Mexican Revolution: The Story of
Reyna´s Braids.” In Expanding the Boundaries of Women’s History. Edited by Cheryl
Johnson-Odim and Margaret Strobel, 278–302. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1992.
Notes:
(1.) Cano, Gabriela. “¿Es posible hacer la historia de las mujeres en la Revolución
Mexicana?” In Charles B. Faulhaber (ed.), Mexico’s Unfinished Revolutions (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2011), pp. 11–24.
(2.) Susie S. Porter, Working Women in Mexico City: Public Discourses and Material
Conditions, 1879–1931 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2003), 10–14.
Page 23 of 28


(3.) Silvia Marina Arrom, The Women of Mexico City, 1790–1857 (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1985), 154.
(4.) John Lear, Workers, Neighbors, and Citizens (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
2001).
(5.) Jeffrey Bortz, Revolution within the Revolution; Cotton Textile Workers and the
Mexican Labor Regime, 1910–1923 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008).
(6.) Mario Camarena Ocampo, Jornaleros, tejedores y obreros textiles. Historia social de
los trabajadores textiles de San Ángel (1850–1930) (México: Plaza y Valdés, 2001);
Carmen Ramos Escandón, Industrialización, género y trabajo femenino en el sector textil
mexicano; el obraje, la fábrica y la compañía industrial. (México: Centro de
Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social, 2004).
(7.) Teresa Rendón Gan, Trabajo de hombres, trabajo de mujeres en el México del siglo
XX (Mexico City: Programa Universitario de Estudios de Género, Universidad Nacional
Autónoma de México), 109–111.
(8.) Francie Chassen López, “Cheaper Than Machines”: Women and Agriculture in
Porfirian Oaxaca, 1880 1911,” In Heather Women of the Mexican Countryside, 1850–
1990, Fowler-Salamini and Mary Kay Vaughan, eds., (Tucson: University of Arizona Press,
1994).
(9.) Sonia Hernández, Working Women into the Borderlands (College Station: Texas A &
M University, 2014), 18–19, 27, 36–39, 51.
(10.) Elizabeth Salas, Soldaderas in the Mexican Military: Myth and History (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1990), and Andrés Reséndez Fuentes, “Battleground Women:
Soldaderas and Female Soldiers in the Mexican Revolution,” Americas 51.4 (April 1995),
525–553.
(11.) Gabriela Cano, “Unconcealable Realities of Desire: Amelio Robles’s (Transgender)

Masculinity in the Mexican Revolution,” In Sex in Revolution: Gender, Politics, and Power
in Modern Mexico, ed. Jocelyn Olcott, Mary Kay Vaughan, and Gabriela Cano (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2007).
(12.) Marta Eva Rocha, “The Faces of Rebellion: From Revolutionaries to Veterans in
Nationalist Mexico,” In The Women’s Revolution in Mexico, 1910–1953, ed. Stephanie
Mitchell and Patience A. Schell (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006).
Page 24 of 28


(13.) Stephen H. Haber, Industry and Underdevelopment: The Industrialization of Mexico,

1890–1940. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989), 122–149.
(14.) Teresa Rendón Gan, Trabajo de hombres, trabajo de mujeres, ibid.
(15.) Susie S. Porter, Working Women in Mexico City: Public Discourses and Material
Conditions, 1879–1931, table 1.4 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2003).
(16.) Mario Barbosa Cruz, El trabajo en las calles. Subsistencia y negociación política en
la ciudad de México a comienzos del siglo XX. (México: El Colegio de México/
Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Cuajimalpa, 2008).
(17.) Mary Goldsmith Connelly, “Política, trabajo y género: la sindicalización de las y los
trabajadores domésticos y el Estado mexicano,” In Orden Social e identidad de género:
México, siglos XIX y XX, María Teresa Fernández Aceves, Carmen Ramos Escandón, y
Susie S. Porter, coordinadoras. México, D.F.: Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios
Superiores en Antropología Social (CIESAS), 215–246.
(18.) Fernanda Núñez Becerra, La prostitución y su represión en la Ciudad de México

(siglo XIX): Prácticas y representaciones (Barcelona: Gedisa Editorial, 2002).
(19.) Katharine Elaine Bliss, Compromised Positions: Prostitution, Public Health, and
Gender Politics in Revolutionary Mexico City (College Station: Pennsylvania State Press,
2001), 28–30, 63–94, 186.
(20.) Pamela J. Fuentes, “The Oldest Professions in Revolutionary Times: Madams, Pimps,
and Prostitution in Mexico City, 1920–1952” (PhD dissertation, York University, 2015).
(21.) Gabriela Cano, “Género y construcción cultural de las profesiones en el Porfiriato:

Magisterio, medicina, jurisprudencia y odontología,” Historia y grafía 14 (2000): 207–243;
Luz Elena Galván Lafarga, Oresta López Pérez, Entre imaginarios y utopías: historias de
maestras. (México, D.F.: Programa Universitario de Estudios de Género UNAM: Centro
de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social: El Colegio de San Luis,
2008).
(22.) Mílada Bazant, Laura Méndez de Cuenca: Mujer indómita y moderna (1853–1928):
Vida cotidiana y entorno (Mexico City: El Colegio Mexiquense, 2010).
(23.) Censo de funcionarios y empleados públicos, November 30, 1930, Talleres Gráficos
de la Nación, Mexico City, 1934, 1–8; Dirección de Pensiones Civiles (México), Tercer
censo de empleados federales sujetos a la ley general de México (Mexico City: Imprenta
M. L. Sánchez, 1938), 4, 18–36.
Page 25 of 28


(24.) Alicia Alva, “La mujer en el trabajo,” El Nacional, July 27, 1933.
(25.) Tercer censo de empleados federales, 4, 36, 51.
(26.) Nichole Sanders, Gender and Welfare in Mexico: The Consolidation of a

Postrevolutionary State. (University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).
(27.) Porter, Working Women, 156.
(28.) Jorge Basurto, Vivencias femininas de la Revolución (México: Instituto Nacional de

Estudios Históricos de la Revolución Mexicana, Secretaría de Gobernación, 1993), 72.
(29.) Fernández Aceves, 145–171.
(33.) Heather Fowler-Salamini, Working Women, Entrepreneurs, and the Mexican

Revolution: The Coffee Culture of Córdoba, Veracruz (Lincoln: University of Nebraska,
2013).
(34.) Charles Berquist, Labor in Latin America: Comparative Essays on Chile, Argentina,
Venezuela, and Colombia. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986); Carlos Illades,
Hacia la república del trabajo: la organización artesanal en la ciudad de México (México:
El Colegio de México, Centro de Estudios Históricos, 1996); John Lear, Workers,
Neighbors, and Citizens, 2001; John Womack, El trabajo en la Cervezería Moctezuma,
1908 (México: El Colegio de México, 2012).
(35.) Susan M. Gauss, “Working-Class Masculinity and the Rationalized Sex: Gender and
Industrial Modernization in the Textile Industry in Postrevolutionary Puebla,” In Sex in
Revolution: Gender, Politics, and Power in Modern Mexico, ed. Jocelyn Olcott, Mary Kay
Vaughan, and Gabriela Cano (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).
(36.) Jaime Tamayo, La clase obrera en la historiad de México: En el interinato de la

huerta y el gobierno de Álvaro Obregón (1920–1924) (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 1987),
200.
(37.) Thelma Camacho and Hugo Picardo, “La cigarrera El Buen Tono (1889–1929)” En
María Eugenia Romero Ibarra, José Mario Contreras Valdés y Jesús Méndez Reyes
(coords.), Poder público y poder privado. Gobiernos, empresarios y empresas, 1880–1980
Page 26 of 28


(México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2006), 83–106; Ana María de

Dolores Saloma Gútierrez, “Las hijas del trabajo: Fabricantas cigarreras de la Ciudad de
México en el siglo XIX.” Tesis doctoral. Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia,
2001.
(39.) Susie S. Porter, “De Obreras y Señoritas; culturas de trabajo en la ciudad de México
en la compañía Ericsson, en la década de 1920,” En Género en la encrucijada de la
historia social y cultural de México, México, CIESAS, El Colegio de Michoacán, 2015.
(40.) Patience Schell, “An Honorable Avocation for Ladies: The Work of the Mexico City
Unión de Damas Católicas Mexicanas, 1912–1926,” The Journal of Women’s History, 10.4
(Winter 1999): 78–103; Kristina Boylan, “Gendering the Faith and Altering the Nation:
Mexican Catholic Women’s Activism, 1917–1940,” In Sex in Revolution: Gender, Politics,
and Power in Modern Mexico, ed. Jocelyn Olcott, Mary Kay Vaughan, and Gabriela Cano
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).
(41.) Tamayo, La clase obrera, 185–186.
(42.) Miguel Olimón Nolasco, Sofía del Valle: Una Mexicana universal (Mexico City:
Instituto Nacional de las Mujeres, 2009), 54–56; Patience Schell, Church and State
Education in Revolutionary Mexico City (Tucson, University of Arizona Press), 2003, 140–
142; and Stephen J. C. Andes, “A Catholic Alternative to Revolution: The Survival of
Social Catholicism in Postrevolutionary Mexico,” Americas 68.4 (April 2012): 529–562.
(43.) “Dos fases,” Mujer, November 1, 1929, 7, 9. See also “¿Debe permanecer la madre
en el hogar?” Mujer, November 1, 1929, 14.
(44.) Leonor Llach, “La feminidady la cultura,” Elegancias, March 3, 1926, 6.
(45.) Llach, “La feminidad y la cultura,” Elegancias, March 3, 1926, 6.
(46.) Ana Lau Jaiven y María Mercedes Zúñiga Elizalde (coordinadoras), El sufragio
feminine en México. Votos en los estados (1917–1965) (Hermosillo, El Colegio de Sonora,
2013).
(47.) Ana Lau, “Mujeres, feminismo y sufragio en los años veinte,” In Un fantasma recorre
el siglo luchas feministas en México 1910–2010 (México DF: UAM-X, CSH, Depto. de
Relaciones Sociales; 2011). México DF: UAM-X, CSH, Depto. de Relaciones Sociales; 201
(48.) “Las mujeres de México pugnaba por la patria,” El Nacional, October 7, 1931, 1.
Page 27 of 28


Susie S. Porter
Department of History, University of Utah
Page 28 of 28


Working Woman in The Mexican Revolution

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Working Women in the Mexican Revolution

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American

Summary and Keywords

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date: 09 November 2016

segregation of the workforce, sex-typing of occupations, and gendered wage differentials.

Women and Occupational Segregation of the

Scholars have explained occupational segregation of the workforce in several different

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date: 09 November 2016

Women at Work in the Countryside, 1850–1910

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The Impact of Revolution on Women’s

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date: 09 November 2016

Women in the National and Regional

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date: 09 November 2016

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(Reglamento para el ejercicio de la prostitución, 1865, 1872, 1898, 1926).18

Women’s unpaid domestic labor contributed to maintaining households, subsidized

PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LATIN AMERICAN HISTORY

date: 09 November 2016

Women Mobilize and Become the Revolution,

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date: 09 November 2016

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anticlericalism crystalized in the formation of the Centro Radical Feminino, composed

During the 1920s, employers largely disregarded maternity legislation. Department of

PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LATIN AMERICAN HISTORY

date: 09 November 2016

Impact of Occupational Segregation on

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date: 09 November 2016

By contrast, Susan Gauss argues that in Puebla, occupational segregation of the

Of Socialists and Señoritas: Labor Organizing

Heather Fowler-Salamini deepens our understanding of how different sectors of

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date: 09 November 2016

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date: 09 November 2016

Women Collaborate Across the Workforce

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date: 09 November 2016

How and Why Working Women Mobilize

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date: 09 November 2016

Ley Federal del Trabajo, 1931

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Shifts in Conceptions of Women and Work

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date: 09 November 2016

later named to the Consejo Superior de Salubridad. Eventually, as María Teresa

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date: 09 November 2016

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