Women In The Mexican Revolution
Before the Mexican Revolution began the role of women was to stay hidden behind their husbands and family. Women worked in the fields, did household chores, went to church, and took care of the children. Women had very minimal rights in the early 1900s. The spark of the revolution caused a reason for women to leave the comfort of home and enter the war zone. Women played an extensive role during the Mexican Revolution that would eventually pay off.
It’s important to understand the events that led to the Mexican Revolution as The Women’s Revolution in Mexico states. The nation was born (or at least conceived ) in 1810, when a general priest named Miguel Hidalgo issued his famous grito, a call of arms to rise up and defeat the Spanish guachupines, a word referring to the spur he and others conceived as Spain, which dug into the side of the colony (Schell, Mitchell 1-2). Within a decade, Mexico was independent, but nearly half a century of chaos and civil war ensued. Most conflicts occurred between conservatives (who favored a central government, possibly a monarchy, and preserving the power of the church) and liberals ( who preferred a constitutional, federal republic that extolled individual rights while limiting the power of the church and other corporate entities) (Schell, Mitchell 1-2). After the united states annexed Texas in 1845 and began a war with Mexico, they captured and purchased about one-third of the Mexican national territory. Decades of strife culminated in the period known as the Reforma, so named because of the sweeping legislative changes that took place ( Schell, Mitchell 1-2 ).
The Mexican Revolution rose out of a struggle for civil liberties and land and would eventually topple the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz and begin a new age for Mexico (Hohman). Peace and stability soon followed, but not in the form of the liberal democracy described in Juarez’s constitution. The period from 1876 - 1910 is called the Porfiriato, after the dictator, and it is sometimes referred to as the Pax Porfiriana because it marked the end of the civil wars. All of this changed between 1900 and 1910. Unfavorable agricultural conditions and economic recession during which the cost of living rose precipitously and real wages dropped combined with peasant unrest and political discontent among educated liberals to produce a volatile situation. Educated members of the middle class grew unhappy with the hypocrisy of the regime, ostensibly a liberal republic, yet riddled with corruption and tyrannical use of power. However, when the wealthy landowner Francisco Madero issued a call to arms to overthrow Diaz in 1910, using Diaz’s own anti-reelection cry, no one could have seen the decade of bloody revolution that ensued ( Schell, Mitchell 3).
Some women were captured and forced to join the revolution and others joined the revolution willingly. Male soldiers often kidnapped women and forced them to join armies. Other times soldiers would turn up in villages and demand that all the women there join. If the women refused they would be threatened until they gave in or else would be shot and killed (LatinLife).
The men gave their wages to women to pay for food, meal preparation, clothes cleaning, and other services. Soldaderas had been a part of Mexican military long before the Mexican Revolution; however, numbers increased dramatically with the outbreak [of ] the revolution. A number of women served as combatants, but how many is not known. Some women became combatants by first joining the army passing as male, speaking in deep voices, wearing men’s clothing (LatinLife). In national myth, the image of women from the Mexican Revolution is of the soldadera, the “self-sacrificing peasant” women integrated into the federal army on the insurgent forces who carried her man’s personal possessions and her metate and petate on trains and long marches through rough regions of the countryside. The soldaderas are also remembered as the brave and hardened rural women who, rifle in hand, formed part of the rebel armies in the lines of fire. And in some cases, these soldaderas were soldiers leading troops, struggling for an ideal and willing to die for a cause. Yet the women officially recognized as veterans of the revolutionary cause were not these soldaderas, but rather the teachers and professional women who acted as spies, publicists, and couriers for various revolutionary factions ( Schell and Mitchell 15).
The feminist movement started late in Mexico. Nothing similar to what occurred in the United States and in Europe during the nineteenth century had happened here; not even the “language of feminists” was familiar to Mexican women at the turn of the century (Foppa 192). It is therefore extraordinary that there should have arisen, in 1915, in a provincial city, the initiative for a feminist assembly; it is still more striking that this immediate fruit have met with success, leaving seeds which gave no immediate fruit but which contributed to the development of feminist thought in Mexico ( Foppa 192). Foppa goes on to say that the Mexican Revolution had not done anything big to pay attention to women and that women “didn’t play a central role” in it. The previous statement goes against what other authors like Schell and Mitchell who said that women were the reason that the Mexican Revolution succeeded. Even though women were allowed to risk their lives by fighting in the war and taking care of the soldiers, their hard work was not recognized right away.
