Gender and the Mexican Revolution: Yucatán Women and the Realities of Patriarchy
The state of Yucatan is commonly considered to have been a hotbed of radical feminism during the Mexican Revolution. Challenging this romanticized view, Stephanie Smith examines the revolutionary reforms designed to break women's ties to tradition and religion, as well as the ways in which women shaped these developments.

Smith analyzes the various regulations introduced by Yucatan's two revolution-era governors, Salvador Alvarado and Felipe Carrillo Puerto. Like many revolutionary leaders throughout Mexico, the Yucatan policy makers professed allegiance to women's rights and socialist principles. Yet they, too, passed laws and condoned legal practices that excluded women from equal participation and reinforced their inferior status.

Using court cases brought by ordinary women, including those of Mayan descent, Smith demonstrates the importance of women's agency during the Mexican Revolution. But, she says, despite the intervention of women at many levels of Yucatecan society, the rigid definition of women's social roles as strictly that of wives and mothers within the Mexican nation guaranteed that long-term, substantial gains remained out of reach for most women for years to come.
"1145935886"
Gender and the Mexican Revolution: Yucatán Women and the Realities of Patriarchy
The state of Yucatan is commonly considered to have been a hotbed of radical feminism during the Mexican Revolution. Challenging this romanticized view, Stephanie Smith examines the revolutionary reforms designed to break women's ties to tradition and religion, as well as the ways in which women shaped these developments.

Smith analyzes the various regulations introduced by Yucatan's two revolution-era governors, Salvador Alvarado and Felipe Carrillo Puerto. Like many revolutionary leaders throughout Mexico, the Yucatan policy makers professed allegiance to women's rights and socialist principles. Yet they, too, passed laws and condoned legal practices that excluded women from equal participation and reinforced their inferior status.

Using court cases brought by ordinary women, including those of Mayan descent, Smith demonstrates the importance of women's agency during the Mexican Revolution. But, she says, despite the intervention of women at many levels of Yucatecan society, the rigid definition of women's social roles as strictly that of wives and mothers within the Mexican nation guaranteed that long-term, substantial gains remained out of reach for most women for years to come.
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Gender and the Mexican Revolution: Yucatán Women and the Realities of Patriarchy

Gender and the Mexican Revolution: Yucatán Women and the Realities of Patriarchy

by Stephanie J. Smith
Gender and the Mexican Revolution: Yucatán Women and the Realities of Patriarchy

Gender and the Mexican Revolution: Yucatán Women and the Realities of Patriarchy

by Stephanie J. Smith

eBook

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Overview

The state of Yucatan is commonly considered to have been a hotbed of radical feminism during the Mexican Revolution. Challenging this romanticized view, Stephanie Smith examines the revolutionary reforms designed to break women's ties to tradition and religion, as well as the ways in which women shaped these developments.

Smith analyzes the various regulations introduced by Yucatan's two revolution-era governors, Salvador Alvarado and Felipe Carrillo Puerto. Like many revolutionary leaders throughout Mexico, the Yucatan policy makers professed allegiance to women's rights and socialist principles. Yet they, too, passed laws and condoned legal practices that excluded women from equal participation and reinforced their inferior status.

Using court cases brought by ordinary women, including those of Mayan descent, Smith demonstrates the importance of women's agency during the Mexican Revolution. But, she says, despite the intervention of women at many levels of Yucatecan society, the rigid definition of women's social roles as strictly that of wives and mothers within the Mexican nation guaranteed that long-term, substantial gains remained out of reach for most women for years to come.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780807888650
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date: 06/01/2009
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 272
File size: 557 KB

About the Author

Stephanie J. Smith is assistant professor of history at the Ohio State University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction Women and the Radical Revolutionary Laboratory 1

1 Redefining Women: The Making of a Revolution 21

2 Broken Promises, Broken Hearts: The Revolutionary Judicial System 54

3 Honor and Morality: The Church, the State, and the Control of Yucatecan Families 84

4 If Love Enslaves. . . Love Be Damned! Divorce and Revolutionary State Formation in Yucatán 115

5 Women in Public and Public Women: Prostitutes in Revolutionary Yucatán 145

Conclusion 174

Notes 181

Bibliography 217

Index 245

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From the Publisher

With a multiple focus on laws, court proceedings, and women's mobilizations, Gender and the Mexican Revolution demonstrates how gender identities, old and new, pervaded political and legal processes in a moment of extraordinary instability and turbulence. It makes a significant contribution to the thriving field of twentieth-century women and gender history in Latin America.—Mary Kay Vaughan, coeditor of Sex in Revolution: Gender, Politics, and Power in Modern Mexico

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