Women

In contrast to the 1824 Constitutional Convention, delegates to the 1857 Convention at least considered the status of women. Liberal politician Ignacio Ramirez stated that granting women the vote would serve no purpose since their fathers and husbands adequately represented them. Convention members apparently agreed, since they took no action on the matter.241

As a result of the 1857 constitution remaining silent on gender-related issues, women remained disenfranchised. Given the tumult of the 1860s, only in 1870 did a national civil code define the status of women.

The 1870 Civil Code left most of the colonial practices concerning women intact. They remained excluded from politics and were punished for transgressions, such as adultery, according to a double standard. As historian Silvia Arrom observed, “The new codes often repeated ancient patriarchal provisions almost verbatim.”242

The 1870 Civil Code declared that the husband had a duty to feed and protect his wife and the wife should “obey her husband as much in domestic affairs as in education of the children and in the administration of property.” A wife’s capacity for legal self-representation was contingent on her husband’s permission, except in criminal cases or when her husband was involved.

The 1870 legislation not only wrote into law the long-standing inferior social position of women but attempted to enforce a nuclear family prototype with a single line of inheritance. As historian Carmen Ramos-Escandon noted, “The liberal model for the family, one in which the family is formed solely by a monogamic couple and its children, was not prevalent in Porfirian Mexico, and legalized marriages were not the rule.”243

Canon law governed marriage until 1859, when the Law of Civil Matrimony became effective. The new legislation provided little change, even though the power to define marriage shifted from Rome to Mexico City. The law declared marriage to be a civil contract. However, it continued Catholic practice by declaring that neither party could remarry until the death of the other party in the marriage. This gave the contract the unique status of not being rescindable even though both of the parties to the contract might desire its rescission. The law included a passage, known as the Epistle of Melchor Ocampo, whose reading was required at all civil marriage ceremonies. It included the following passage:

The woman, whose principle sexual endowments are self-denial, beauty, comprehension,

Perspicacity, and tenderness, should and will obey the husband and provide pleasure, assistance,

Consolation, and counsel.244

Laws, such as the 1857 constitution, the 1859 law on matrimony, and the 1870 Civil Code, lagged behind changing Mexican social reality. Though denied the vote, women repeatedly took part in political movements. More than 1,000 women signed a petition opposing the freedom of religion that the 1857 constitution provided for. The petitioners qualified their position, stating, “We have not come to meddle in the difficult question of politics, completely foreign to our sex.” When two women arrived to serve as delegates to the 1876 General Congress of Workers, heated debate arose over where they should be seated. Those opposed declared that women had never been seated before and that seating them would violate a precedent. Finally, after heated debate, they were seated to a standing ovation. This opened the way for more extensive female participation in the labor movement. In 1879, Carmen Huerta was elected president of the Congress, a position to which she was reelected in 1880. In 1900, a number of women answered Arriaga’s call to become active in liberal clubs. In Veracruz, an all-women liberal club was formed with Concepcion Valdes as president.245

More women joined the labor force, since few urban male workers could support a family on one income and many single or widowed women sought employment. Increased migration from rural to urban areas undermined the traditional nuclear family. In Mexico City, 70 percent of births were to unmarried women. The low rate of marriage also reflected the high cost of a formal marriage and the slow acceptance of civil, as opposed to religious, marriage.246

The urban upper classes frowned on women working outside the home. They did, however, approve of upper-class women who founded social-benefit institutions since Porfirians viewed philanthropy as one of the few proper activities for upper-class women. In 1904, President Diaz reflected this view when he stated, “The mission most worthy of society matrons is to provide the sustenance, education, and training of orphaned girls through efforts to replace moral despair with examples of virtue.” In their organizing of philanthropic efforts, elite women exercised significant power and influence. These efforts to provide assistance to workers and indigents were especially important as Church-sponsored charities declined.247

Women’s educational opportunities expanded as their role in society evolved. As late as 1874, education remained not only a preserve of the elite, but of males, as only 22 percent of students were women. Only in 1892 did the Escuela Normal de Profesores in Nuevo Leon accept women. The large number of women enrolling in that school led to the establishment of a separate Escuela Profesional para Senoritas, which offered courses in pedagogy, telegraphy, accounting, and natural and social sciences, in both day and night shifts. Between 1878 and 1907, the number of teachers’ colleges increased from twelve to twenty-six. At the same time, other professions were slowly opening to women. In 1886, the first woman dentist graduated, and in 1887, the first surgeon did.

Once they graduated, women professionals still faced obstacles in a male-dominated world. At the turn of the century, Maria Asuncion Sandoval de Zarco, the first woman law school graduate, could not practice criminal law, her initial area of interest, and was forced to practice civil law. Public litigation was viewed as an unseemly role for a woman. Women school teachers were dismissed if they married.248

Economic expansion greatly increased the need for education, and, as in the rest of the Western world, teaching became one of the first professions to open its doors to women. By 1895, 51.3 percent of teachers were women, and, by 1910, this figure had risen to 64.4 percent. Many middle-class women found jobs in the growing commercial sector and in government, working as clerks, secretaries, typists, and bookkeepers.249

The number of women enumerated as a part of the formal labor force increased steadily until 1900. Then, with the economic downturn, the decreased cost of male labor removed the economic incentive to hire women who previously had been willing to work for even lower wages than men. As a result, the number of working women declined by 1910 (see Table 12.1).

Women were almost entirely excluded from some areas of the economy, such as mining. However, in the industry of transformation, which included textile and cigar factories, women comprised a third of the workforce. As women increasingly joined the industrial labor force, the

Idealized notion of a woman evolved Irom that of a Irail, helpless person to one who should be allowed to work as long as her job did not interfere with her domestic duties.250

In some cases, women workers struck making demands specifically as women. They would often address a letter to a powerful public figure and then have the letter published so their grievances could be aired. In 1881, female cigar rollers struck four factories in the Federal District—La Nina, La Mexicana, El Modelo, and El Borrego—after management raised the daily quota from 2,304 to 2,600 cigars. Strikers posted placards, which they signed “Las Cigarreras,” declaring, “We have to work from six in the morning until nine at night. . . We don’t have one hour left to take care of our domestic chores, and not a minute for education.” In this case, the governor of the Federal District intervened and set the daily quota at 2,400 cigars.251

While some women moved into new areas of employment in the professions and industry, many others continued to work in traditional occupations. The 1895 census found 190,413 women (and 82,887 men) working in domestic service. Indigenous women in urban areas, who were frequently separated from their families and cultures, often worked as domestics. They worked in an environment where they received little pay, toiled long hours, and were vulnerable to sexual abuse. Home sewing was another common form of female employment. Many other women worked as street vendors and tortilla makers.252

The 1910 census indicated that women made up only 14 percent of the work force. This figure in part reflects employment practices in still largely rural Mexico. The low percentage of women reported to be in the labor force also indicates census takers’ blindness to many economic activities undertaken by women but not generally included in employment statistics.253

In the late nineteenth century, women’s periodicals provided space for women to share ideas with other women. Unlike early nineteenth-century periodicals for women, Porfirian women generally wrote and edited the magazines targeting them. El album de la mujer reported on social and artistic events, life in Europe, fashion, the theater, poetry, hygiene, and the role of women in Mexican society. A weekly magazine Las violetas de Anahuac spoke out on behalf of women’s suffrage and equal opportunity. In 1904, three women, a doctor, a lawyer, and a teacher began publishing a feminist monthly, La mujer mexicana. All of these journals faced financial problems, and as a result none lasted more than a decade.

Laureana Wright de Kleinhans, born to a Mexican mother and an American mine owner in Taxco in 1846, was an early critic of the status quo. She founded Las violetas de Anahuac and vigorously attacked the notion of female intellectual inferiority. Wright argued that women failed to match men’s intellectual achievement because they were denied an adequate education. To buttress this argument, she cited the National Preparatory School, the incubator of the late nineteenth-century Mexican elite, which only accepted its first female student fifteen years after its founding. Wright minced no words, declaring, “Men aren’t content with subjugating all other species, they also subjugate half of their own species—women.”254

During the Porfiriato, Mexican feminists concentrated on eliminating the inferior status for women codified in the civil code and in expanding women’s access to education. Even these rather tepid, by modern standards, demands put women on the defensive. In response to the charge that

Such changes would destroy the family, women noted that increased education would allow them to obtain better jobs and thus improve their families’ living standard.255

The changing role of women inevitably produced a backlash. Even though female employment in the federal bureaucracy was burgeoning, Treasury Secretary Limantour opposed hiring women, claiming they not only lacked the mental capacity for treasury jobs, but that they would distract men from doing their jobs. The treasury department remained closed to women until the end of the Porfiriato.256

In 1909, Horacio Barreda, whose father founded the National Preparatory School, declared that feminism, by preaching the equality of rights for men and women “threatened to uproot the very foundation of the family and society.”257 Leading cientifico Francisco Bulnes warned:

Feminism has entered into Mexico as an extremely disruptive force. It is well known that in Latin countries it is only the unattractive women, despairing widows, and indigent spinsters, when they are susceptible to hysterical emotions, who consecrated themselves to the social cause. A woman. . . is in great social peril if her energies are not channeled into religious and charitable channels. Those reforming women are the generators of a hatred against society more dangerous than that fulminated by a Barcelona anarchist.258