Women

The Mexican government redefined the status of both Afro-Mexican slaves and Indians. In contrast, the legal status of women during the early nineteenth century underwent only slow evolution. Sometimes this benign neglect, such as the continued enforcement of the Spanish law guaranteeing women and men equal inheritance rights, favored women. In most cases, though, it hurt women. A woman’s only remedy to a failed marriage remained, as in colonial times, an ecclesiastical divorce—a form of Church-sanctioned separation.179

The labor of poor, rural women played a crucial role in the economy, even though their efforts never appeared in the detailed hacienda account books of the period. Wives rose before dawn to prepare tortillas for the family. Once that was done, they tended gardens, raised small livestock, and “helped” work the estate fields, with their labor being credited to the accounts of their fathers, sons, or husbands. They earned cash by spinning; in the household they converted crops to food, wool to yarn, and yarn to family clothing, and they raised the next generation.180

In Mexico City, women over age eighteen who worked outside the home increased from 32 percent of the labor force in 1811 to 37 percent in 1848. Throughout the early nineteenth century, domestic service remained the main source of female employment. Domestics were often on call twenty-four hours a day, and many received only room and board. An endless stream of young women coming from rural areas ensured that pay for domestics remained low. As other opportunities for women became available, the percentage of Mexico City’s female labor force working as domestic servants declined from 54 percent in 1811 to 30 percent in 1848. Increasingly, women were being hired in commerce, food preparation, and service industries. Seamstresses increased from 3 to 14 percent of Mexico City’s working women during this period. Women prepared food for sale, sewed, opened small retail establishments, peddled in the streets, and sold in local markets, where they dominated.181

As a more modern vision of womanhood gained acceptance, legal and social barriers to women joining the labor force declined. At the same time, economic trends worked against increased female employment. Massive imports undermined industries, such as textiles, in which women worked. Similarly, mechanization deprived women of employment. Machines operated by men deprived many seamstresses of employment.

In 1836, Mexican writer and politician Jose Maria Luis Mora noted that “the progress of Mexican civilization is especially evident in the Fair Sex.” He also noted that women’s education had improved since colonial times when instruction was “reduced to the barest essential required to fulfill domestic obligations.”182

In 1838, only 3,280 girls were registered in the eighty-two convent, parish, municipal, and private schools in Mexico City. This represented only one-sixth of school-aged girls. During the next two decades, enrollment doubled, and girls attended school in roughly the same percentage as boys. By 1850, 150 women were teaching in Mexico City.183

In 1841, after visiting some of the institutions where women she knew volunteered, Fanny Calderon de la Barca commented:

With the time which they devote to these charitable offices, together with their numerous

Devotional exercises, and the care which their houses and families require, it cannot be said the

Life of a Mexican senora is an idle one—nor, in such cases, can it be considered a useless one.184

Even though they were banned from public office, women did attempt to influence public policy. More than fifty Mexican women signed an 1829 petition that protested the expulsion of Spaniards— their husbands were threatened with deportation. A delegation of women personally presented the petition to President Guerrero. Women were so active in the all-volunteer Junta Patriotica, which organized the annual commemoration of Mexican independence, that, in 1849, its bylaws were revised to explicitly state that women could be members.185

Entrenched male attitudes toward women changed slowly. In 1843, the liberal writer Guillermo Prieto expressed a widely held view when he described an ideal wife: “She should know how to sew, cook, sweep, . . . find pleasure and utility in virtue, [and] be religious, but never neglect my dinner for mass. . . The day she discusses politics, I’ll divorce her.” Many believed that ending wives’ subordination to husbands would upset the social order.186