Women

In 1917, Hermila Galindo, the editor of La Mujer Moderna, and several other women presented demands for women suffrage to the all-male Constitutional Convention. The committee on citizenship reviewed their demand based on the citizenship section included in the draft constitution, which had been brought forward unchanged from the 1857 constitution. The earlier document did not explicitly deny the vote to women; instead, it merely stated (using a gender-ambiguous term) that mexicanos could vote. The 1917 committee reviewed the text and declared women would not be allowed to vote, since: “The fact that some exceptional women have the qualifications necessary to exercise political rights satisfactorily does not justify the conclusion that these should be conceded to women as a class. The difficulty of making the selection authorizes the negative.” The committee also noted that Mexican women “do not understand the necessity of participating in public affairs, which is demonstrated by the lack of any collective movement for this purpose.”228

While the 1917 constitution did not enfranchise women, it did contain special provisions relating to them. Article 123, which concerned labor rights, prohibited women from engaging in “unhealthy or dangerous work” and from working industrial night shifts. The same article granted women the right to take one month maternity leave at full pay and then reclaim their job and take lactation breaks. Finally, it guaranteed women equal pay for equal work.

The legal status of women was further elaborated in the 1917 Law of Family Relations, which guaranteed husband and wife equal rights with respect to guardianship and child custody, entering litigation, and drafting contracts. Women received equal authority with husbands concerning their children’s education and the expenditure of family funds and were granted the right to receive alimony and manage their own property. The law granted divorcees the right to remarry. 229 During the 1920s and early 1930s, little official attention was paid to women’s rights, since few male leaders were concerned with the issue and they were burdened with what for them were more pressing issues. During this period, Mexican women more than made up for their male leaders’ inactivity by plunging into a plethora of organizing efforts. In fact, the multiplicity of groups and issues addressed, as well as divisions along class, ethnic, religious, and ideological lines, limited their ability to achieve their goals. Women’s groups promoted temperance, addressed labor and agrarian issues, and formed mothers clubs, consumption cooperatives and labor unions. While lay groups demanded recognition of women as wage earners, the largest Catholic women’s organization defined them as “the paradigm of purity, abnegation, and sublimity.”230

During the 1920s, the issue of women suffrage shifted to the state level. During his 1922—1924 administration, Yucatan Governor Felipe Carrillo Puerto granted women the right to vote and to be elected to public office at the municipal and state level. By 1934, three more states would follow this path. Some of these gains proved to be fleeting. After Carrillo Puerto was assassinated and conservatives regained control over the state, Yucatecan women lost their vote. The three women who had been elected to, and seated in, the state legislature were removed.231

During the late 1920s and early 1930s, while systematically denying them leadership roles, both the revolutionary state and the Catholic Church sought to enlist women to support their respective causes. The males leading the government assumed that women would overwhelmingly support the very clerical elements they were seeking to control and thus denied them suffrage. The males leading the Church, acting on the same assumption, favored women suffrage.232

Even though the political elite was unwilling to grant women the vote, it sought to mobilize them to implement reforms and in its struggle with the Church. In 1932, the PNR attempted to finesse the suffrage issue by declaring, “The Constitution does not deny a woman’s right to vote, but considering that the State wants to introduce women gradually to civic life, it is not advisable to precipitate this matter.” PNR leaders did allow women to vote in party plebiscites.233

While on the campaign trail, in contrast to his forthright support for labor and peasant struggles, PNR presidential candidate Cardenas clung to standard party platitudes concerning women. In a December 1933 speech, he declared:

It is necessary to invigorate and promote the effort which Mexican women have made to integrate themselves in the public life of the nation. This must be done in a balanced and progressive manner in order to employ their great energies and virtues for the general welfare, since women are beings eminently aware of human problems and sufficiently generous to seek the general interest.234

Cardenas’s position had shifted by the time of his 1935 State of the Nation address in which he declared that the PNR had recognized that “working women have the right to participate in elections.” Cardenas soon began organizing women to build a mass base, just as he had done with other groups. In the spring of 1936, the PNR granted women the right to vote in party primaries.235

Cardenas’s open support for women suffrage galvanized the United Front for Women’s Rights (FUPDM), organized in 1935. This group served as an umbrella organization including some 800 feminist organizations that claimed 50,000 members. The front embraced women from a broad political spectrum, ranging from the Mexican Communist Party to the official PNR and included rural and urban women, professionals, and workers. In addition to promoting its central issue— women suffrage—the Front pressed for expanded employment opportunities, lower rents, lower electric rates, lower taxes for women market vendors, the establishment of day-care centers, and the granting of the same rights to ejido land to women as to men.236

In his September 1937 State of the Nation address, Cardenas declared there was a “need to reform the nation’s Code so that the rights of women, who form an integral half of Mexican society and the citizenry, may be redressed as befits the dignity of a people.”237

The following November, Cardenas’s secretary of the interior sent Congress a draft amendment to the constitution that provided for women suffrage, along with a message stating that women would be more subject to Church influence if they remained outside the electoral process than if they were included.

Both houses of Congress soon approved a constitutional amendment enfranchising women. By May 1939, the legislatures of all twenty-eight states had ratified the amendment. However, as Article 135 of the 1917 constitution stipulated, one step remained—Congress had to tabulate the votes of the legislatures and declare the amendment to be in effect.

At this point, the political momentum toward enfranchising women faltered. Politicians considered women to be overly influenced by the Church. The sight of women marching from churches to polling places in bitterly divided Spain reinforced this belief. As one functionary commented, “If we granted women the right to vote, the Archbishop of Mexico would be the next president of Mexico.” As Almazan’s candidacy gained strength, PRM leaders felt that if women were enfranchised, they would back Almazan. Although they were a decidedly small minority, public demonstrations by well-dressed, well-organized women who supported Almazan reinforced this perception.238

Congress adjourned in July of 1939 without having declared the Constitution amended to permit women suffrage. In his September 1939 address to Congress, Cardenas stated, “Suffrage in Mexico should be perfected by extending the vote to women, since otherwise, the electoral process will be incomplete.”239

On March 24, 1940, realizing that the clock was running out on the women suffrage amendment, the Feminine Action Section of the PRM sent Cardenas a telegram urging him to call a special session of Congress for the sole purpose of officially proclaiming the passage of the women suffrage amendment. Cardenas failed to call the session, raising the question of whether, as his term wound down, he still favored enfranchising women. Since Cardenas, on his own initiative, had accelerated land reform, transformed the PNR, and nationalized the oil industry, he could presumably have pushed though women suffrage if he had still supported it. At the end of Cardenas’s term, feminists Adelina Zendejas and Concha Michel concluded: “Cardenas felt that women were controlled by the clergy, and said, ‘If they have the vote, then we’ll be beaten, because they are a majority.’ That’s why they never declared the passage of the suffrage amendment.”240

The failure of the PRM leadership to enfranchise women by no means brought to a halt the social forces that were, willy-nilly, changing women’s role in Mexican society. Women not only received more education but increasingly imparted it. The opportunity to become a rural schoolteacher provided many young women with professional identities and modest incomes. However, women were still denied equal access to education, due to the widespread belief that highly educated women would not be able to find males willing to marry them and due to families with limited income only investing in educating male children. Such families felt investments in female education would never be recouped since after marriage women would become full-time homemakers regardless of their educational level.241

After the Revolution, female employment increased rapidly in the state sector, especially in agencies concerned with social welfare, such as health and education. During the early 1920s, an unprecedented number of careers opened to women. They worked in medicine, law, accounting, and real estate, and served as stenographers and telephone operators. The operators’ union, El Sindicato de Telefonistas de la Republica Mexicana, represented the largest group of women in the formal economy.242

Even though new areas of employment were opening for women, between 1921 and 1930 female employment declined from 6.7 percent of the workforce to 4.6 percent as women were disproportionately laid off during the Depression and as demobilized revolutionary veterans rejoined the labor force. By 1940, as Mexico began to urbanize and recover from the Depression, female employment increased to 7.4 percent of the labor force.243

Perhaps the biggest change of all in the lives of women resulted from the widespread introduction of molinos de nixtamal (corn mills) powered by internal combustion engines. Since pre-historic times, grinding the corn kernels used to make tortillas had been culturally defined as women’s work. Mechanical mills, which began to appear in the 1920s, freed women from rising before dawn and spending tedious hours on their knees grinding corn. In petitions listing a community’s needs, women often placed a mill above schools, clinics, and water rights. In some cases, mills even produced a male backlash, since they dramatically changed women’s daily routine. Men in Tepoztlan commented that the flavor of tortillas coming from the mechanical mill was inferior, and repeatedly opposed the mills on the grounds that women would use their increased free time for gossip, idleness, and— so it was believed—infidelity.244