Working Women in Mexico City: Public Discourses and Material Conditions, 1879-1931

Abstract

PORTER, SUSIE S. Working Women in Mexico City: Public Discourses and Material Conditions, 1879-1931. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2003. 250 pages.At the turn of the twenty-first century attention to the feminicides in Ciudad Juarez has reinforced an increased attention to the presumed connection between working-class women's bodies and assumptions about underclass morality. Much of the contemporary discussion is heavily moralistic, in a stereotyped, racialized, middle-class fashion that has not changed appreciably in the last one hundred years. Because so many of the young women who have disappeared in that border city were maquila workers, once again public discourse is full of questions about the breakdown of traditional family values when women are on their own as wage earners, about whether underclass women have any claim to sympathy (i.e. good girls from good families), or whether they are complicitous in their own victimization (i.e. sexually available women from dysfunctional or irregular families). The activism around gender violence is so fraught partly because-secreto a voces-working women themselves are often imagined as a site of violence and a threat to the integrity of the family and the nation. Susie Porter's new book helps remind us of the long history to these social upheavals in her study of underclass working women in Mexico City at the turn of the last century, when rapid economic expansion and urban industrialization brought a significant percentage of women into the wage-labor market.Porter is a labor historian, and her book is drawn from her analysis of archival materials including censuses, newspapers, and government documents, as well as a generous sprinkling of letters and petitions of working-class women to government officials and factory managers. Her methodology is loosely based on a feminist appropriation of the concepts of Jurgen Habermas on the public sphere, and she is particularly interested in focusing on the intersection of women's participation in the labor market and the discourse around female honor. At the last turn of the century (as, alas, at our turn of the century as well!) there was/is a slippage in discussions of the working woman that worried about her potential chameleonlike ability to move between the roles of obrera and prostitute. Discourse inevitably seemed (and still seems) to ground itself in concern about protecting the reproductive potential of the good woman and exorcizing the unfortunate population explosion among the less worthy, in the service of the national self-imaginary. The bottom line: in all her discussions, Porter comes back to the effects of a rhetoric of middle-class morality upon women from the lower classes. Gender, says Porter, functioned as a marker of distinctions. [T]he term respectability identified an occupation as middle class (xv). Since they cannot hope for middle-class income or lifestyle, the only way to legitimate themselves as workers, it seems, is for Mexican women to shoehorn themselves into a middle-class conception of virtue.Unlike most historians, Porter does not focus on the Mexican Revolution as the pivotal point of her analysis. While she does recognize that the revolutionary rhetoric did open up a space to speak of the working woman in less moralistic ways, she emphasizes that the process of industrialization itself, much more than the Revolution, is the instrumental factor in bringing about changes in the women's daily lives. Here she points to two main factors: first, the discourse of honor and morality continued to inflect discussions of the rights of working women in a more-or-less continuous fashion throughout the Porfiriato and well into the postRevolutionary period; second, while revolutionary rhetoric allowed women a space to reformulate their demands, the benefits associated with the Revolution are not unique to Mexico, and in fact similar legislation was enacted throughout the Americas in this time period. …

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 54 citations exist upstream.