Freethinkers and Labor Leaders: Women, Social Change, and Politics in Modern Mexico

The interpretation of the revisionist historiography of the Mexican Revolution (1910-17) has focused primarily on revolutionary leaders who were men, pushing the heroines of the war to the sidelines. If women happened to be mentioned, they appeared only as symbols, not as social agents. However, the role of the Adelitas, the Cristeras, the Hijas del Anáhuac, and the women of the Ácrata Group were essential to the revolution. In Freethinkers and Labor Leaders María Teresa Fernández Aceves tells the stories of five militant feminist women who aided in the creation of a modern culture in revolutionary and postrevolutionary Mexico and, in some ways, Latin America as a whole: Belén de Sárraga Hernández (1872-1950), Atala Apodaca Anaya (1884-1977), María Arcelia Díaz (1896-1939), María Guadalupe Martínez Villanueva (1906-2002), and María Guadalupe Urzúa Flores (1912-2004).

These five women formed part of two cultural generations that participated together in the Mexican Revolution, in the consolidation of state cooperative institutions, and in the antiestablishment and dissident politics that evolved in the late 1940s. Through these social processes and their struggles as women, mothers, and workers, these women fought for secular education, labor rights, and the civil and political rights of women, redefining cultural and social constructions. Based on original, pathbreaking research, Freethinkers and Labor Leaders demonstrates how five women transformed Latin American society’s ideas of citizenship, femininity, masculinity, and politics.

María Teresa Fernández Aceves is a professor of social anthropology at Centro de Investigaciones en Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social-Occidente in Jalisco, Mexico. She is the author of a book in Spanish about women in twentieth-century Mexico.