Yucatán has long been recognized as Mexico’s leading revolutionary laboratory of the teens and twenties, in no small part due to reforms aimed at uplifting women: divorce, limited suffrage, expanded opportunities for education, and even a feminist congress. Although Yucatán’s women’s movement has been the object of several notable studies, we still know relatively little about how revolutionary legal reforms and discursive shifts affected the everyday lives of these women. The two works reviewed here address this gap.
In Gender and the Mexican Revolution, Stephanie J. Smith explores how subaltern women tried to use revolutionary tribunals and courts to minimize the disadvantages of gender, class, and ethnicity. In doing so, she reveals the profound contradictions that marred the revolution’s “rhetoric of equality” (p. 13). Mining rich veins of previously untapped judicial archives from the administrations of Governor Salvador Alvarado (1915–17) and of the more radical Felipe Carrillo Puerto (1922–23),...
