Alan Riding points out in Distant Neighbors: A Portrait of the Mexicans (1985) that there are probably fewer than one thousand organized feminists in Mexico, most of them left-wing, intellectual, middle-class women. This may help to explain why academic programs in Women’s Studies are still in their infancy in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America, and why only a handful of books about women have been published in the region. El Colegio de México is a pioneer in the field, and in 1984 the Interdisciplinary Program of Women’s Studies inaugurated a workshop on “Women in the History of Mexico.” Nine seminar papers written in conjunction with that workshop, most by women and men at the beginning of their graduate training and a few by young published scholars, make up this anthology edited by Carmen Ramos Escandón.
Presencia y transparencia includes one essay on women in the Aztec family, three on women in the colonial period, four on females in the nineteenth century, and the last on the woman suffrage movement in the 1950s. Every major period in Mexican history, then, is represented in these 189 pages—no mean feat. In addition, Ramos Escandón has made a conscious effort to include essays that study groups of women representative of every sector of Mexican society, whether Indian or Spanish, urban or rural, poor or middle class, conforming or deviant, Catholic or Protestant.
The essays, however, are uneven in quality. Only two are based primarily on archival research—those on violence against women in rural Tenango and on Protestant women and education during the Porfiriato—and only a third, a study of women and the family in New Spain, demonstrates a thorough acquaintance with recent research on the subject on three continents. The remaining essays, though focusing on such original and neglected topics as heretics, witches, and false beatas in colonial Mexico or feminine stereotypes in the nineteenth century, offer little originality, either in their research methodology or in their conclusions. Despite these shortcomings, this anthology belongs in every university library and will be welcome in courses emphasizing the role of women in Mexican history.
