This new book on women in the Mexican Revolution is long overdue and fills a large gap in the historiography of the period. Soto examines both the participation of women in the political movement of the Revolution and the Mexican women’s rights movements during the 1910-40 period. Her research concentrates mostly on newspaper and magazine accounts, pamphlets, books, and interviews with Mexican women. Her work rectifies to some extent the previous disregard of women’s contributions in the historiography of the period. This initial effort to highlight that participation cannot entirely avoid the male perspective, however, and dwells to a considerable extent on male revolutionary leaders and how they dealt with women.
Soto treats at length the emergence of women’s organizations during the revolutionary and postrevolutionary years, yet she gives most of the credit to the efforts of male leaders such as Salvador Alvarado and Felipe Carrillo Puerto, who were interested in promoting women’s rights. The study does not clarify, however, what this advocacy meant to their political aims, to the struggle for power within the different revolutionary groups, or, most important, to the women’s movement. Researched when the methodology of women’s history was still in its early stages, this book does not address the relationship between gender and politics but is an initial attempt to gauge the women’s movement against the broader political panorama. Soto contends that women were not granted the political equality they sought following the Revolution because of the limited nature of their movement, which lacked a broad base and was seen by revolutionary leaders as susceptible to manipulation by the Catholic church.
Soto’s approach circumscribes history within the traditionally male bastion of politics. By taking this route she simplifies the complexity of women’s history issues. This is a traditional political history that has been enriched by highlighting the overlooked contribution of women, and it is valuable in that it organizes dispersed and hard-to-find information about women. It is informative on forgotten women whose hidden histories are brought to light, but still it is not a history of their own. Although one wishes for more analytical concern with the current issues of women’s history, the book shows that the field of women’s history is rich, promising, and full of unexplored questions, and for this task we should be grateful to Soto.
