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. Her newest book, Freethinkers and Labor Leaders: Women, Social Change, and Politics in Modern Mexico (Nebraska, 2025) was published last month.

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.
 

1. The “Modern Woman,” Politics, and the Mexican Revolution in Guadalajara, 1910–17

On July 8, 1914, the Constitutionalist army took Guadalajara with two objectives: first, to advance in their military campaign toward Mexico City against General Victoriano Huerta’s usurping government and the federal army, and second, to reduce the power of the Catholic Church, which had allied with Huerta after his coup d’état (February 23, 1913). In October 1914, two people took the podium at the Degollado Teatro to defend the Constitutionalist cause. On October 1, a young student named Daniel Galindo, from the prestigious Boys’ Lyceum (Liceo de Varones), made a speech to criticize Catholic education (Jesuit) and to extol the virtues of Constitutionalists’ program of public education that would contribute to the construction of a new social order, one that drew on Eurocentric and male ideas of Francis Bacon, René Descartes, Auguste Comte, Voltaire, Jacques Rousseau, Molière, Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint Pierre, Charles Perrault, and Mexican politician, philosopher, and writer Justo Sierra. These thinkers stimulated the modern scientific thought and method that would contribute to the discussion on the importance of liberty and rationalist, humanist, and scientific notions of education. For Galindo, these ideas ultimately would build the common good, the soul of the fatherland (patria) and of race (raza). Women did not figure in Galindo’s vision. On October 25, Laura Apodaca, director of the Jalisco Normal School for Women, took the stage at the Degollado Theater and made a public speech advocating for women’s education for modern life and the role of the “modern woman” in society. Apodaca’s actions were audacious—both her taking to the stage and the contents of her speech—for as Mary Louise Pratt argues, “modern women expressed their inconstant identity as citizens in an increasingly disconcerting fashion.” As a modern woman herself and aware of the advancements of the feminist movements in Europe and the United States, Apodaca drew on the male European classical canon (Plutarco, Ciceron, Virgilio, Homero, René Descartes, François Fénelon, Montesquieu, and Victor Hugo) and on a strong legacy of nineteenth-century liberalism to refute the gender norms propagated by the Catholic Church. Her speech countered the image of women as conservative Catholics who represented an impediment to the construction of a new, revolutionary society. Apodaca argued that a woman can fulfill the same job as a man, only in a different way. The two speeches, both in support of the Constitutionalist cause, serve to demonstrate the gendered nature of revolutionary rhetoric in the 1910s.

Political divisions in 1910s Mexico have been characterized as a split between the Catholic Right and the revolutionary Left; however, the political effervescence of the era was more complex than dichotomies can communicate. Anarchists, Catholics, liberals, socialists, and those between the various revolutionary factions—Villistas, Zapatistas, and Constitutionalists—debated about the role and representation of women and men during the armed movement and their role in the new state and in the future modern society. All discussed possible educational projects for women, and the function of modern women, but within a context of radically accelerated cultural, political, and social change. And yet with all these different trends, both social Catholicism and the Constitutionalists shared the idea that women should be prepared for modern life. However, both had different conceptions of the role of women. Whereas Catholics sought an active role of Catholic women defending the motto “Everything is restored in Christ,” Constitutionalists encouraged women to be active participants in a new society that could campaign against the power of the Catholic Church and in favor of temperance, hygiene, and education. What were the gender policies, and what were the social and political programs of Catholic social action versus those of the revolutionary leaders or caudillos for both men and women? What was the perspective of women themselves expressed in periodicals regarding the purpose of women in modern society? My argument is along these lines. Both the Catholic Church and Constitutionalists constructed women as active participants but limited their role in defense of their own political and social programs.