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Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico: The Emergence of a New Feminist Political History
John D. French
Olcott, Jocelyn. Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Photographs, maps, tables, bibliography, index, 361 pp.; hardcover $84.95, paperback $23.95.
Olcott, Jocelyn, Mary K. Vaughan, and Gabriela Cano, eds. Sex in Revolution: Gender, Politics, and Power in Modern Mexico. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. Photographs, bibliography, index, 346 pp.; hardcover $79.95, paperback $22.95.
Dealing with the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1940), Jocelyn Olcott's monograph offers an innovative contribution to a sophisticated, multigenerational literature that explores the dynamics and impact of the Western Hemisphere's most violent revolution. This review essay will place this monograph and a related edited collection into the context of two scholarly debates in Mexican history while drawing out some broader suggestions about its relevance to the future of feminist political history elsewhere in Latin America.
POSTREVOLUTIONARY STATE FORMATION AND THE CHALLENGE OF CARDENISMO
To understand the contribution of Revolutionary Women, it is necessary to grasp the historiographical self-critique that characterized the history of Mexico in the early 1990s. Scholars had long grappled with the question of how to understand the revolution; in particular, how and why did it give rise to Latin America's most stable political system from 1917 to 2000, a regime marked by both authoritarianism and high levels of popular mobilization? By the late 1980s, scholars had exhaustively explored the military phase of the revolution (1910-17), and many Mexicanists turned with renewed energy to postrevolutionary state formation.
In 1994, Oxford Mexicanist Alan Knight placed the administration of President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-40) at the center of debate with a widely influential article titled "Cardenismo: Juggernaut or Jalopy?" As the most radical president in the Western Hemisphere in the 1930s, Cárdenas carried out a massive distribution of land to peasants, nationalized foreign oil interests, and fostered the development of powerful agrarian and trade union movements. The problem, retrospectively, lay in the longterm outcome of the Cárdenas era: the consolidation of a durable and undemocratic system of machine politics and state tutelage over Mexican society. This led Knight to formulate an ambitious research agenda that asked, among other things, how radical was Cardenismo in its goals and policies versus practical accomplishments? Was it authoritarian...