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FAMILY/GENDER STUDIES Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico. By Jocelyn Olcott. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Pp. ix, 337. Illustrations. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $79.95 cloth; $22.95 paper.
Jocelyn Olcott's study opens and closes with radical activist Concha Michel leading a land invasion of the Hacienda Santa Barbara, estate of former president Plutarco Elias Calles, in January 1936. Michel's immediate goal was to provide women with access to ejido land, but this incident also was something larger: a "gender inversion" (p. 2) meant to challenge political leadership in general as well as Calles in particular. While brave and extraordinary, Michel's action failed on both levels: immediately, Calles kept his land; and more broadly, such actions did little to destabilize the vision of the Mexican woman as a "rebozo-shrouded madre abnegada," and have it "give way to the ciudadana revolucionaria" (p. 244).
Olcott provides a detailed, well-documented history of women's activism to become the latter after Mexico's armed revolution (1910-1917). Rather than select one or a narrow range of groups active in the 1920s and 1930s as a focus, Olcott ambitiously aims to demonstrate the "chains of equivalence" (p. 23) that bound different women's mobilizations together and established their relationship with the consolidating state. These relationships, formed in women's struggles for land, labor rights, resources, social...