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Stephanie J. Smith's Gender and the Mexican Revolution brings a sophisticated, gendered version of the revolution to its 'laboratory': Yucatán under governors Salvador Alvarado (1915-18) and Felipe Carrillo Puerto (1922-4). Among the experiments run in this laboratory were the first feminist congresses in Mexico, both in 1916, and revolutionary policy formation specifically addressing women, giving the revolutionary period in Yucatán a feminist veneer. Cracking that veneer, Smith finds that at the local and personal level revolutionary policies did not overturn fundamental assumptions about gender roles and women's domestic responsibilities. At the same time, using court cases for which she scoured local archives, she shows how ordinary women, Maya and mestiza, put revolutionary rhetoric into practice to seek a better life for themselves and their children.
The book is organised into five thematic chapters examining different policy areas of Yucatán's revolutionary period: education and feminist groups; the judicial system, both military tribunals and constitutional courts; the church-state conflict; divorce practice; and debates about and regulation of prostitution. Throughout, Smith argues persuasively that the rhetoric of radical reform often ignored basic problems, such as a lack of resources to implement changes or the ways in which revolutionary policies reinforced pre-revolutionary hierarchies. Moreover, the direction of change was not inexorably towards greater equality and blind justice. Military tribunals established during the revolution to provide justice for the 'poor' heard diverse complaints, including lost honour, jilting, spousal abandonment and unjust working practices. In...