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For a collection committed to recovering the diversity of women's roles in Mexico's Revolution, the essays in this volume cohere remarkably well. As witnessed in these chapters, common to women's sundry revolutionary experiences was their profound, though hardly uniform, politicisation. Women expressed this not just through their participation in formal politics, such as efforts to achieve suffrage or amend family law. Amid the exuberance of post revolutionary civic life in the 1920s and 1930s, activities that had been historically largely female or domestic concerns, such as welfare, social reform, education, temperance and housing, now earned the attention of the state. Women in turn used this new status to press for equality, social justice, or at the very least an improvement in women's condition. Notably, despite these varied objectives, the contributors to this volume show that women's means often were quite similar. For example, upper-class, conservative women seeking to defend the Catholic Church, liberal feminists fighting for universal equality, and working class communists striving to overcome the oppression of capitalism found common ground in their efforts to uplift prostitutes and modernise the poor. By reclaiming their complex history, the contributors not only recognise women's participation in Mexico's Revolution; together, they simultaneously attempt to answer whether this participation resulted in a revolution for Mexico's women.
Women in Mexico ultimately gained full rights as citizens in the 1940s and 1950s by employing a politics of difference that emphasised their distinct feminine contributions to the public sphere. This is not surprising to scholars of comparative women's history. Yet, as Sarah Buck illustrates, what is noteworthy about Mexico is just how close women came to full citizenship in the 1930s, when revolutionary radicalism almost ushered women into the voting booths on a platform of universal equality. However, the conservative shift in the 1940s and 1950s soon eliminated this possibility, and moderate feminists found themselves in the vanguard of the suffrage movement. Their...