Cleaning the revolutionary household: Domestic servants and public welfare in Mexico City, 1900-1935

Journal of Women's History

Volumn 15, Issue 4, 2004, Pages

  Blum, Ann S ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS BOSTON   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34247650894     PISSN: 10427961     EISSN: 15272036     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jowh.2004.0006     Document Type: Review

References (47)

1. Ann Shelby Blum, "Children without Parents: Law, Charity, and Social Practice, Mexico City 1867-1940," (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, 1998), chap. 4.
2. Carmen Ramos Escandón, "Comentarios," in El trabajo y los trabajadores en la historia de Mexico, V Reunión de Historiadores Mexicanos y Norteamericanos, Pâtzcuaro, 1977, ed. Elsa Frost, Michael C. Meyer, and Josefina Zoraida Vásquez, (Mexico City: El Colegio de Mexico, 1979), 460. Translations from the original Spanish are mine unless otherwise noted.
3. Antonio Garcia Cubas, The Republic of Mexico in 1876, trans. George F. Henderson (Mexico City: La Enseñanza Printing Office, 1876), 18.
4. Silvia M. Arrom, The Women of Mexico City, 1790-1857 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1985), 162:
5. and John Lear, Workers, Neighbors, and Citizens: The Revolution in Mexico City (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 75-77.
6. Flora Salazar identifies a decline in the proportion of domestic servants from 30 percent to 10.2 percent relative to the entire economically active population of Mexico City between 1811 and 1900: "Los trabajadores del 'servicio doméstico' en la ciudad de México en el siglo XIX," in Organization de la production y relaciones de trabajo en el siglo XIX en México, Cuadernos de Trabajo del Departamento de Investigaciones Históricas, INAH, ed. Sonia Lombardo de Ruiz (Mexico City: Instituto National de Antropología e Historia, 1979), 184-94.
7. Brígida García and Orlandina de Oliveira, Trabajo femenina y vida familiar en México (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1994), 26.
8. Lear, Workers, Neighbors, and Citizens, 76.
9. For comparison, see Lesley Gill, Precarious Dependencies: Gender, Class, and Domestic Service in Bolivia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994);
10. and Emma Pérez, "'She Has Served Others in More Intimate Ways': The Domestic Servant Reform in Yucatán, 1915-1918," Aztlán 20:1-2 (1991): 11-38.
11. Women's civic and political organizations across the political spectrum from Communist to conservative Catholic, spoke for women workers. See Jocelyn Olcott, "'The Necessary and Immediate Task': The Popular Front and Mexican Welfare Policy," paper presented at the Twelfth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Storrs, Conn., June 2002.
12. See T.G. Powell, "Comentarios," in El trabajo y los trabajadores, 456-58.
13. Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp, "The Politics of Reproduction," Annual Review of Anthropology, 20 (1991): 311-43.
14. Mary Kay Vaughan, "Modernizing Patriarchy: State Policies, Rural Households, and Women in Mexico, 1930-1940," in Hidden Histories of Gender and the State in Latin America, ed. Elizabeth Dore and Maxine Molyneux (Durham, N.C: Duke University Press, 2000), 194-214.
15. Katherine Bliss, "The Science of Redemption: Syphilis, Sexual Promiscuity, and Reformism in Revolutionary Mexico City," Hispanic American Historical Review 79, no. 1 (1999): 1-40;
16. Ann Blum, "Dying of Sadness: Hospitalism and Child Welfare, Mexico City, 1920-1940," in From Cholera to AIDS: History and Disease in Modern Latin America, ed. Diego Annus (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), 209-36;
17. Oresta López Pérez, "Prescripciones y técnicas de higiene doméstica a través de las lecturas para mujeres mexicanas," paper presented at the XXII Congress of the Latin American Studies Association, Miami, FL, March, 2000;
18. Emma Pérez, "Feminism-in-Nationalism: The Gendered Subaltern at the Yucatán Feminist Congresses of 1916," in Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and the State, ed. Caren Kaplan, Norma Alarcón, and Minoo Moallem (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999), 219-39;
19. Patience Schell, "Public Health in Public School, Mexico, 1896-1928," paper presented at the XXII Congress of the Latin American Studies Association, Miami, FL, March, 2000;
20. Alexandra M. Stern, "Responsible Mothers and Normal Children: Eugenics and Nationalism in Post-Revolutionary Mexico City, 1920-1940," in La historia de la mediana en México: corrientes interpretativas, ed. Laura Cházaro (Zamora, Mich.: El Colegio de Michoacán, 1999);
21. and Ann Varley, "Women and the Home in Mexican Family Law," in Hidden Histories of Gender and the State in Latin America, 238-61.
22. For international comparisons, see Susan K. Besse, Restructuring Patriarchy: The Modernization of Gender Inequality in Brazil, 1914-1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996),
23. See also Lanny Thompson, "The Structures and Vicissitudes of Reproduction: Households in Mexico, 1876-1970," Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 14, no. 3 (1991): 403-36.
24. See Barbara J. Nelson, "The Origins of the Two-Channel Welfare State: Workmen's Compensation and Mothers' Aid," in Women, the State, and Welfare, ed. Linda Gordon (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 123-51;
25. and Ginsburg and Rapp, "The Politics of Reproduction." See also Carmen Sarasúa, Criados, nodrizas y amos: el servicio doméstico en la formation del mercado de trabajo madrileñe, 1758-1868 (Madrid: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1994).
26. Sarah Radcliffe and Sallie Westwood, Remaking the Nation: Place, Identity and Politics in Latin America (London: Routledge, 1996), 29.
27. See Mercedes González de la Rocha, The Resources of Poverty: Women and Survival in a Mexican City (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 97-102.
28. Space limitations require postponing discussion of the experiences of domestic servants and employer-servant relations and identities to other venues. See Ann Blum, "Breaking and Making Families: Adoption and Public Welfare, 1917-1940," paper presented at "Las Olvidadas: Gender and Women's History in Post-revolutionary Mexico," Yale University, 11-13 May 2001.
29. Felipe Avila Espinosa, "Los niños abandonados de la Casa de Niños Expósitos de la Ciudad de México, 1767-1821," in La familia en el mundo iberoamericano, ed. Pilar Gonzalbo Aizpuru, and Cecilia Rabell (Mexico City: Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales, UNAM, 1994), 265-310.
30. Elizabeth Kuznesof, "A History of Domestic Service in Spanish America, 1492-1980," in Muchachas No More: Household Workers in Latin America and the Caribbean, ed. Elsa M. Chaney and Mary Garcia Castro (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 17-35.
31. In 1887, first lady Carmen Romero Rubio again endorsed employers' preferences for domestics without children in founding the Casa Amiga de la Obrera, providing daycare for children of working mothers; see, Ann S. Blum, "Conspicuous Benevolence: Liberalism, Public Welfare, and Private Charity in Porfirian Mexico City, 1877-1910," The Americas 58 (July 2001): 7-38.
32. Arrom, The Women of Mexico City, 162;
33. Manuel Dublán and José María Lozano, eds., Legislación mexicana o colección de las disposiciones legislativas expedidas desde la independencia de la República (Mexico City: Imprenta de Comercio, 1876-1903), v. 11, 238;
34. J. P. Taylor, The Civil Code of the Mexican Federal District and Territories (San Francisco: The American Book and Printing Company, 1904), 323.
35. Martiniano T. Alfaro, Reseña histórico-descriptiva del antiguo Hospicio de México (Mexico City: Imprenta del Gobierno Federal, 1906), 55.
36. Ramón Beteta, La mendicidad en México (Mexico City: Beneficencia Pública del Distrito Federal, Departamento de Acción Social, 1931), Table 11, 72.
37. Anna Macías, Against all Odds: The Feminist Movement in Mexico to 1940 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982), 125;
38. Shirlene Soto, Emergence of the Modern Mexican Woman: Her Participation in Revolution and Struggle for Equality, 1910-1940 (Denver: Arden Press, 1990), 113-114;
39. See also Ann S. Blum, "Public Welfare and Child Circulation, Mexico City, 1877-1925," Journal of Family History 23 (July 1998): 240-71.
40. Bliss, "The Science of Redemption," 3-5;
41. Patience Schell, "An Ordered Life: Public Health in Mexico City's Public Schools, 1896-1928," paper presented at the XXII International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association, Miami, FL, March 2000;
42. Katherine Bliss, "The Birth of the Revolutionary Citizen: Reproductive Health and Population Policies in Early 20th-century Mexico," paper presented at "Las Olvidadas: Gender and Women's History in Postrevolutionary Mexico," Yale University, 11-13 May 2001;
43. Eugenio Toussaint Aragón, Hospital Infantil de México: Dr. Federico Gómez, 1943-1983 (Mexico City: Hospital Infantil de Mexico, 1983), 8.
44. The Federal Labor Law: United States of Mexico, Effective August 28, 1931, English Translation (Mexico City: The American Chamber of Commerce of Mexico, 1931).
45. For a discussion of Mexican labor legislation regarding domestic service since 1931 see Mary Goldsmith, "Politics and Programs of Domestic Workers' Organizations in Mexico City," Muchachas No More, 221-43.
46. For similarities in Chile, see Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt, "Charity, Rights, and Entitlement: Gender, Labor, and Welfare in Early-Twentieth-Century Chile," Hispanic American Historical Review 81 (August-November 2001): 555-85.
47. Nichole Sanders argues that welfare policy shifted from a class-based to a gender-based focus during the 1940s. See Nichole Sanders, "Improving Mothers: Poverty the Family and 'Modern' Social Assistance in Mexico, 1937-1950," in The Women's Revolution: Women and Womanhood in Mexico, 1910-1953, ed. Patience Schell and Stephanie Mitchell (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, forthcoming).