Description
Book Synopsis2019 Thomas McGann Award for best publication in Latin American Studies
In late nineteenth-century Mexico a woman’s presence in the home was a marker of middle-class identity. However, as economic conditions declined during the Mexican Revolutionand jobs traditionally held by women disappeared, a growing number of women began to look for work outside the domestic sphere. As these “angels of the home” began to take office jobs, middle-class identity became more porous.
To understand how office workers shaped middle-class identities in Mexico, From Angel to Office Workerexamines the material conditions of women’s work and analyzes how women themselves reconfigured public debates over their employment. At the heart of the women’s movement was a labor movement led by secretaries and office workers whose demands included respect for seniority, equal pay for equal work, and resources to support working mothers, both married an
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"This book is an excellent contribution to a variety of historiographies and would work well in a graduate seminar. It is also well written and well organized, making it a useful addition to undergraduate courses on labor history, women’s history, state formation, and Mexican history."—Nichole Sanders, H-LatAm
"This book will appeal to anyone interested in gender and labor history in the Americas."—Evan C. Rothera, Anthropology of Work Review
“In this fine study Porter contributes to our understanding of Mexico’s first-wave feminist movement. . . . She shows the close linkage between women and work in feminist programming that would, contrary to conventional scholarship, expand rather than wither in the immediate decades after 1940.”—Mary Kay Vaughan, coeditor of Sex in Revolution: Gender, Politics, and Power in Modern Mexico
“Susie Porter demonstrates that labor was key to both the women’s movement and the emergence of a middle-class identity. This is a must-read for scholars of twentieth-century Mexico.”—Robert F. Alegre, associate professor of Latin American history and affiliated faculty in the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at the University of New England
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Graphs and Tables
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
1. “Women of the Middle Class, More Than Others, Need to Work”
2. Office Work and Commercial Education during the 1920s
3. Writing and Activism in 1920s Mexico City
4. Women at Work in Government Offices in 1930s Mexico City
5. Commercial Education and Writing during the 1930s
6. Office Workers Organize during the 1930s
7. Women, Work, and Middle-Class Identity during the 1940s
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
