Abstract
In From Angel to Office Worker, Susie S. Porter examines changing social roles and terms of “respectable” middle-class identity for Mexican women at the turn of the twentieth century. Porter’s history of women public employees (empleadas públicas) focuses on the economic context of Mexico City, covering the decades between the 1890s, when women first found government office employment, through the establishment of the revolutionary government, and into the 1940s. The book is organized chronologically, but with particular focus on themes relevant in each period, such as initial establishment of employment as legitimate for middle-class women; organization of commercial education and women’s activism in the 1920s; Mexico City government office work, activism, education, and writing throughout the 1920s and 1930s; and the changing economic and social landscape, including extreme inflation and concern for stability of the family as an institution, characteristic of the 1940s.
Porter’s contribution is significant and multifaceted. She fills a gap in the historical scholarship on women’s roles in Mexico. In contrast with well-known images privileging women’s domestic place as angel of the home (angel de hogar), Porter reminds us that beginning at the turn of the twentieth century, these same respectable middle-class women were increasingly given employment opportunities in the public sector of government office work. Historically, middle-class respectability had been framed in terms of seclusion and a singularly domestic life. Middle-class women, when pressed, were likely to take work in. Largely because of its visibility, factory labor and street vending undermined a woman’s status and was racialized (Spanish women shunned work that was relegated to caste and Indian women). Even when economic recession and male mortality necessitated women’s contribution to household finances, teaching and welfare work (jobs consistent with a feminine domestic role) expanded for women, while any office-type work for women was initially restricted to secluded settings. It took rapid growth during the last two decades of the 1800s, coupled with adoption of new technologies (such as the typewriter) to create the expanded demand allowing for the feminization of office work. Subsequently, agriculturally driven economic crisis, high unemployment, and limited opportunities in rural areas led many women to migrate to urban city-centers, so that expanded opportunities coincided with greater need for work on women’s part.
Porter emphasizes the question of middle-class identity as constructed in nuanced, often seemingly contradictory ways for women. Identifying class position of women has long been problematic for sociologists and economists. If women’s role is seen as primarily located in the home, observers have been quick to link a woman’s class directly to her husband’s (whereas a man’s class has long been identified according to his own occupation, income, and education). The experience of women government office workers, however, complicates that assumption. In the late 1800s, even middle-class families needed women to contribute to household finances, opening ideological space for women to simultaneously claim respectability in their middle-class status and to work in the public sector. Expanding opportunities in office work also meant the promise of educational and occupational mobility for girls and women of poorer backgrounds who came to commercial education in their aspirations for economic, middle-class stability. Nevertheless, women were not paid commensurately with a middle-class income; indeed, the gap between men’s and women’s wages persisted, so that as late as the 1940s, women were reportedly being paid as little as one-third the pay for the same work performed by men. Middle-class aspirations and identity based on cultural capital gained by public sector employment did not necessarily afford a woman a secure middle-class lifestyle.
Moreover, Porter’s study traces the shifting meaning of feminista, which initially referred to women working in public offices, a nod to women’s expanding social roles and the young women at the cutting edge of these changes. Over time, feminism increasingly signified social movement for change, reflecting women’s activism, their cultural and political agency, and the interconnectedness of middle-class and working-class feminisms. Located in their labor, in their workplace experiences, women advocated for themselves as women and as workers. Porter’s chapter on organizational efforts during the 1930s is particularly instructive as to the multiple sites, many grievances, and collaborative, cross-organizational efforts of the women’s movement, workers’ movement, and party politics. Women office workers (empleadas) fought on all fronts: for sex education, legal equality, political rights (such as suffrage), as well as workplace equity (such as maternity leave, a minimum wage, and an eight-hour workday). They were active in shaping public perception of their changing position and proved effective at mobilizing for their status and equal treatment in the labor movement and, more broadly, under the law.
This volume is recommended especially for graduate students and scholars of gender and work, social change and social movements, and labor history, as well as for anyone interested in the history of early twentieth-century Mexico.