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CHAPTER 1
"Women of the Middle Class, More Than Others, Need to Work"
This proclamation, printed in La Convención Radical Obrera in 1894, may seem surprising. With the important exception of teachers, public commentary had associated middle-class identity with women who remained in the private sphere. And yet, both artisans and the middle class engaged in a vigorous conversation over women and work in the mid-1890s. Economic growth during the Porfiriato (1876–1911) was marked by shifts in the labor market and inflation, with profound implications for women. Though household-level studies for the period are lacking, we do know that the mid-1880s were characterized by inflation that put pressure on artisan and middle-class households alike. Artisan households suffered to such a degree that people took to the streets in 1883, 1884, and 1892. The years 1900 to 1910 were also marked by inflation, compounded in 1907 and 1908 by rising unemployment. In response, people began to rethink the role of women within the middle-class household economy and to question cultural restrictions on women working outside the home. For those women already employed outside the home, working conditions declined in the industries that hired primarily women, especially sewing and cigar and cigarette production. Women, from seamstress to teacher, needed work, and that need would be answered, in Mexico City, with the opening of government office work to women.
Shifts in women's workforce participation led to new ways of speaking about women, class, and feminism. This chapter examines the public conversations in Mexico City regarding women and work that appeared in a variety of media — newspapers, journals, and public speeches — between 1884 and the mid-1910s. Public commentary about working women was nothing new in the 1880s. Commentators had for decades expressed concern over "mixing the sexes" when women entered into work spaces conceived of as male, factories primarily. Women's interaction with men outside the domestic sphere posed a danger, they argued, to female sexual morality. Politicians, labor activists, journalists, and intellectuals simultaneously drew on these conceptions of women and work, and on conceptions of class identities, to produce new ways of talking about female office workers. What was new about these conversations was the ways of marking middle-class identity. Education, work, and the capacity to choose when to marry began to eclipse the ideal of the "angel of the home" as foundational components of middle-class identity.
Commercial education played an important role in training women for office work and in defining that work as middle class. In efforts to meet the need for office workers to fill an expanding bureaucracy, in 1903 the federal government opened a new school for commercial education specifically for women, the "Miguel Lerdo de Tejada" Commercial School for Young Ladies. President Díaz, officials in the Ministry of Justice and Public Education (1891–1905), and teachers hoped the school would serve as a conduit to new professional and cultural opportunities for women. And it did. The female-centered school culture, the curriculum, and the public rituals to which women gained access contributed to expand public roles for women. Commentators identified the growing number of female office workers as middle class and associated them with feminism, despite the lack of a robust social movement that identified itself as such prior to the 1910s.
Women and Work
Whereas the year 1879 had seen a series of articles asserting the primary role of women within the home, by the early 1880s articles ran on the topic "women and work." By the 1890s a combination of social and economic factors led labor and middle-class newspapers alike to debate not whether women should work but rather how to support their move into new white-collar occupations and the consequences of this trend. Commentators questioned traditional middle-class gender norms and lamented women's lack of options for work outside the home. For their part, women sought wage-earning opportunities that offered good conditions and reflected positively on their class identity. The possibility, and increasing reality, of women working outside the home contributed to shifts in class identities. The domestic ideal was decentered. The angel of the home continued to serve as a reference point but was no longer the pivot around which middle-class identity revolved. Middle-class identity came to include women working outside the home in "respectable" occupations. The respectability of that work was characterized by the education required to obtain it, by the condition that it be considered non-manual labor, and by the appearance of female sexual propriety. Nineteenth-century liberal reform, which included a reconceptualization of the legal status of women within the family and marriage, served as context for women's changing relationship to work, marriage, and family, and thus to class identity.
In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, important changes occurred in the Mexico City economy and workforce. The city's economy shifted toward machine manufacturing, with a significant impact on artisans, workers, and the middle class. Following the devaluation of silver in 1883 and financial crisis from 1891 to 1894, the government stabilized the foreign debt and successfully encouraged foreign investment. Some 70 percent of the Mexico City population was, in the late nineteenth century, composed of artisans, factory workers, small business owners, and unskilled labor. From 1895 to 1900 the expansion of factory production outweighed the decline in artisan production. However, between 1900 and 1910 artisans were displaced more quickly than industry could absorb them. This, coupled with growing inflation — at a rate of 2.1 percent between 1894 and 1904 and nearly 5 percent between 1904 and 1910 — likely led to a decrease in the living standards for the average working- and middle-class household. Hyperinflation between 1914 and 1917 compounded the challenges people faced in making ends meet. In response to economic pressures on households, women sought work outside the home.
Of course, women had a long history of work outside the home, as laundress, seamstress, cook, child-minder, and in artisanal production. Throughout the colonial period guild rules had not allowed women anything but temporary membership, in the case of the death of a spouse who was a guild member, and then only for one year. Despite the 1799 decree abolishing such barriers, Silvia Arrom found that women's workforce participation shifted only slightly. From 1753 to 1854 women remained approximately one-third of the Mexico City workforce, concentrated primarily in paid domestic work. Sonia Pérez Toledo's in-depth study of Mexico City found 17 percent of women worked in artisanal trades — in order of significance, textiles, clothing production, tobacco, leather, and food preparation. Women also worked in commerce (9 percent), in the home (5 percent), and in professions (3 percent) such as teacher and nurse. Since the early years of the Mexican Republic women made cigars and cigarettes in large manufactories, while some women, seeking "respectability," sold cigars and cigarettes from behind a counter in a shop attached to their home, thus avoiding association with work outside the home.
During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, women constituted more than one-third of the Mexico City industrial workforce, yet the nature of women's workforce participation was in flux. Census data for Mexico City note a modest decline (4 percent) in female employment between 1895 and 1910. Several of the occupations that were considered "women's work" — cigarrera (cigarette worker) and seamstress, for example — saw increasingly difficult working conditions. Cigarette factory owners increased piecework allotments for rollers, who went on strike numerous times throughout the 1880s, with particularly significant mobilization in 1881, 1885, and 1887. La Convención Radical Obrera, official paper of the artisan group the Workers Congress (Congreso Obrero), was a vocal supporter of the cigarreras. By the 1890s the paper was calling for more respectable work options for middle-class women and may have had these same cigarreras in mind. Contractors for the readymade-clothing industry raised production quotas as a way to reduce labor costs, and as a result, seamstresses also struggled to earn a living wage. A journalist for El Imparcial, a Mexico City daily, reported in 1897 that a seamstress who worked ten to twelve hours a day might earn 25 to 37 cents. La Convención Radical Obrera characterized such women as "typical of the middle class" and as a "martyr without a palm frond."
Teaching, one of the few "respectable" occupations open to women, initially represented an opportunity for intellectual life and an entrée to professional identity, but by the turn of the century it had become less attractive. In 1869 the Juárez government, as a part of its initiative to expand the Mexican education system, opened the Secondary School for Girls (Escuela Secundaria para Niñas) in Mexico City. Under President Díaz, in 1889 the Secondary School for Girls became the Normal School for Women (Escuela Normal para Mujeres). Teaching became associated with traditionally feminine roles which bolstered women's growing authority and presence in elementary school education. Between 1875 and 1905 women went from 57 to 76 percent of primary school teachers. In separate studies, Mílada Bazant and María Eugenia Chaoul Pereyra found that when the Mexican government reclassified teachers as public employees in 1896, a growing number of women worked as primary school teacher aides. Those positions, however, did not require a degree and were low paid. Occupational segregation placed a downward pressure on salaries, which remained stagnant between 1867 and 1903. Meanwhile, the cost of living increased. Teachers petitioned the federal government, complaining of stagnant wages and a long workday accentuated by the commute to and from work. La Convención Radical Obrera ran an article in 1894 that, after considering all work options for women, made financial calculations that were not encouraging:
The education crisis takes its victims from our most honorable and hardworking families. Take, for example, the young teacher (preceptora) who earns her degree thanks to thousands of sacrifices and privations. It has cost her family more than 2,600 pesos to support her studies and at the end of six years she has earned her degree, only to find a position that pays an annual salary of 300 pesos.
The social status of teachers fell into such decline that one woman declared, "A teaching degree? Impossible! It has become so ordinary that even the daughters of doormen and women who iron get this degree."
Women's need for work occurred within the context of a movement throughout Latin America that threw into question women's dependent legal status. Liberal reforms swept the continent in the mid-nineteenth century, resulting in the increased rights of individuals (at least for some) and the establishment of civil marriage. The adoption of civil marriage raised questions as to its dissolution. During the 1860s and 1870s, jurists revamped civil codes and women exercised increased individuality within marriage and the process of its dissolution, as Ana Lidia García Peña argues. And the conversation was not confined to the courtroom, jurists, or educated elite. In 1880 the newspaper La Mujer (Woman), published by the School for Manual Arts and Trades for Young Ladies, reported news of changing laws to allow for divorce in France.
Long-standing concern about female dependency, both material and moral, framed discussions about women's need for work. In 1884, Concepción Gimeno de Flaquer, a Spanish women's rights advocate who resided in Mexico City and was director of El Álbum de la Mujer, wrote an article calling for more work options for women. If women were allowed the means to achieve economic independence, they could exercise their agency in a way that would safeguard their morality. "Allow a woman to support herself," she wrote, "and then she will marry only for love, and will not sell her heart for a crust of bread." Work, in other words, provided women with a means to choose marriage rather than pursue it out of necessity or blind habit. Drawing on the middle-class rhetoric of choice, she validated women's capacity to work outside of the home because it allowed her to choose marriage and thus "guaranteed" female virtue. Gimeno de Flaquer participated in pushing the boundaries of female respectability to include work outside the home, as long as domesticity remained a reference point.
For some commentators, such as the pro-labor paper El Hijo del Trabajo, the problem of female dependency manifested itself as public handwringing over a perceived "surplus of women." A supposed demographic imbalance left women disadvantaged within the marriage market. Women could no longer depend on getting married and therefore posed a burden on society. The same concern had shaped English debates over the role of women in economic development as early as 1850.27 Development in the Mexican countryside pushed men and women out of rural communities and toward metropolitan industrial centers like Mexico City. In 1900 only one-third of Federal District residents had been born there, while the remaining two-thirds had migrated from surrounding states. As a result, between 1895 and 1921 the Federal District had the largest concentration of women across the country (roughly 53 percent of the population). The majority of these women, like men, were migrants to the city. One journalist drew attention to similar gender imbalances in Ireland and other countries around the globe.
As in England, however, it seems that the primary concern was not a demographic imbalance but the inability of middle-class women to earn a living. Whereas poor women had long labored to support themselves and their families, discussions of a female surplus were either implicitly or explicitly about middle-class women who faced a restricted labor market. El Hijo del Trabajo lamented: "Overburdened by their excessive numbers, a woman has to choose between being independent and not being a burden to community, or being a dependent and humiliated slave. There can be no doubt as to the choice." Such arguments set the stage for growing public opinion in favor of middle-class women's employment outside the home as a solution for those who might otherwise remain dependent or destitute.
Between 1884 and 1888, the press, concerned about a surfeit of women in need and the problem of limited work options, called for the hiring of women in government offices, frequently pointing out that this was the practice in other countries. In the United States and France women already worked in government offices. The U.S. government first hired women to work in the Treasury Department in 1861.31 Rumors circulated in the press that the Mexican government might follow suit. In 1884, Concepción Gimeno de Flaquer made the case for women's employment in offices by identifying specific occupations appropriate for women: "A woman can be a lithographer, telegraph operator, book-binder, stenographer, and cashier." An 1885 article questioned why the federal government, in need of office workers, did not employ women who had been trained for such work at the government-run School for Manual Arts and Trades for Young Ladies.
Labor newspapers also weighed in on the prospect of women working in offices. "Elisa," likely a pseudonym, published an 1886 article in El Socialista that exemplifies how some observers struggled with what they construed as the problem of female dependency and yet resisted changes in gender relations. Elisa advocated for women's education so that a woman, if she were to find herself in adverse circumstances, might become the "arbiter" of her own future. Even "daughters of well-to-do families" ought to adopt a profession, Elisa wrote. Which professions the author had in mind is less clear. The article mentions "artistic" careers, like copying paintings, a skill that had been taught in schools since the colonial era but that as an occupation did not appear in censuses. While Elisa supported women's education, she raised concerns about the impact of new work and educational opportunities on gender relations, both between individuals and in the public sphere:
I am not a partisan of those, fed by self-interested concerns, who deny the vast capacity of woman. Her quick understanding and clear intelligence give her an excellent capacity to fill positions in desk work, administration, business, etc., as she is allowed to do in other countries. I agree that her education should be as comprehensive as that which she receives today, but I hope that men will find in her a docile and sweet companion, not a rival. She should be amiable, not someone who wants to take the podium and show off her eloquence in public assemblies, not someone who wants to argue with distinguished orators and men of science, nor someone who aspires to become a dictator in skirts.
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Excerpted from "From Angel to Office Worker"
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