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Women School Teachers in the Mexican Revolution: The Story of Reyna's Braids

The Mexican Revolution of 1910 was reputedly not a revolution for women: women did not vote in national elections until 1958, they were marginalized from industrial work, discriminated against in divorce cases, and told that domesticity and motherhood constituted their citizenship.1 Yet this revolution opened a field for creativity and self-realization for hundreds of Mexican women of humble, provincial backgrounds who became rural school teachers. They filled the ranks of the only profession opened to women since the nineteenth century and took up a crusade for "civilization." The school of the Mexican Revolution was not a simple school for teaching people to read and write. It aimed at a social and political literacy that would change the way people ate, raised children, relaxed, worked, and viewed the world, themselves, and their Patria. In this essay, I probe the lives of three women school teachers, Reyna Manzano Carmona, Socorro Rivera Rodriguez, and Isaura Martinez Guzman, to understand their empowerment as women, professionals, and revolutionary teachers.2 I ask what difficulties accompanied women's entry into the teaching profession in a fundamentally agrarian society in which only 25 percent of women over 12 years of age were literate in 1910. Because rural school teachers were part of a revolutionary process of change and state formation, I probe the experiences of these women to gain insight into a central issue in Mexican revolutionary historiography: the interaction between the individual, socio-political movements, and the revolutionary state in the period 1920 to 1940. Revisionist historians treat the state as the organizer and victor of the Mexican Revolution. They marginalize the role of popular forces to focus attention on state formation and on ambitious politicians who manipu- lated mass organizations and issues to gain power.3 A number of works, including my own, have interpreted public education as a channel for state domination and the imposition of a western, capitalist paradigm on the peasantry and working class.4 As historians question the revisionist ap- proach and explore ways of understanding the role of individuals and social movements in the revolutionary process, teachers and schooling offer an intriguing field for study. Teachers were individuals who became employees of a revolutionary state. Many worked among peasants, or campesinos, major historical actors in the revolutionary process who were beneficiaries of land reform, and subjects to be co-opted by the emerging