Women’s rights in Mexico: A brief history
A History of Women's Rights in Mexico
Ever wondered about the history of women’s rights and feminism in Mexico? Check out this blog post for a condensed version and learn about some key figures in Mexican feminist history along with some current challenges that Mexican women continue to face.
The Legacy of Benito Juárez and Ignacio Ramirez
Traditionally, education was used as a tool of domination, control and assimilation by several religious orders in New Spain, most notably, the Dominicans and Jesuits. Girls’ education usually centered around religion and domestic activities. After the War of Independence, Mexico came under the rule of progressive leaders who centralized the education system. In 1857, under President Benito Juárez, a new Constitution was written and along with it came La Reforma. La Reforma established the separation of church and state, as well as the right to education. These new laws caused a shift away from the Catholic Church as primary disseminators of education and gave the government more control. After a brief Franco-Habsburg takeover between 1864-1867, Benito Juárez seized power once again and declared education to be secular, obligatory and free. The new laws coincided with the founding of the Secondary School system for young girls and other special schools such as The National Preparatory School and the Academy of Sciences and Literature.
Another key figure who expanded the growing tradition of inclusive education was Ignacio Ramirez. Ignacio Ramirez was a magistrate who was briefly exiled during the Franco-Habsburg period. Although he disapproved of the Juárez administration and the Tejada administration that succeeded it, he was entrusted with overseeing the national education system. He expanded primary and secondary education, founded libraries, scholarships and promoted the fine arts. Most notably, he emphasized the importance of higher education for women and fought for the rights of indigenous populations.
Rita Cetina Gutiérrez
Born in Mérida in 1846, Rita Cetina Gutiérrez is considered to be one of the earliest feminists in Mexico. She was a prominent poet and writer who wrote under the pen name Cristabela. She wrote about love, justice, patriotism and feminism. With a little help from her friends she opened La Siempreviva, the first secular school for girls. She believed that girls’ education should not only be relegated to domestic activities and religion, but should encompass the arts and sciences as well.
Women’s Suffrage in Mexico
Traditionally, women were expected to continue their roles as mothers and domestic workers, and if they had professional jobs they were either teachers or nurses. Pre-revolution there was no formal feminist movement; however, as liberal ideas become more popular, questions concerning the status of women in their current roles began to materialize, particularly among rich and middle class women. These high status women often led the charge on providing better access to funding and education for the betterment of women. They created Feminist Leagues and organizations. They produced publications such as Violetas de Anáhuac (Violets of Anáhuac) created by Laureana Wright de Kleinhansz, and La Mujer Mexicana (The Mexican woman) formed by the Sociedad Protectora de la Mujer (The Society for the Protection of Women).
The Mexican Revolution and women’s work
The Mexican Revolution of 1910 changed the trajectory of women’s involvement in the public sphere and inspired the emergence of feminism as a collective movement in Mexico. During the revolution, women had to take up jobs that were traditionally held by men, some even fought alongside them, working as soldiers, cooks, laundresses, and nurses. Some women worked as spies. After the revolution, Mexican women found themselves sidelined once again, which encouraged a more widespread discourse on the need for suffrage and equality.
The revolution yielded some fruits for women. In 1915, Mexican women obtained the right to divorce which later expanded to include the right to alimony and child custody, and in 1916, women were granted permission to convene the First Feminist Congress or Primer Congreso Feminista. This Congress laid the foundation of many of the rights that would become outlined in the Constitution of 1917, such as free state-sponsored secular education, and equal pay for the same work.
Elvia Carrillo Puerto
In 1922, the governor of the Yucatan, Felipe Carrillo Puerto, proposed legislation to make women citizens and give them the right to vote. He also urged women to run for political office. This gave rise to the preeminence of leaders such as Elvia Carrillo Puerto and Maria Rosa Torre González. The sister of Felipe Carrillo Puerto, Elvia was responsible for setting up many feminist leagues around the country. The feminist leagues gave talks about family planning, child care, and hygiene to marginalized women. The most prominent feminist league was the Rita Cantina Gutiérrez.
Rosa Torre González
Born an illegitimate child in the state of Yucatan, Mexico, González attended The Girl’s Literary Institute whose unique curriculum laid the foundation for her vibrant career. Instead of teaching home economics and domestic skills which was customary at the time, The Girl’s Literary Institute taught feminist theory, astronomy, history, geography, mathematics and constitutional law. González worked as a spy during the revolution, was the president of the Second Feminist Congress, and worked with Elvia Carrillo Puerto to set up 45 feminist leagues around the country. She also mobilized more than 5000 workers to fight for workers’ rights. Despite the fact that Mexican women would not gain the right to vote until 1953, González became victorious in her bid for the city council of Mérida and became the first woman to hold public office in Mexico in 1922.
Feminist Issues in Mexico between 1930-1990
Prostitution
Prostitution and sexual education spearheaded issues on women’s rights between the 1920’s and 30’s, largely because feminist issues were eclipsed by the horrors of the post-war era. Prostitution had been legal in Mexico since the 19th century, was considered a viable way to survive, and was highly regulated. Its high regulation was a legacy left by the Franco-Habsburg Takeover, which had ushered in an increase of diseases such as syphilis and gonorrhea. To protect soldiers, the government mandated that prostitutes register, undergo monthly quotas, medical examinations and submit photographs. Eventually, the numerous forums on prostitution birthed the legalization of abortion in the cases of rape and endangerment of the mother’s life in 1931.
Feminism and Marxism
The 1970s onwards saw some significant strides in women’s rights. During these periods, the feminist movement coupled with the socialist and Marxist movements, organized protests and demonstrations. As people began to move away from the rural areas into urban ones, there were growing concerns with regards to workers' rights, along with the distribution of resources such as sanitation, transportation, housing and utilities. When the debt crisis hit, people found themselves in more precarious positions than before. Women from rural communities often worked together to get their needs addressed and gain adequate representation in Congress. Workers’ unions incorporated female advisory boards to organize and prevent the exploitation of female garment workers.
Abortion laws Mexico
In the 1990s, the state of Chiapas legalized abortion for “reasons of family planning or by common agreement of the parents within 90 days of conception" which was unprecedented for abortion rights in Mexico. In the 2000s, while abortion became legal in the states of Mexico City and Oaxaca, abortion laws regressed in other states. Constitutional reforms asserting that life begins at conception changed the laws in once legal states such as Chiapas, which now only permit abortion on the grounds that it is fatal to the mother’s life or that the fetus has congenital defects. Generally, women who are caught having an illegal abortion can face up to 30 years in prison.
Indigenous women’s rights
The 1990s saw the rise of indigenous women’s rights as a central focus. Indigenous women’s rights concerned the same issues as non-indigenous women such as poverty, family-planning, rurality, violence, workers' rights and lack of political representation. However, non-indigenous feminists did not have to deal with racial discrimination nor cultural issues stemming from indigeneity. Indigenous women and girls were often married off at very early ages and were disproportionately the targets of abuse and attacks, some were even forced to marry their attackers and abusers.
Women’s groups such as the Center for Research and Action for Women, The Women’s Group of San Cristobal de Las Casas, and the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) were prominent groups that advocated against the violence and disenfranchisement of Indigenous women. The EZLN introduced the Women’s Revolutionary Laws which weren’t adopted by the Federal government, however, they outlined the concerns of Indigenous women:
Women have the right to participate in the revolutionary struggle in the place and at the level that their capacity and will dictate without any discrimination based on race, creed, color, or political affiliation.
Women have the right to work and to receive a just salary.
Women have the right to decide on the number of children they have and take care of.
Women have the right to participate in community affairs and hold leadership positions if they are freely and democratically elected.
Women have the right to primary care in terms of their health and nutrition.
Women have the right to education.
Women have the right to choose who they are with (i.e. choose their romantic/sexual partners) and should not be obligated to marry by force.
Women should not be beaten or physically mistreated by either family members or strangers. Rape and attempted rape should be severely punished.
Women can hold leadership positions in the organization and hold military rank in the revolutionary armed forces.
Women have all the rights and obligations set out by the revolutionary laws and regulations.
Education and Indigenous Girls
Indigeneity and Rurality
While Mexico’s Constitution guarantees equal rights to education, it seems that this right is barely afforded to Indigenous girls. Indigenous Mexican women and girls have many obstacles in regards to their education, job prospects and safety. They suffer a "quadruple burden" of poverty, indigeneity, rurality, and gender. A quarter of Indigenous girls have to deal with bullying in schools, teachers who won’t defend them or have any interest in their culture and background. Reports, interviews and surveys track a pattern of references to their indigeneity and the color of their skin as sources of abuse and humiliation. Indigenous girls who stand out and achieve high grades are often shut down and ridiculed by fellow classmates and school teachers.
Rurality, family and culture
Indigenous girls suffer a rising pressure from their own families in regards to pursuing higher education. Indigenous families, which can have a patriarchal structure, are often subjected to the will of the male figure, and there is an expectation that girls must contribute to their family's income in agriculture. Indigenous girls who already feel like burdens to their family fear that pursuing higher education would cause an additional financial strain on their parents. Parents also fear that their daughters would be taken advantage of and be discriminated against in large cities where the universities are often situated. Indigenous girls additionally have the emotional burden of not seeing their families long periods of time because of the financial costs of returning to their communities from university.
The fight continues
Language is an obstacle to how Indigenous girls perform in schools. Education in Mexico is disseminated using Spanish and all other languages are an afterthought. As a result, Indigenous girls feel like they cannot express themselves at school. After the Revolution, the Spanish language was used to unify the country through the mantra of “One nation, One language.” So, although Mexico is a diverse nation that comprises 67 Indigenous languages, each language does not receive equal support or recognition by the law. Today, Indigenous children suffer the blowback of this tradition; the system does not adequately match them to teachers who speak their language and their learning materials are in Spanish rather than their native tongue. Although 1.3 million Indigenous children predominantly speak an Indigenous language, reports show that only 60 percent of teachers who do speak an Indigenous language are in classrooms with students who speak the same one.
Gender Gaps in the Workforce and the Informal Sector
There are very large gaps in regards to Mexican women’s participation in the workforce. Although Mexican women comprise 46 percent of higher education, they represent only 37 percent of entry-level jobs and 10 percent of executive level positions.
The wage gap is another harsh reality that Mexican women in the workforce have to endure, with women in entry-level positions making eight percent less than their male counterparts, senior-level making less than 10 percent and C-suite executives making 22 percent less. Men are also 88 percent more likely to achieve their goal of becoming senior managers than their female counterparts. There are plenty of factors that cause these discrepancies including employment discrimination, maternal leave policy, and household duties.
Workplace discrimination and harassment
The Federal Labor Laws protect Mexican women from workplace and pregnancy discrimination and harassment; however, without routine checks and balances, the burden to prevent, detect and deter harassment and discrimination in the workplace rests solely on the victims. While employers caught discriminating against women can be fined up to $20,000 USD by the Secretaría de Trabajo y Previsión Social (the Secretary of Work and Social Provision), employers often go unpunished. Only 16 cases of workplace discrimination have been recorded between 2013 and 2017, which means that either workplace discrimination and harassment hardly exists in all 32 states of Mexico or it is hidden*. The latter is easy to discern considering that there are no mechanisms to monitor harassment and discrimination, nor transparency in regards to any labor conflicts that do reach the courts. We can know the number of cases, but not their particularities, nor any information about their rulings. It is also worth noting that those companies that were fined between 2016 and 2017 paid less than $2000 USD on average, which isn’t enough to deter the behavior nor does it fairly compensate the victims who have to leave their jobs.
The state of women in Mexico
Mexican women have made great strides in regards to their representation in education and politics. Mexican boys and girls have achieved parity in school attendance and Mexico ranks as one of the top five in government representation for women, who are 48 percent of the decision-makers in the country. While those achievements are unprecedented, there is still work to be done for Indigenous and Afro-descended women in Mexico, who still endure the additional hardships of language, rurality and discrimination and fall through the cracks of top-down government programs that do not include them in the decision-making processes.
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Sources:
*Área de Derechos Sexuales y Reproductivos Programa de Derecho a la Salud División de Estudios Jurídicos Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (2018): Shadow Report on Employment Discrimination in Mexico. The Sexual and Reproductive Rights Area of the Right to Health Program at the Law Division of the Center for Economic Research and Teaching, pp. 1–16,
Colette Despagne (2013): Indigenous Education in Mexico: Indigenous Students' Voices, Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education: Studies of Migration, Integration, Equity, and Cultural Survival, 7:2, 114-129
María Cristina Osorio Vázquez (2017): Understanding Girls’ Education in Indigenous Maya Communities in the Yucatán Peninsula. Echidas Global Scholars Program
McKinsey & Company (2018): One Aspiration Two Realities Women Matter Mexico, pp. 1–81,
World Bank Group (2019) : Mexico Gender Assessment. International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, 2019, pp. 1–87
Victoria Andrade de Herrara (1992) : Education in Mexico: Historical and Contemporary Educational Systems.” Children of La Fontera: Binational Efforts to Serve Migrant and Immigrant Students, United States, pp. 3–36.
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