on paper it represented a direct and significant threat to U.S. businesses and landowners. In August 1919, the U.S. Senate established a subcommittee of the Committee on Foreign Relations to investigate the Mexican situation. Senator Albert B. Fall, who strongly supported the idea of U.S. military intervention, chaired the subcommittee. The subcommittee released a report in June 1920 recommending that the United States refuse to recognize any Mexican government without an agreement protecting U.S. landowners and financial investments. When Mexican President Á lvaro Obregón refused in 1920 to exempt U.S. interests from Article 27, U.S. President Warren Harding severed diplomatic ties and refused to recognize Obregón. The two countries did not restore their formal relationship until 1923.33
Revolutionary nationalism and patriotism also grew among ordinary Mexicans, who sought to claim the promises of the Revolution for themselves. This included feminist activists, who began to organize themselves during these years. Many of them were reacting against a late nineteenth-century traditional feminine ideal, according to which women’s lives centered on the home and the church, and remained separate from the male spheres of political and intellectual activity. Encouragement for women’s political participation first arose among opponents of the Díaz regime. Some Díaz opponents supported expanded education for women and emancipation from the yoke of tradition, particularly as part of a larger effort to attack the power of the Catholic Church. During the Revolution, the Constitutionalists, led by Venustiano Carranza, likewise saw feminists as a potential ally against the Church. None of these revolutionary factions were particularly interested in equality or advancing women’s rights. But they did offer feminists a new political language of constitutionalism and representative government to advance their cause. In the mid- to late 1910s, activist women began to co-opt revolutionary ideals of womanhood to argue for greater individual freedoms, greater access to education, and greater dignification of women’s influence within the family.34
This revolutionary feminism emerged first in the Yucatán, in eastern Mexico. The same month that Jane Addams addressed the Women’s Auxiliary Conference in Washington, a very different group of women assembled in Mérida, the Yucatecan capital. In January 1916 the governor of the state, Salvador Alvarado, called two feminist congresses to raise consciousness of women’s subordination among Yucatecans and to empower working- and middle-class women to advance their own interests.35 Yucatán had become a kind of laboratory for testing radical social ideas during the Revolution, thanks in part to Alvarado himself. Venustiano Carranza had appointed him governor in 1915, but his ideas concerning women’s issues were more radical than those of most of his party. Alvarado believed all women should receive a solid education, encouraged them to participate in civic life, promoted literacy, and even changed the civil code to allow unmarried women to work outside the home. But the empowerment of women Alvarado sought had its limits; he wanted to elevate women’s status in order for Mexico to be seen as a modern nation, but he still believed that a woman’s most important role was that of a wife.36
The congresses revealed a range of views among Mexican women, but the majority demanded greater access to education and liberation from the “yoke of tradition,” even though most did not go so far as to reject marriage and motherhood.37 Not surprisingly, since the majority of the delegates were teachers, the resolutions of the first congress in January stressed schooling and teaching as the best ways to liberate women and make their contributions to the family and to society more valuable. A few women did express more radical views. Hermila Galindo, a leading Mexican feminist and personal secretary to President Carranza, drew nationwide attention to the congress when she advocated for birth control and access to divorce. Galindo did not actually attend, but in a paper read by a colleague she argued that the new approach to women’s education should include instruction on anatomy and hygiene, since women’s sex drive was just as strong as men’s and they needed to be educated about their own bodies. She also argued forcefully against the sexual double standard, and demanded women’s right to divorce.38 Taken together, these opinions were interpreted by many in the audience, not to mention the press, as promoting free love and sexual equality for women.39 In fact, most of the delegates were more moderate; they supported Alvarado’s plan for expanding women’s education, and instead of the right to divorce, they demanded that Alvarado reform the civil code to allow single women to leave home at age twenty-one, as men were allowed to do.40 Although the focus of feminist activity shifted to Mexico City shortly after Alvarado left office in 1918, these early conferences in the Yucatán marked the first organized feminist activity in Mexico and influenced later feminist conferences in the 1920s.
New feminist leaders emerged from the Yucatán congresses, some of whom would have significant interactions with U.S. women internationalists over the next decade. One of the more radical was Elena Torres Cuéllar. Torres was a schoolteacher from Guanajuato who traveled to Yucatán to attend the congresses. She was a friend of Hermila Galindo, and read Galindo’s paper at the first congress. Enamored with the feminist and revolutionary environment of the region, Torres stayed on in Mérida after the conference. Alvarado, impressed with Torres’s motivation and background in education, put her in charge of opening a Montessori school. Torres also became an active participant in the Yucatán Socialist Party.41 In 1918 she helped organize the Latin American Bureau of the Third International, which aimed to foster solidarity between Russian and Mexican workers.42 In 1918 or 1919, she moved to Mexico City, where she cofounded the Consejo Feminista Mexicano (Mexican Feminist Council, CFM) in August 1919.
Like Galindo, Torres was frustrated by the limitations of revolutionary rhetoric for women. She saw herself not as a “useful political instrument” for Mexico’s modernization, but as an equal citizen.43 Dedicated to the economic, social, and political emancipation of women, Torres’s group became over the next few years the most important feminist organization in Mexico, and the focal point of most interactions between U.S. and Mexican women internationalists. Its goals ranged from equal pay for equal work to civic improvements such as neighborhood inspections and children’s parks to political rights and reform of the civil code. The CFM demanded enforcement of the laws protecting women workers that were spelled out in the 1917 Constitution, including overtime pay, safe working conditions, and maternity leave. It claimed equal political rights for women, including the right to vote in local and national elections and the right to run for and hold public office.44 The CFM platform was not quite as radical as Torres’s personal beliefs; there was no mention of birth control or divorce, for instance. But the group’s demands did reflect Torres’s concern with women as workers, demanding the establishment of wages “considering woman as head of a family,” and mechanisms for establishing workplace safety and sanitation.
The Consejo Feminista drew strength and legitimacy from revolutionary rhetoric, even as its members pushed back against its limits and sought international connections to bolster their standing. The group’s platform reflected the revolutionary atmosphere in which it was created, incorporating “effective realization of the rights of citizenship granted by the present Constitution and its [enlargement]” and “equal political rights for men and women.”45 Central to Elena Torres’s mission was to “aid in the reconstruction of our country.”46 But there was also a clear internationalist cast to the CFM agenda. The group’s call to Mexican women included a demand for cooperation “with women around the world to abolish war, end militarism, and ensure the rights of weaker peoples to live in peace, harmony, and perfect liberty.”47 Torres was eager to establish contacts with international women’s organizations, to “promote a feminine entente-cordiale among the women of the whole world in order to bring about permanent peace and international amity.”48 Although it is difficult to pin down the origins of the CFM’s internationalist impulses, it is possible they grew from members’ understanding that the Yucatán congresses had drawn interest from U.S. and European women, and thus that Mexican women’s struggle for emancipation could attract international support. It is also possible that Elena Torres’s involvement with the Third International influenced her global thinking as she and her colleagues drew up their platform.
Mexican feminism was thus bound up with the Revolution in important
