Freethinkers and Labor Leaders : Women, Social Change, and Politics in Modern Mexico

The interpretation of the revisionist historiography of the Mexican Revolution (1910-17) has focused primarily on revolutionary leaders who were men, pushing the heroines of the war to the sidelines.If women happened to be mentioned, they appeared only as symbols, not as social agents.However, the role of the Adelitas, the Cristeras, the Hijas del Anáhuac, and the women of the Ácrata Group were essential to the revolution.In Freethinkers and Labor Leaders María Teresa Fernández Aceves tells the stories of five militant feminist women who aided in the creation of a modern culture in revolutionary and postrevolutionary Mexico and, in some ways, Latin America as a whole: Belén de Sárraga Hernández (1872-1950), Atala Apodaca Anaya (1884-1977), María Arcelia Díaz (1896-1939), María Guadalupe Martínez Villanueva (1906-2002), and María Guadalupe Urzúa Flores (1912-2004). These five women formed part of two cultural generations that participated together in the Mexican Revolution, in the conso