This book reinvigorates the debate on the Mexican Revolution, exploring what this pivotal event meant to women. The contributors offer a fresh look at women's participation in their homes and workplaces and through politics and community activism. Drawing on a variety of perspectives, the volume illuminates the ways women variously accepted, contested, used, and manipulated the revolutionary project. Recovering narratives that have been virtually written out of the historical record, this book brings us a rich and complex array of women's experiences in the revolutionary and post-revolutionary era in Mexico.

Soto (Chicano studies, Cal. State U., Northridge) examines women's participation in the Mexican Revolution (1910-1940) and the Mexican women's rights movement during the same period. Paper edition (unseen), $16.95. Published by Arden Press, PO Box 418, Denver CO 80201. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

On November 20, 1910, Mexicans initiated the world?s first popular social revolution. The unbalanced progress of the previous regime triggered violence and mobilized individuals from all classes to demand social and economic justice. In the process they shaped modern Mexico at a cost of two million lives.

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The photographs of Las Soldaderas and Elena Poniatowska’s remarkable commentary rescue the women of the Mexican Revolution from the dust and oblivion of history. These are the Adelitas and Valentinas celebrated in famous corridos mexicanos, but whose destiny was much more profound and tragic than the idealistic words of ballads. The photographs remind Poniatowska of the trail of women warriors that begins with the Spanish conquest and continues to Mexico’s violent revolution. These women are valiant, furious, loyal, maternal, and hardworking; they wear a mask that is part immaculate virgin, part mother and wife, and part savage warrior; and they are joined together in the cruel hymn of blood and death from which they built their own history of the Revolution. The photographs are culled from the vast Casasola Collection in the Fototeca Nacional of the National Institute of Anthropology and History in Pachuca, Hidalgo, Mexico.