Gender and Justice in Late Nineteenth-Century Mexico: Exploring Women’s Recourse to the Amparo Suit (1870-1910)

• In Event: Outside In? Plebeian Exclusion and Participation in Dominant States from the Enlightenment to the Era of Positivism

Abstract

The categories private and public point to social divisions that have been central to the structuring of gender in modern Western society. Public has been viewed as a space where citizens deliberate issues of common concern, while private has been conceived of as a familial or a domestic space. The former has been presented as a space where inequalities of status and private matters are “bracketed” and “neutralized,” as if private life were irrelevant to political, social and economic transformation. These parameters have led to the exclusion of women from historical narratives of modern societies. In addition, women’s historical invisibility has entailed a number of significant inequalities between the sexes. If we look at the case of Mexico, women were not incorporated into the national historical understanding, even if they were involved in diverse ways in state formation and nation-building processes. Mexican women in the nineteenth century have been usually portrayed as powerless beings, subordinated to men and confined to their homes. However, in recent years, scholars have showed that Mexican women were far from passive. For instance, some scholars have argued that if women were subject to legal restrictions, there were also some legal provisions that allowed them to limit patriarchal power or circumvent their inferior legal status. Following this new historical interpretation, this paper focuses on women’s recourse in the late nineteenth century to the legal procedure intended to protect individual rights known as Amparo. It pays particular attention to the Porfiriato, considered a period when constitutional rights protections were systematically violated by the political regime. It analyzes the extent to which boundaries between private and public were redefined when women resorted to the Amparo suit. It also examines the way in which claiming justice through the Amparo suit was for women a “struggle to be seen”. This paper claims that by resorting to the Amparo suit, women placed private issues in public through the private idioms of domesticity and motherhood. Hence, in claiming and attaining protection and justice, women contributed to crafting a new meaning of the public, which we study in this paper.

Author

• Frida Osorio, Columbia University