Homes and workshops: Urban workers in the Mexican Porfiriato 1876-1910

Abstract

By analyzing the specific ways in which urban women were integrated into the process of economic growth in Porfirian Mexico, we are deepening in knowledge about the specific effects of mechanization in the productive process and economic change in women's lives. I have chosen three key activities to exemplify these processes: the factory production of fabrics, the tobacco sector and prostitution in the most urbanized area of the country, Mexico City. The first two activities experienced mechanical and organizational changes that affected women. Prostitution, the oldest trade in the world, was also modified. Lives and the activities of women were modified in the factory, in the workshop and in the home. The gender perspective helps us to illuminate the lives of women as economic actors and to understand their own economic changes as processes differentiated by gender.