Mexican Revolution and teacher training for women in San Luis Potosí

Abstract

The Mexican Government had the purpose of training teachers of primary school since the legislation of 1849. But the social and political conditions of the country before and during the Mexican Revolution restrained the access of young women to the Normal School. With the first revolutionary governments, the two Normal Schools that existed in San Luis Potosí, one for men and another for women, were united in one school. But the curriculum was differentiated by gender, and the selection of students and their permanence in the Normal School was determined also by gendered values. In this context some women students expressed their ideas about equality in education, and the first revolutionary government started to promote women’s education by launching a curricular reform. Besides that, some women students demanded equality in their access to the knowledge, and they managed to study Political Economy, a course that only men studied at that moment, and some women students participated also in the strikes of 1930 and 1931.