Biography of a Hacienda: Work and Revolution in Rural Mexico by Elizabeth Terese Newman (review)
Less apparent perhaps to the uninitiated reader is Wright-Rios’s thoughtful and always accessible engagement with the complex theoretical literature on gender and representation. Despite its egalitarian rhetoric, nineteenth-century liberalism was often harder on women than the intensely patriarchal Church, which at least provided symbolic validation (for example, in the Marian devotions) and physical spaces (such as monasteries) for women—provisions that anticlerical liberals sought to undermine. For Catholic ideologues, including the probable author of the first Madre Matiana prophecy, the advent of liberal gender politics, which threatened to relegate women to the “private” sphere of the home, offered an opportunity to appeal to the hearts and minds of concernedMexican women, who they hoped to sway to the conservative cause. According to Wright-Rios this appeal took the shape of an “apocalyptic feminism” that cast Catholic women as both prophetesses of doom a la Madre Matiana and purehearted saviors of the nation, whose piety—modeled on that of the Holy Mother and sanctified by their veneration of the Holy Sacrament—authorized them to intercede on behalf of a benighted Mexican people.