Bringing It Back Home: Perspectives on Gender and Family History in Modern Mexico

Lately, study of the family as a special set of historical questions has fallen out of fashion in modern Latin American history. Yet in increasing numbers, gender historians are examining courtship and sexual behavior, marital conflict, reproductive health, women's domestic labor, institutions that intersect with families, like education, medicine, and welfare, and political deployment of family‐based ideologies. Has gender history replaced family history? This essay argues that it has not, but explores some of the ways that gender history has changed not only what we know about past families but also what we ask. Examining recent studies of the working classes in late‐nineteenth‐ and early‐twentieth‐century Mexico, the era punctuated by the revolution of 1910–1917, this essay finds that scholarly assessments of the impact on the gender order of the economic and political restructuring that preceded and followed that upheaval have expanded the frame of how we think about families while at the same time affirmed the centrality of family in the dynamics of social and ideological change.