In Mexico’s presidential election last year, many progressives were seduced into voting for Vicente Fox, candidate of the right-wing National Action Party (PAN). When the votes were counted, it was clear that Fox’s margin of victory was provided by votes that ordinarily would have gone to the left. It was more important, the thinking went, to remove the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) from the executive branch than to keep the Mexican right out of power. The result has not been kind to women.
Now that Fox is president, the task for women will be to ensure that their hard-won rights not be swept away with the PRI. Scarcely a month after the elections, for example, the PAN-dominated state legislature of Guanajuato (Fox’s home state) tried to change the laws governing abortion by banning a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy caused by rape. The effort sparked a national outcry, including strong protests from many who had earlier supported the “useful” vote for Fox, and the proposal was eventually vetoed by the state’s governor. Mexico’s pro-choice sympathies were so evident that a liberal reaction followed. In the Federal District legislature, the progressive Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) garnered support from PRI representatives and reformed Mexico City’s laws to allow legal abortion for fetal impairment and risk to the woman’s health. The PRI made the same changes in the state of Morelos.
These were not lone incidents; rather, they are a sign of what is to come. It will be hard to carry out democratic change when the party in power is the PAN, whose positions on gender issues represent a chilling reversal of many of the advances made by women in recent years. On the first day of the new panista government we watched Fox take communion and receive a crucifix. Newly appointed Secretary of Labor Carlos Abascal is also a devout Catholic whose first gaffe in the new administration was to invoke the blessing of the Virgin of Guadalupe as “patron of all the workers,” a move that was roundly criticized as disrespectful to all non-Catholic workers.
Incidents like these augur a future where religion and politics mix in dangerous ways, and where the Church and its activist arms—Opus Dei, Legions of Christ and PRO-VIDA, for example—attempt to erase the line between church and state. Nowadays, respect for sexual and reproductive rights is the arena of greatest conflict between state and society in Mexico. But as the conflict plays out and religious obstacles remain, many women workers have become pragmatic in their reproductive behavior. They use contraceptives. And they have illegal abortions.
In Mexico, as elsewhere, sexual and reproductive rights, while occupying minimal space in the national debate over democracy, allow women to achieve self-determination, and are thus intimately linked to the meaning of modern citizenship. Previous Mexican governments have accepted the legitimacy of sexual and reproductive rights by reformulating and articulating them as “reproductive health.” But reproductive health is not yet respected in Mexico—not through currrent legislation and not through the UN-sponsored international agreements.
In Mexico, for example, women still bear the responsibility of caring for the family, as well as creating and raising the country’s next generation. At the same time they are increasingly entering the job market. So while the domestic sphere—responsibility for family life—continues to be almost exclusively the domain of women, those same women now make up about 32% of the wage-labor force.[1] This double duty becomes increasingly problematic amid the ever-sharpening contradictions between motherhood and earning a living. Public policy is still designed as though women did not work outside the home. It still reflects the traditional pattern of the father as husband-“breadwinner” and the mother as housewife. As a result, Mexico suffers from a brutal scarcity of child-care centers and from concomitant contradictions, such as the mismatch between children’s school hours and adults’ work shifts, so that mothers must leave their jobs in mid-morning to pick up the children and drop them off at the home of a relative or friend. Along with this dilemma comes another paradox: the firing of workers who become pregnant and cannot get legal abortions. The outlawing of elective abortion thus becomes, in addition to an indicator of women’s lack of real autonomy, an expression of their subjugation as female workers.
And because of profound gender inequalities, a salaried job does not assure a woman’s independence. Nearly half of all women workers earn less than the official minimum wage (just over $3 dollars a day), compared to one-fifth of male workers, and women’s representation in management and executive positions is minimal. Only a few women, those with educational resources and professional training, are in a decent position to join the work force, and they tend to pay other women to do their housework and care for their children. At the same time, although paid domestic work continues to be an important source of employment for many women, especially those from rural areas and from the poorest sections of the cities, declining middle-class incomes throughout the 1990s have led to a reduction in the number of available house-cleaning and child-care jobs. In 1970, domestic workers made up the largest group represented in the statistics of women’s annual economic activity, but since the early 1990s, office workers have become the biggest cohort of women workers.
The characteristics of women with paying jobs have also changed. In the 1970s a much higher proportion of working women were young and single; now, many older women are also working, as are wives and mothers of small children who need wages for family survival or to maintain their standard of living. In addition, more and more women are becoming heads of households. They, too, are working.
Yet traditional wage discrimination spans the job spectrum, as do engrained attitudes that criticize and blame women who need salaries. Working outside the home has been shown to have positive social and psychological effects on poor women, but the high cultural value placed on motherhood negatively affects those who work for wages. Since femininity is defined by maternity, it comes as no surprise that women, if they can afford it, tend to leave their jobs when they marry and give birth. And the scarcity of child-care centers and the incompatibility of school and job schedules create obstacles that are dealt with only by hiring a domestic worker, or by having yet another woman—a sister, mother or grandmother—help with the kids.
Migration from rural to urban areas continues, but patterns have changed. While some rural women still take the traditional path to domestic work in the cities, many others establish themselves in the most developed and productive rural areas of Mexico, or they cross the border to the United States. Still others transform themselves into industrial workers by finding jobs in maquiladoras—the transnational plants that assemble imported inputs into products for export. The maquiladoras, at first located mainly on Mexico’s U.S. border, currently extend to the central and southern regions of the country, where they have become a principal source of jobs for women.
In large cities, women can now find low-wage manufacturing jobs and can also start their own survival-level “microbusinesses,” selling small items, typically food, in markets or on the street. In the cities young women can escape traditional provincial life and the constant vigilance of patriarchal families and neighbors. Thus, young rural women are increasingly migrating as their elders stay behind to tend to the family plot of land and care for their grandchildren. The economic independence they gain from salaried work and the contrasts between the constrictions of their previous lives and the relative liberty of their new ones, have profound—if ambiguous—impacts on their daily lives and values.
Women’s appreciation of this newfound freedom partly explains the paradox of their apparent satisfaction with poorly paid jobs and undesirable working conditions—conditions frequently exacerbated by serious health risks and the absence of a supportive surrounding community. Deadly violence, for instance, has become a chilling aspect of the maquiladora scene in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. To date since the early 1990s, some 200 young women—virtually all of them poor—have been brutally killed in a city that had few female homicides a decade ago. The murders, compounded by the local government’s failure to seriously investigate the crimes, have become symbols of the trivialization of the lives of poor working women.
Amid all these risks, most women workers find it very difficult to improve their situation. Notwithstanding Mexico’s political, industrial and technological development, the concept of womanhood is still structured around extremely patriarchal concepts that are strongly influenced by the Catholic Church. Mexican culture venerates motherhood and celebrates traditional feminine qualities—submissiveness, beauty, domesticity—while it belittles and disapproves of women’s independence, education and work as a means of achieving autonomy and self-esteem.
In most parts of the country women’s sexuality remains directly tied to procreation; virginity continues to be highly valued; the sexual double standard is ubiquitous and childbirth is considered women’s destiny. Even so, the only consistent public policy aimed toward women in the last 25 years has been family planning, and this has reduced the national fertility rate by half in only one generation. Indeed, one of the most important changes to occur in recent years—one that now may be threatened—has been women’s relatively increased control over their own fertility.[2]
Yet violations of women’s reproductive rights are frequent. In 1996, the Women’s Health Network of Mexico City organized a Hearing for the Defense of Reproductive Rights.[3] Staging such an event would be nothing new in many countries, but in Mexico it was noteworthy for several reasons. It was the first time that reproductive rights had been publicly demanded by ordinary citizens, it brought to public attention the connection between reproductive rights internationally and in Mexico, and it exposed the imbalance between current Mexican legislation and working women’s new realities and needs.
Sixteen women—some speaking in person and some recorded on videotape—voiced their complaints. Among the complaints were reports of sterilization and the application of birth control (mainly intrauterine devices) without the women’s consent. Women also described injuries, illness and permanent damage to their reproductive systems caused by the poor quality of health services, inadequate medical attention, lack of information and, in some instances, physician negligence. Other women complained about companies firing pregnant women without cause and neglecting women who needed medical care—in many cases urgently—at work.
Although maquiladoras vigorously push contraceptives on their women workers, the control they exercise to make sure these same workers are not pregnant is often humiliating. In several factories, women must show their sanitary napkins on the days of their period. In addition, pregnant women are not hired, and if a worker becomes pregnant once employed, the work contract that must be renewed every two or three months makes it easy to dismiss her. Many businessmen, declaring themselves “Catholic,” denounce legal abortion while at the same time refusing to hire or keep pregnant workers.
Despite its interest in lowering the country’s birth rate, the Mexican government has taken no steps to relax the laws that define abortion as a punishable offense. The penal codes of all 31 states and the Federal District criminalize abortion. There is only one nation-wide exception: when the pregnancy is the result of rape. In 29 states, abortion is permitted when a woman miscarries due to an accident and in 28 states when her life is endangered. In 11 states abortion is permitted in the case of fetal impairment and in another eight when the woman’s health is at risk. Meanwhile, the anti-abortion laws have created high costs for women’s lives and health, especially hospital expenses for the care of back-alley abortion victims. Estimates of the number of women who abort annually run from 220,000 to 850,000.[4] Deaths caused by illegal abortions are the third most common cause of maternal mortality. Thousands of public hospital beds are occupied by patients suffering complications from unsafe abortions.
According to nationwide Gallup polls, over 75% of Mexicans believe that the decision whether or not to abort should be made only by the pregnant woman herself, or by her and the man who shares responsibility for the pregnancy. Even so, social pressure has not been enough to overcome Church opposition. Although the pro-choice struggle has been supported by renowned intellectuals, scientists and artists, Mexican politicians are reluctant to take up positions that are stigmatized by hegemonic Catholic ideology. No political party dares confront the enormous power of the Church by supporting the demand to legalize abortion. And now, with a president who is openly close to the Catholic Church, people who support choice in private are afraid to do so publicly.
Meanwhile, women are overrepresented among the poor, are most affected by the reproductive process, and as a group have little political influence. Women’s lack of power is reflected in persistent economic inequality, the lack of decent job opportunities, the risks of illegal abortion and widespread, devastating sexual violence. As they become aware of these injustices, women are taking the idea of democracy beyond that of a representational political system, and instead are demanding “democracia en el país y en la casa”—democracy in the nation and in the home.[5] Accepting reproduction as a broad economic issue forces society to see itself in a new light, in which the productive and reproductive economies are interrelated. This implies a recognition that poverty is about lack of power and that it has a strong gender component.
Among young women in the northern maquiladoras there has been significant cultural progress, due in large part to the influence of “American” values, especially the feminist discourse on women’s rights popularized with the image—whether it is admired or reviled—of the “liberated” woman. That image has entered the popular imagination so thoroughly that young workers use the expression “matrimonio americano”—American marriage—for a relationship in which a woman works for wages and her male partner takes charge of housework and childcare.
At the dawn of the twenty-first century, then, new forms of women’s labor have changed some cultural patterns, generating new forms of family life, neighborhood sociability, workers’ consciousness and political identity. But the change that women workers perhaps need most is the acquisition of basic political skills, because in order to fight gender inequality, they must first and foremost integrate themselves into the country’s political dynamics. Secondly, they must demand that national laws and international agreements be enforced, for despite having ratified international conventions mandating the elimination of discrimination against women, the Mexican government continues to suppress sexual and reproductive rights.
Entering the new millenium, it has become clear that unity does not exist naturally among women—it must be built politically, and women workers must develop better organized political structures that cut across institutional lines. A cross-union feminist alliance, for example, could incorporate gender perspectives into its political platform, raise awareness of gender issues and influence labor policy.
The state is supposed to be the sphere in which public life is realized. The more democratic the state, the more it actually represents society, attempts to lessen economic inequality and respects social and cultural diversity. The new Fox government needs to realize that “gender perspective” is more than a slogan to mollify the World Bank.[6] For the state to have a gender perspective it must have an understanding of the sexist conditions that sully relations between women and men. The goal of a gender perspective is to offer women the same possibilities that men have to reconcile work and reproduction. A first step in realizing this goal is to return to women the control of their bodies.
Today, the confrontation between progressive and conservative forces has made a cultural battleground of women’s bodies. It is therefore crucial to start from a broadly understood “reproductive health” concept, one that takes into account poverty, the environment and gender—gender understood not as “sex” but as culture. As the women’s movement fully accepts the idea of diversity and comes to understand that a gender perspective in machista society is by nature radical, it will have to mobilize to ensure that sexual difference no longer justifies inequality. In a country where women’s independence is considered totally unfeminine and often immoral, feminism will play a key—and imperative—role in the struggle for workplace democracy.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Marta Lamas is an anthropologist in the Gender Studies Program at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). She is director of the journal, Debate Feminista, and of the Information Group for Reproductive Choice (GIRE), an NGO based in Mexico City. Translated from the Spanish by NACLA.
NOTES
1. The figures vary depending on the source. This percentage is from the 1995 National Population and Housing Document of the National Institute of Statistics and Geographical Information (INEGI).
2. The official program of “family planning” was started by President Luis Echeverría in 1974.
3. This took place at the Antigua Escuela de Medicina on May 28, the International Day of Action on Women’s Health.
4. The first figure comes from CONAPO, the National Council on Population; the second one from Dr. Raúl López García, medical subdirector of the National Institute of Perinatology.
5. The slogan, “Democracy in the nation and in the home,” was first used by the Chilean feminists.
6. In his inaugural address on December 1, 2000, Fox said his administration would have a “gender perspective.”
