Women played a significant but, until recently, largely overlooked role in the complex and destructive civil war known as the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920. A number of women trained and educated in the vocational and normal schools and molded by the incipient feminist movement of the Porfirian era actively sought involvement in the struggle during its various phases. A much larger number of women of the rural and urban lower classes found themselves caught up in the struggle and had no choice but to become actively involved, especially in the military aspects of the Revolution. Still others, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, and including women of every class, were among the victims and casualties of that conflict. Lastly, women of primarily but not exclusively middle and upperclass origins who strongly identified with the Catholic Church became active and bitter enemies of the decidedly anti-clerical leadership of the Revolution.
removes luster from the reputation of the Conde de Revillagigedo but refurbishes the standing of the frequently maligned Marques de Branciforte, Felix Berenguer de Marquina, and Jose de Iturrigaray. These books contain substantial advances in knowledge about the military in the two viceroyalties studied, but further work remains to be done. Lyle N. McAlister argued over two decades ago that examining the military's privileges in the late colonial period helped to explain the roots of the later emergence of praetorian government in Mexico. Archer and Campbell, in contrast, reveal implicitly that the military qua military was of surprisingly little importance in late colonial society. The question that McAlister posed, in other words, remains unanswered by these studies and awaits further investigation. It might prove useful, moreover, to examine the military in Spain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Considering the political prominence of military leaders in nineteenth-century Spain, more extensive knowledge about the social background of officers, recruitment patterns, and military expenditures would perhaps yield even more insight into the military in the colonies and its emergence as a preeminent political power.
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