page_title: Women in Mexico
section_title: Women intellectuals, journalists, and writers
hierarchical_section_title: Women in Mexico / Women in the Professions / Women intellectuals, journalists, and writers
caption_attribution_description: Español: La escritora mexicana Elena Poniatowska en la Feria Internacional del Libro de Miami, 2014
context_page_description: The status of women in Mexico has changed significantly over time. Until the twentieth century, Mexico was an overwhelmingly rural country, with rural women's status defined within the context of the family and local community. With urbanization beginning in the sixteenth century, following the Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire, cities have provided economic and social opportunities not possible within rural villages. Roman Catholicism in Mexico has shaped societal attitudes about women's social role, emphasizing the role of women as nurturers of the family, with the Virgin Mary as a model. Marianismo has been an ideal, with women's role as being within the family under the authority of men. In the twentieth century, Mexican women made great strides towards a more equal legal and social status. In 1953 women in Mexico were granted the right to vote in national elections.
  Urban women in Mexico worked in factories, the earliest being the tobacco factories set up in major Mexican cities as part of the lucrative tobacco monopoly. Women ran a variety of enterprises in the colonial era, with the widows of elite businessmen continuing to run the family business.
context_section_description: Eulalia Guzmán participated in the Mexican Revolution and then taught in a rural primary school and was the first woman archeologist in Mexico. Her identification of human bones as those of Aztec emperor Cuauhtémoc brought her to public attention. Rosario Castellanos was a distinguished twentieth-century feminist novelist, poet, and author of other works, a number of which have been translated to English. At the time of her death at 49, she was Mexican ambassador to Israel. Novelist Laura Esquivel (Like Water for Chocolate) has served in the Mexican Chamber of Deputies for the Morena Party. Other women writers have distinguished themselves nationally and internationally in the modern era, including Anita Brenner, and Guadalupe Loaeza. The most famous woman writer and intellectual was seventeenth-century nun, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. "Today, Sor Juana stands as a national icon of Mexican identity, and her image appears on Mexican currency. She came to new prominence in the late 20th century with the rise of feminism and women's writing, ... credited as the first published feminist of the New World." A number of women have become distinguished intellectuals in modern Mexico, especially Elena Poniatowska, whose reportage on the Tlatelolco Massacre of 1968 and the 1995 Mexico City earthquake have been important. Historian Virginia Guedea has specialized in the history of independence-era Mexico.
  Many Mexican journalists have been murdered since the 1980s, including a number of Mexican women. In 1986, Norma Alicia Moreno Figueroa was the first woman journalist identified as a murder victim of the Mexican drug war. Broadcast crime reporter Dolores Guadalupe García Escamilla was murdered in 2005. Yolanda Figueroa was murdered in the drug war, along with her journalist husband, Fernando Balderas Sánchez, and children in 1996.  In 2009, Michoacan journalist María Esther Aguilar Cansimbe disappeared.  Former TV journalist at Televisa, María Isabella Cordero was murdered in Chihuahua in 2010.  In Veracruz in 2011, crime reporter Yolanda Ordaz de la Cruz was killed. Marisol Macías was murdered in Nuevo Laredo by the Los Zetas in 2011.
caption: Princess of Poland Elena Poniatowska, journalist and essayist
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