Susie S. Porter - Böcker

2019 Thomas McGann Award for best publication in Latin American StudiesIn late nineteenth-century Mexico a woman’s presence in the home was a marker of middle-class identity. However, as economic conditions declined during the Mexican Revolution and jobs traditionally held by women disappeared, a growing number of women began to look for work outside the domestic sphere. As these “angels of the home” began to take office jobs, middle-class identity became more porous.To understand how office workers shaped middle-class identities in Mexico, From Angel to Office Worker examines the material conditions of women’s work and analyzes how women themselves reconfigured public debates over their employment. At the heart of the women’s movement was a labor movement led by secretaries and office workers whose demands included respect for seniority, equal pay for equal work, and resources to support working mothers, both married and unmarried. Office workers also developed a critique of gender inequality and sexual exploitation both within and outside the workplace. From Angel to Office Worker is a major contribution to modern Mexican history as historians begin to ask new questions about the relationships between labor, politics, and the cultural and public spheres.

2019 Thomas McGann Award for best publication in Latin American StudiesIn late nineteenth-century Mexico a woman’s presence in the home was a marker of middle-class identity. However, as economic conditions declined during the Mexican Revolution and jobs traditionally held by women disappeared, a growing number of women began to look for work outside the domestic sphere. As these “angels of the home” began to take office jobs, middle-class identity became more porous.To understand how office workers shaped middle-class identities in Mexico, From Angel to Office Worker examines the material conditions of women’s work and analyzes how women themselves reconfigured public debates over their employment. At the heart of the women’s movement was a labor movement led by secretaries and office workers whose demands included respect for seniority, equal pay for equal work, and resources to support working mothers, both married and unmarried. Office workers also developed a critique of gender inequality and sexual exploitation both within and outside the workplace. From Angel to Office Worker is a major contribution to modern Mexican history as historians begin to ask new questions about the relationships between labor, politics, and the cultural and public spheres.

In Señorita Telefonista Susie S. Porter recounts the dynamic role of telephone operators in labor organizing in early twentieth-century Mexico City, taking us from switchboards to union halls and into the streets as working women fought for better wages and against sexual discrimination and harassment. The telephone operators' struggles reveal how bodily autonomy is historically contingent and constructed through the lived experiences of class. When and where were working-class identities available to women who wanted to make demands as workers? How did middle-class conceptions of respectability, sexual and otherwise, limit the space for working women to speak against male authority and to denounce assaults on their bodily autonomy? Porter charts the shifts in the ways women could (or could not) speak out against discrimination related to gender, marital status, and pregnancy.Señorita Telefonista examines the emergence of the idea that women were maladapted to the workplace and charts Mexican women's fight to claim their rights as workers. As languages of class circulated and identities were made and unmade––by management, organized labor, working men, and working women themselves––women's support for organized labor hung in the balance.