Gender, Religion, and Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Mexico

FAIN: FA-51574-05

Pamela Voekel
University of Georgia (Athens, GA 30602-0001)

Heretofore, historians of Mexico’s mid-nineteenth-century Liberals have concluded that the movement’s program of church-state separation and constitutional democracy amounted to an unambiguous secularization drive. But far from seeking to remove religion from Mexican national life, Liberal intellectuals were instead consumed with refashioning the Catholic Church from within, with paring down its hierarchy and simplifying its liturgy without eliminating its central mysteries. This project will investigate both who supported the Liberals' religious agenda and why so many women opposed the Liberals and defended the traditional Church.