These remarkable women who left the safety and comforts of Victorian society and traveled to the southwestern United States, were intrepid, restless and inquisitive, educated women, whose lives were transformed in the first decades of the twentieth century by the people of the southwestern United States. United. As part of a circle of influential women, these women created a new home territory, a new society and a new identity for them and for the women who would follow them.
The American West presented opportunities for some 19th-century Anglo-American women to cultivate a stronger sense of authority by positioning their domestic work as part of the construction of the nation. White middle-class reformist women interested in promoting the assimilation of Native Americans, for example, worked to define the well-maintained single-family home and women at its center, as a key marker of civilization. His power widely recognized as a moral guardian. They tried to "civilize" the western tribes in the second half of the nineteenth century.
Women and men founded schools for children and established churches with monetary and land donations. In towns and cities working-class women and seamstresses worked. At the beginning of the 20th century, the first woman established a store.
In the first decade of the twentieth century, more women emigrated from Mexico to Texas. In 1900, 15 percent of Mexican immigrant women in South Texas earned salaries outside the home. They also washed, sewed and kept guests. In Houston they worked in textiles. Women and girls worked in the fields. In the years prior to World War II, there were few Mexican-American teachers; After 1910, Praxedis Torres Mata was the first Mexican-American public school teacher in Uvalde. In education, segregation provided limited education and prevented mobility. At the beginning of the 20th century, radical women joined the Mexican Liberal Party as organizers and journalists. During the Mexican Revolution, they founded Cruz Blanca, an organization similar to the Red Cross. Instances of marked activism on the part of Mexican American women include the laundry strike in El Paso in 1919. Women of Mexican origin worked in urban industries, particularly after 1930.
Farm workers have fought for baths and against sexual harassment.
Mexican-American women advanced electoral politics in the 1950s.
In 1992, a Political Action Committee of Mexican American Women was formed to help increase the political power of the group.
