The organizing committee of the II Conference on Gender and Women in Mexican History continues its preparation for the forthcoming meeting to be held in Guadalajara in 2003. Until now, the two keynote speakers will be Joan Scott, Institute for Advanced Studies, and Mary Kay Vaughan, University of Maryland at College Park. Their important contribution to the field of gender history and their presence in this meeting will definitively promote and strengthen the ties among an international community of scholars dedicated to research about women's experiences and gender issues in Mexico.

MEXICAN AND MEXICANIST SCHOLARS AT THE TWELFTH BERKSHIRE CONFERENCE ON THE HISTORY OF WOMEN, JUNE 7, 2002

.In the panel on "The Organization and Creation of the Welfare State in Mexico, 1930-1958" Sarah Buck, Nikki Sanders, and Jolie Olcott presented three papers dealing with different aspects of official and "complementary" welfare-state construction in Mexico-Mother's Day conmmemorations, party politics, and social work. Sarah Buck in her paper entitled "Mother's Day, the State and Feminist Action: Maternalist Welfafe Initiatives in the 1940s Mexico" shows that social assistance projects under the Manuel Avila Camacho were organized around a gendered and "idealistic vision of modernizing industrial development". By focusing on how teachers, social workers, and feminists pressured the Mexican state to advance a welfare agenda oriented around such women as recipients of social assistance, Buck argues that the Mexican women activists and professionals paradoxically promoted an image of traditional maternal domesticity and dependence on state-dispensed benefits to secure political rights, including suffrage, by the middle of the 1940s. She concludes that the Mexican state benefited from the private agendas of women's groups while retaining its patriarchal authority. Nikki Sanders presented the paper entitled "Social Welfare, the State, and Mexico's Civilizing Mission" examined the professionalization of social work as an acceptable career for women in Mexico in the 1930s. She argues that social work in Mexico focused on social transformation, challenging "traditional" notions of charity and philanthropy. Mexican social workers maintained that it only through scientific and modern casework methods that poverty could be combated and the poor transformed into "modern" workers and citizens. Many social workers in the 1930s had been trained in the U.S. Sanders argues that social workers combined several schools of U.S. social work thought to create a vision of social reform that was particular to Mexico. This paper also examined the creation of professional social work programs in Mexico City during the 1930s. Jolie Olcott's paper "The Necessary and Immediate Task: The Popular Front and Mexican Welfare Policy" focuses on the rise of the Popular Front modernism and the consolidation of the Mexican women's movement to sketch out a gendered political history of Mexico's national welfare state, with particular attention to the intersection between party politics and women's activism. The Mexican welfare state became an arena of contestation within a multi-layered and noticeably gendered process of state formation. Examining this process reveals both the efforts of competing political factions to define and lay claim to legitimate revolutionary nationalism as well as efforts by women to have a hand in shaping public policy. Women activists within the Popular Front-era Communist Party pointed to the "necessary and immediate task" of not only promoting welfare programs but also - and perhaps more urgently - finding ways to incorporate women as political actors supportive of the postrevolutionary regime rather than "tools of the reaction." Finally, Katherine Bliss commented that these three papers significantly advance our understanding of the gendered nature of post-revolutionary politics because they highlight the ways in which non-governmental groups, including social workers, feminists, women affiliated with political parties and other associations, worked to shape the Mexico's mid-20th century welfare agenda.In the panel on "Gender and Secularization in the 1920s: A Comparative View From Britain, the U.S., and Mexico", María Teresa Fernández-Aceves argued in her paper entitled "Virgins or Revolutionaries: Female Representations During the Church-State Conflict in Revolutionary Guadalajara, Mexico, 1910s-1920s" that for the first time in the 20th century, the Mexican Revolution of 1910, the Catholic movement, the rise of the Church-state conflict, the process of state formation, changes in the labor force, and the incipient feminist movements opened the path for women to mobilize massively. With their active political mobilization, Catholic and non-Catholic women chose to control their visual identity going beyond the Church and revolutionary state stereotypes. Their representations and political participation challenged the typical gender roles assigned by the Mexican revolutionary state (which promoted a bourgeois and apolitical position for women), as well as the Catholic Church (which encouraged women to follow the sedate image of the Virgin Mary). The performance of their own representation showed the deep complexities of the cultural processes that women experienced. Catholic women appropriated a classic imaginary, while non-Catholic women created a relatively new imaginary product of the nineteenth-century liberal and anarcho-syndicalist ideas. Nonetheless, both women used their bodies as powerful instruments to display the meaning of their own representations and how they wanted to be seen and perceived. She concluded that women-Catholic and non-Catholic-created complex representations that tended to opposed the Church and state stereotypes. Their public representation helped them to spread and push for their public presence and demands. In the process, they transformed the public sphere and expanded roles for women within society and politics.