| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Caribbean and Latin America

Katherine Elaine Bliss. Compromised Positions: Prositution, Public Health, and Gender Politics in Revolutionary Mexico City. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. 2001. Pp. xv, 243. $45.00.

On the eve of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, social hygienist Dr. Luis Lara y Pardo shocked readers when he estimated that between fifteen and thirty percent of the Mexico City's young adult female population were active in the sex trade. His book, La prostitución en México (1908), claimed that a majority of these women were part of a generation of poor, largely uneducated rural migrants who had come to the capital and crowded into a variety of working-class neighborhoods. Faced with the dismal prospect of working as domestic servants, laundresses, seamstresses, factory workers, or at some other low-paying job that did not provide a living wage, Lara y Pardo determined that those who sold themselves on the street often did so to supplement their otherwise meager income. As Katherine Elaine Bliss explains in her excellent study of gender politics and sex commerce in revolutionary Mexico City, Lara y Pardo unfortunately showed little sympathy for his subjects. Embracing the prevailing scientific and moral discourse that classified prostitutes as degenerate, he tended to ignore aspects of their personal lives that might have served as reasons for entering la vida. Instead, Lara y Pardo as well as the social reformers who would follow him after the revolution (with a few notable exceptions) viewed these working-class women as "worthless except as prostitutes to the greater male public" (p. 37). . . .

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