Soldaderas, Space, and Memory - Home

Welcome to my Omeka site about soldaderas, space, and memory! I, Kimbra Shaner, created this website as part of a capstone class for my undergraduate history degree at Butler University. 

The soldaderas of the Mexican Revolution—both female soldiers and camp followers who performed such duties as cooking, cleaning, nursing, spying, smuggling, fighting, and sex work for virtually all army factions involved—challenged and permeated the boundaries or borders of the highly gendered, militarized space of warfare. In performing this work, they created a space of resistance or "heterotopia" and challenged the ascribed notions of “acceptable” work and spaces that women could perform and occupy. These acts of resistance, however, were then attacked by the revisionist work of contemporary depictions of soldaderas that sought to portray these women not as a relatively large group that helped revolutionary armies continue to function, but as soldiers’ love interests who were few and far between.

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