Relationship with Armies

Map of Mexico

As Andrés Reséndez Fuentes notes, although all armies in the Mexican Revolution relied on women’s labor, the roles which women played in supporting them vary from army to army.[1] Armies that primarily utilized cavalry rather than trains for transportation, such as the northern Maderista and Orozquista armies, did not travel with soldaderas because they could not afford to sacrifice their speed for a large group of women and children following them on foot.[2]

Zapatistas, who fought primarily in the south, also did not utilize soldaderas; rather, they relied on women in neighboring towns to perform necessary work for the upkeep of an army.[3] As long as the Zapatistas remained in Morelos, they could access provisions from the women who remained at home. According to a resident of Tepoztlán, village officials would collect tortillas twice a day to be given to Zapatista soldiers from the women of the town, most of whom voluntarily offered the food.[4] However, this relationship did not translate into kinder treatment of female residents of the towns they entered. Quite the opposite, Zapatistas were notorious for raping women; one story in The Mexican Herald reported that over forty women, the entire female population of a town near Jojutla, were carried away by the Zapatistas in 1913.[5] Although a measure of this reputation was likely exaggerated by anti-Zapatistas in Mexico City, women such as Esperanza Martínez, interviewed by sociologist Oscar Lewis, corroborate the stories in their recollections of daily life during the war.[6]

The Federal army already had a strong tradition of using soldaderas as a quartermaster corps; despite Díaz’s efforts to modernize Mexico, the Federal army continued the practice taking women to war decades after most Western countries abolished the tradition.[7] Lacking a formal quartermaster corps, the Federal army represented a valuable career opportunity for many women. Further, the Federal army employed particularly harsh conscription practices in which men were literally taken from the streets by Huerta’s press-gangs; the wives of these men often chose to go along with them rather than be left alone at home.[8]

Carrancistas also used soldaderas, and General Carranza was the most generous leader of all the Revolutionary armies towards soldaderas. He recruited the women into his army and even established a pension fund for his soldiers' "widows," which he diligently enforced among his officers.[9] Carrancistas were also known to “pick up the remnants of the Federal army” that were separated from the soldiers in Mexico City, Puebla, and Veracruz.[10]

Villistas, too, used soldaderas, but Pancho Villa had the most fraught relationship with soldaderas by far out of all the army commanders involved in the Mexican Revolution. Villa saw soldaderas as the main obstacle in his goal to modernize his army and improving their mobility.[11] As Elizabeth Salas notes, “a U.S. newspaper reported that Villa often forced women to leave the trenches and escorted them from the firing lines to places of safety only to find them racing back to the front when he was not looking. He attributed his successful capture of Ciudad Juarez in 1911 to his refusal to allow soldaderas to accompany his soldiers.”[12] Villista’s forces, however, were reluctant to give up their camp followers; one Major in Villa’s army stated that "we had to have soldaderas if we wanted to have soldiers.”[13] Villa’s dislike of soldaderas became excessively violent in 1916 when he captured around ninety Carrancista soldaderas and their children.[14] A gun fired from where the soldaderas stood hit Villa’s sombrero, and when the women refused to name the shooter, Villa ordered his men to shoot them.[15] According to Cleofas Calleros, a contemporary historian, Villa trampled the dead bodies with his horse afterwards.[16]