Work of the Soldaderas

Soldadera with her clients - likely part of Lucio Blanco's forces, ca. 1914

A woman helping a wounded person in Mexico City, 1913

Soldaderas fell into two categories: attached and unattached. The former group comprised the majority; these women followed their husbands to war or had a stable relationship with individual men with whom they would live and for whom they would cook and do laundry.[1] Unattached camp followers performed similar work but for much less money and thus led more difficult lives than soldaderas contracted to a single man.[2]

Soldadera scholar Elizabeth Salas has compared the function of soldaderas to a “semiofficial quartermaster corps.”[3] They were primarily responsible for finding and cooking food for the soldiers—a task which occasionally involved extreme foraging tactics. Andrés Reséndez Fuentes cites one American consul who witnessed Tomais Urbina leading Villistas into Durango in 1913; while the men pillaged the town, "the women vultures were particularly voracious and could be seen fighting and clawing their way through the entrance of every store, from which they issued a few minutes later literally bowed down by the weight of their booty.”[4] Soldaderas would also take food, water, and ammunition to soldiers during battle; according to one Villista, Capt. Francisco Macías, the women would use their husband’s weapon while he ate.[5]

Soldaderas also helped treat sick and injured soldiers after a battle. One soldadera, María Villasana López, recalled that she and her fellow “nurses” often “were half naked from making bandages with their clothes.”[6] Fuentes notes that soldaderas would treat an injured soldier whenever they came upon him in the battlefield, then take him to a hospital or to camp in an ox cart.[7]

Their status as women in a society which progressively gendered war a masculine space also allowed soldaderas to successfully smuggle arms from the U.S. into Mexico. Women wore belts under their dresses in order to smuggle ammunition rounds, and they brought rifles and machine guns into Mexico as well.[8]