Developing the Sex to Save the Nation: Women’s Civism, Catholic Integralism, and Conservative Protest in 1970s Mexico

Speaking at the I National Women’s Civic Congress in December 1973, the president of the newly-formed National Women’s Civic Association (ANCIFEM), Amparo Noriega Martínez, proclaimed that the “civic awakening of the woman” was the only salvation for a morally tormented and divided Mexico. The Congress initiated a women’s civic movement that impelled organized Catholic laywomen to the forefront of national politics. Over the next two decades, ANCIFEM forged an expansive network of activists, rallying women in central and northern Mexico behind calls for direct civic and political participation and the moral renewal of public life. The movement, which provided critical support for the National Action Party (PAN), constitutes a missing chapter in the history of Mexican conservatism, democratization, and economic transformation.

This paper explores the genesis of ANCIFEM and the women’s civic movement during the presidency of Luis Echeverría Álvarez (1970-76). It examines how middle- and upper-class, conservative Catholic women mobilized to oppose the administration’s secular reproductive politics and courting of women’s liberation activists, imploring women to forge a ‘new civic culture’ to defend feminine ideals. Heralding the ‘integral development’ of Mexico, movement organizers blended an defense of traditional gender and sexual relations with calls for political modernization through the creation of ‘intermediate’ civic associations. By casting state power as corruptive not only of the economy but of the values underpinning civic culture and family life, right-wing women linked political and economic opening in Mexico, subsuming unpopular market ideas within a democratic vision that appealed to broader sectors of society.