Discipline and Violence Against Women in the 19th Century Press. Comparative Divergence Between Mexico and Spain

Abstract

This article presents a comparative analysis of the ways women, and their behaviour were represented in the print media in Mexico and Spain at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. The study distinguishes between the press specifically addressed at women, the press based on accounts of crimes, and that written by women about their own circumstances. The analysis uncovers, first, an unyielding regulation of the spaces women were obliged to occupy, through descriptions of their domestic and maternal activities; second, punishment of women’s dissidence by generating criminalising stereotypes or belying the atrocity of the violence against them; and third, writings by women calling for public recognition of their new tasks and demanding education.