Devouring Frida. Margaret A. Lindauer
paradigmatic husband/father, center of both family and society, with a wife/mother who provided all of his domestic needs, including a throng of children submissive to his paternal direction, comprised an analogy for a society that submitted to a paternalistic national government.28 Repressive gender restrictions were not prime factors contributing to the rebellions that comprised the Mexican Revolution. But women’s participation on battlefields and in political arenas marked a significant departure from Porfirian-era gender mores for the middle class. Female soldaderas fought violent, bloody battles and championed political causes to end economic, physical, and cultural exploitation, thereby blatantly disregarding prerevolutionary gendered codes that presumed women’s absence from active political combat. Thus the postrevolutionary reinscription of the bourgeois family as a hallmark of a stable society sharply contrasts the liberation from the strict gender dichotomy that the revolution precipitated.
Domestic roles were promoted, in part, by mythologizing women’s motivations for appearing on the revolution’s battlefields. After 1920, accounts of the revolution celebrated women as loyal companions and helpers rather than fierce fighters. Maria Antometa Rascon argues that “bureaucrats who write up the history of women’s participation in social movements . . . [emphasize] their subordinate condition, their sacrifices, their self-denial and the support they provide for their husbands’ struggles.”29 Fictional narratives such as Rivera’s 1928 “Distributing Arms” panel of the Insurrection Ballad of the Proletarian Revolution mural at the Ministry of Public Education (figure 3) diminish the active heroic significance of the soldaderas by casting women in passive or subordinate roles. Rivera’s mural panel anachronistically portrays Kahlo (who was three years old when the revolution began) distributing arms to revolutionary soldiers. Rivera’s painting places Kahlo within a political arena; however, it is an agenda that is engendered. Rivera portrayed Kahlo in a secondary capacity, not actively orchestrating or participating in violent fighting, but equipping men with weapons. As Jean Franco argues, historical and fictional narratives that reduce women’s revolutionary activities to the domestic ones of giving birth and rearing a family on the battlefields simultaneously herald men as aggressive redeemers. Postrevolutionary discourse associated masculine “virility with social transformation.”30
The image placed here in the print version has been intentionally omitted
Figure 3. Insurrection Ballad of the Proletarian Revolution, “Distributing Arms.” Mural by Diego Rivera, 1928. Ministry of Education. Reproduction authorized by the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Litteratura.
Rivera’s mural represents one way in which gender dichotomy was promoted—women’s roles were depicted as those which serve men’s. Another way that gender distinctions were articulated was through symbolic demonstration of the consequences that “overzealous” women faced when they adopted masculine behavior. Franco argues that the “broken family, the cult of violence, and the independent ‘masculinized’ woman” were primary subjects in postrevolutionary films; and typical narratives focused on the transformation of wayward subjects “into a new holy family in which women accede voluntarily to their own subordination not to a biological father but to a paternal state.”31 The family was the ideological site where the passive-female/active-male distinction was entrenched, with the stereotypic Mexican wife/mother not only ancillary to the absolute authority of the husband/father but also to the nation. Within these narratives, male and female roles in relation to family and nation were constructed to appear remarkably stable and unaffected by political upheaval before, during, and after the revolution. The only fluctuation was the family’s environment, from home, to battlefield, and back home again, with women faithfully accompanying their husbands in their public duty. Thus the distinction of social roles according to gender lines was formulated as an overriding constant component of early-twentieth-century Mexican society. On the feminine side of the boundary between domestic (feminine) and public (masculine) roles, caretaking responsibilities were configured not merely as a feminine function but a social duty, and motherhood amounted to much more than personal or biological fulfillment. Indeed, despite women’s political and military involvement in the revolution, the 1917 Constitution did not grant them the right to vote, on the pretext that their contributions to revolutionary causes were not an indication of political aspirations. One report to the Constituent of Congress claims that “Mexican women have traditionally concentrated their activities on the home and the family. Women have no political consciousness and do not feel the need to participate in public life, as is shown by the absence of any collective movement to attain this end.”32
Kahlo produced Henry Ford Hospital amid this mythology, which is echoed in assumptions that Kahlo was devastated by her lack of children. Interpretations inscribing postrevolutionary symbolism of the family project an overwhelming despair onto Kahlo, thereby demonstrating the tenacity of the family mythology. As Tomás Almaguer argues, the “Mexican family remains a bastion of patriarchal privilege for men and a major impediment to women’s autonomy outside the world of the home.”33 With the hospital bed and miscarriage depicted in an open, outdoor space, Henry Ford Hospital exaggerates the correlation between private incident and public discourse. When the painting was first exhibited, its title was The Lost Desire. Though rarely discussed as an aspect of the painting, the “lost desire” to which the former title refers implicitly has been assumed to refer to Kahlo’s longing for children. However, another association with a “lost desire” is the less-often-invoked charge that Kahlo lacked maternal longing. This is a more serious accusation in that the artist rejects social prescriptions for enacting mythic stereotypes relating national, paternal desire to a gendered, social hierarchy. Suspicion about Kahlo’s “desire” is implied in accounts of the miscarriage in which she is held responsible for the baby’s death. Ella Wolfe suggested that Kahlo could have carried a child to term if only she had obeyed the doctor’s instructions to stay in bed for six months.34 And Richmond explains: “Having finally decided to try to rest and keep the baby, Frida’s behavior seemed designed to sabotage her deepest wish. Diego had come around to the idea of a child. He tried to … persuade Frida to have complete bed rest. She took driving lessons instead.”35 Thus, with a husband who had “come around” and was urging Kahlo to restrict her behavior appropriately, she alone is blamed for their lack of children and held culpable for the aborted family. Kahlo’s miscarriage connotes both a personal tragedy and a public loss that could have been prevented. Symbolically Rivera is cast as if he accepted his individual responsibility to build a stable postrevolutionary society through the propagation of children. Kahlo accordingly is cast as a traitor who recklessly put her individual whims before her social responsibility. No matter how much she may have wished for a child (as alleged), her actions sabotage the postrevolutionary social directive.
In Herrera’s analysis of Henry Ford Hospital, Kahlo suffers the consequences of her socially subversive behavior. Herrera notes the juxtaposition of the hospital bed and the Ford factory in the background and explains, “the world outside … functions cleanly and efficiently; Frida on the other hand is a wreck.”36 With the assertion that Kahlo depicted herself as physically and emotionally disabled, Herrera implies that Kahlo recognized her own culpability. Furthermore, she suggests that the distance between Kahlo’s bed and the factory, where Rivera worked on sketches for his Detroit murals, is an analogy for the distance between his commitment and her lack of commitment to social prescription delineated according to gender dichotomy. Herrera explains that one reason Kahlo weeps in the painting is because Rivera has abandoned her in order to return to his work, and his absence is exacerbated by the barrenness of her womb, tangible evidence of her selfish irresponsibility.
Ironically, while strict social codes are embedded in the recollections of Kahlo’s miscarriage and interpretations of the paintings, the relevance of broader social contexts tacitly is negated when writers insist that Kahlo focused exclusively on illustrating her emotional responses to personal tragedies. Kettenmann attributes the artist’s painting style and compositional elements to Kahlo’s purported intention to illustrate her private life:
Although the … [objects] are rendered in accurate detail, true-life realism is avoided in the composition as a whole. Objects