Sex and class

Working-class morality is shaped by material conditions. Review: Sex and Love in Porfirian Mexico City, Michael Matthews, by Gavin O'Toole

Sex and Love in Porfirian Mexico City: A Social History of Working-Class Courtship, Michael Matthews, 2025, University Press of Florida

Marxism has been prudishly estranged from the study of sexuality, yielding to an emphasis in critical thought since the 1960s upon gendered aspects of identity and the dissolution of class in dominant rights-based liberal critiques of oppression.

Yet Marxist ideas continue to have relevance as an analytical basis for understanding how sexuality is socially constructed, even if this is most likely to be found in the “cultural turn” towards ideology, culture and hegemony within, for example, the writing of Gramsci.

However, this debate has been shaped since the “sexual revolution” by the search for Marxism’s theoretical significance to a contemporary politics of sexuality—seeking emancipation and an intellectual underpinning for gender diversity. It has not, in general, been applied as an historical lens to socio-sexual behaviours in the capitalist past.

Contemporary debate has been dominated overwhelmingly by feminisms—hence the consideration of such themes as patriarchy and masculinity—which have been seen as providing the strongest explanatory framework for sexual oppression compared to a mostly 19^th-century critique based upon class and capitalism.

In short, the differences between analytical approaches reflect how we understand the social production of categories—either in material, deterministic terms, deriving from the relations of production; or discursively, deriving from structures of power and how these shape moral, legal, and cultural narratives.

Michael Matthews offers an empirical way to undertake a materialist analysis of sexual attitudes in an historical period, with a groundbreaking study focusing on a critical moment in the development of modern capitalism in Mexico.

Moreover, his smart focus—the late Porfiriato—has identified and made use of concrete evidence of the mechanisms shaping social relations, in this case the legal system, and how material determinants of class shaped attitudes towards sex.

It is refreshing to learn from Sex and Love in Porfirian Mexico City how the sexual outlook of the lower classes during this period was so recognisably “modern”.

Matthews finds hard evidence for surprisingly open attitudes towards sexual relationships before or outside marriage that belie ideas about a strictly Catholic and patriarchal society.

One reason for this is that the perspectives of the lower classes were shaped far more by the material influences upon their position in social relations, unlike the middle and upper classes who established models for behaviour that were more symbolic and aimed at the control of those beneath them seen as essential for the maintenance of capitalism.

Matthews writes of lower-class attitudes: “While these values, beliefs, and behaviors at times could be ambiguous and demonstrate individuals’ ambivalence about matters of honor and shame, the urban poor nevertheless often showed little concern about female chastity and sexual history while exhibiting more freedom in choosing paramours and partners based on their own needs and desires.”

It is an important observation because it challenges scholarly assumptions that would have us believe bourgeois sexual morality “filtered down” to plebeian society, especially such notions as virginity being a prerequisite for marriage.

In reality, the material conditions endured by the lower classes in urban Mexico in this period made their adherence to bourgeois sexual values impractical—if not impossible.

Matthew’s work is also important because it coincides in its conclusions with similar scholarship on urban Brazil in roughly the same period. It reinforces an argument of Anthony Giddens about how a weakening of family control over women’s sexuality and an evolving female sexual liberation represent important social changes that help to define modern life.

This is further proof that critical analysis of this theme may remain trapped in the headlights of the sexual revolution of 1960s America, which bizarrely continues to shape attitudes today. In fact, what we regard as “modern” sexual norms may not be so modern after all.

As Matthews notes, many works on this subject have neglected historical antecedents of what happened in the mid-20^th century, especially the role played by the sexual freedoms practised by the turn-of-the-century working classes.

He recreates the sexual lives of Porfirian Mexico City’s lower classes through an examination of criminal cases of rapto, the abduction of young women from parental authority, and estupro, the initiation of sexual relations with young women. He does so by examining the records of 234 cases to explore the sensibilities of residents in and around the Mexican capital about courtship, love, and sex.

The resulting picture challenges long-held assumptions about aggressively masculine behaviour—machismo—and female sexual subordination, offering a more complex view of diverse mores, beliefs, and behaviours when it came to sexuality.

The Porfiriato, which lasted from 1876 to 1911, is an ideal case study because the dictatorship ushered in an era of rapid capitalist modernisation after a long period of chaos and stagnation.

The transformation of Mexico spurred economic development driven by foreign investment that not only allowed the government to undertake large infrastructure projects but to establish a new form of state that nurtured the ambition to restructure all aspects of society.

It was as much a revolution in values as it was in physical signs of progress, one that promoted social transformation to curb the perceived lasciviousness and moral weaknesses of the poor. From the schoolhouse, to prisons, to the workplace new forms of discipline and surveillance began to shape Mexicans into new citizens reflecting a new morality.

Accordingly, as Matthews shows, we see a dramatic increase in the regulation of and intervention by state agents in the sexual peccadillos of the common people in an effort to link the morality of the working class to the dictatorship’s civilising mission.

Ultimately, this is a book about class relations and the incursion of the nascent capitalist state into the lives of workers. As Matthews notes, sexuality is inseparable from the distribution of power and privilege and legal judgments about sexual behaviour “expose and determine who wields power, who deserves it, and who is denied it”.

Yet what these interventions laid bare in court was that Porfirian Mexico City’s working class had a surprisingly freer and more liberated sexual life than their repressed bourgeois peers.

The author writes: “While it would be too bold to claim that they rejected elite values related to sexuality, their words and actions reveal a culture of courtship, romance, and sex that could be ambivalent toward a wide range of norms such as honor, shame, marriage, love, and female chastity.”

Using the archival record, Matthews demonstrates that the nature of amorous encounters was shaped by the conditions of economic precarity and the daily struggle for survival in which the working classes lived.

He examines social lives in the context of the material conditions and disciplining mechanisms that emerged as a result of state formation and capitalist development.

Modernisation reshaped workers’ lives and the social conditions that structured the practise of courtship, romance, and sex which, in turn, reshaped value systems related to honour, virginity, and morality.

As export-led development linked Mexico to the demands of global capitalist development, driving internal migration, urbanisation and industrialisation, workers became a source of cheap labour enduring social conditions characterised by the familiar phenomena of overcrowded housing, financial insecurity, unsanitary conditions and high crime rates.

At the same time, the regime’s modernising ambition shaped policies that aimed to discipline and monitor the lower classes in order to ensure the reproduction of a reliable workforce that would sustain capitalist development in an increasingly competitive global order.

Matthews writes: “Government officials, social reformers, police forces, and public health workers increasingly interfered in the private lives of the poor to instill a middle-class morality understood as the bedrock of civilization. Rather than confront the lower class’s existing economic conditions, reformers explained their unhealthy environment and poverty as rooted in immorality.”

Nonetheless, despite increasing attempts by Mexico’s bourgeois leaders to reshape productive and reproductive practices through moral reformism in policy areas such as sanitation, prostitution, vice and public safety, workers often contested or resisted state efforts.

Matthews writes: “The nineteenth century offers valuable counterpoints that challenge conclusions about the role played by the middle and upper classes in liberalizing sexual norms. It was the working class, for example, whose everyday practice under oppressive material conditions challenged the normative sexual values championed by the elite, a phenomenon not lost on policymakers who sought to curb, if not extinguish, the perceived lasciviousness and immorality of the poor.”

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