Values under seige in Mexico: strategies for sheltering traditional values from change.

PIP: The adverse economic conditions of inflation and falling oil prices over the late 1970s and 1980s in Mexico forced many middle-class married women out of the home and into the workplace in order to help the family maintain its socioeconomic standing. Although this phenomenon ran directly against the traditional Mexican cultural construction of gender and family, many Uruapan middle-class couples had no alternative and rationalized the change by concealing, reinterpreting, or not directly challenging traditional values. Sections discuss the dilemma of middle-class families, Mexican middle-class adaptation to wives' employment, strategies for existing change in values, and the open acceptance of changed values. The author's comments and conclusions are based largely upon interviews with 16 married women of the period. It is concluded that even though the middle class resists them, changes have taken place over the past 20 years in the acceptance of married women in the workplace, the sharing of domestic work, fertility control, and equality between spouses in family decision making. It remains to be seen, however, whether these women will stop working and return to their formerly exclusive roles of wives and mothers if and when economic conditions improve in Mexico.^ieng