In postrevolutionary Mexico, one of the most significant social expectations of married women was to bear children, and women were understood to carry an intense yearning to procreate and nurture. Kahlo’s creative production is characterized accordingly as a sentimental illustration inspired by the intense psychological agony of not bearing children. For example, Erika Billeter explains that only after Kahlo survived a life-threatening miscarriage did she “find the mode of expression that typifies her thematic pictures.”17 Billeter asserts that in 1932, when Kahlo “lost a baby for the second time,” she realized that “although she can conceive a child, she cannot bear one to the full term. It is as if this realization and the suffering she experienced opened her eyes to a new picture of the world, as if it moved something within her that led to her own vision of pictorial representation. Her suffering created her iconography, and it is tied to her for all time.”18 According to Billeter’s assertion, Kahlo’s paintings tautologically are inspired by the personal events that they document, and they are stereotypically feminine because of their direct relation to the artist’s emotions. Thus Kahlo’s entire creative process is considered to be radically distinct from Rivera’s stereotypically masculine endeavor to create “history” paintings inspired by social and political events. But, contrary to Billeter’s implications, both artists incorporated references to the political context in which they worked. While Kahlo’s paintings do indeed include overt allusions to personal circumstances, they are, as Schaefer argues, “inextricably linked to their historical and social contexts [and] they grow out of a total history, not autonomously in isolation from it.”19 In short, Kahlo’s private life was experienced and understood within wider social contexts that are inscribed alongside personal references in Kahlo’s paintings. Re-viewing her work while making a conscientious effort to discern references and resistances to social codes involves considering Kahlo’s biography but goes beyond an exclusive focus on personal circumstances.
As writers purport that Kahlo’s numerous miscarriages provoked an unfulfilled desire that plagued her throughout her adult life, they interpret the 1932 self-portrait Henry Ford Hospital (figure 2), produced after recovering from a life-threatening miscarriage, as an illustration of Kahlo’s anguish. For example, Herrera explains that Kahlo depicted herself surrounded by “symbols of maternal failure” representing her “knowledge that she would never be able to bear a child.”20 But other authors, though acknowledging Kahlo’s inability to bear children, have questioned the intensity of Kahlo’s maternal desire. She elected to have a surgical abortion in 1930 after Dr. Jesus Marín concluded that the injuries she sustained in the 1925 bus-trolley collision made her physically unable to bear children.21 In 1932, when she was pregnant for the second time, Kahlo wrote to Dr. Leo Eloesser, expressing concern over her physical debility and asking his advice.
The image placed here in the print version has been intentionally omitted
Figure 2. Henry Ford Hospital, 1932. Oil on metal, 12¼″ × 15½″. © Banco de México, Av. 5 de Mayo No. 2, Col. Centro, 06059, México, D.F. 1998. Reproduction authorized by the Banco de México and by the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura.
Given my health, I thought it would be better to have an abortion. I told [Dr. Pratt] and he gave me quinine and a very strong castor oil for a purge. The day after I took this, I had a very slight [case] of bleeding, almost nothing. I’ve had some blood during five or six days, but very little. In any event, I thought I had aborted and I went to see Dr. Pratt again. He examined me and told me that he is completely sure that I did not abort and that it would be much better to keep the child instead of causing an abortion through surgery. [He said] that in spite of my body’s bad shape, I could have a child through a Cesarean section without great difficulties even considering the small fracture of the pelvis, spine, etc. etc.… I am willing to do what is most advisable for my health; that’s what Diego also thinks. Do you think it would be more dangerous to have an abortion than to have a child?22
After reviewing her physical condition and recounting Pratt’s prognosis, Kahlo’s letter implores Eloesser to consider the practical circumstances:
Here [in Detroit] I don’t have any relatives who could help me out during and after my pregnancy, and no matter how much poor Diego wants [to help me] he cannot, since he has all that work and a thousand more things. So I could not count on him at all. The only thing I could do in that case would be to go back to Mexico in August or September and have it there.
I do not think Diego would be very interested in having a child since what he’s most concerned with is his work and he is more than right. Children would come in third or fourth place. I don’t know if it would be good for me to have a child since Diego is constantly travelling and in no way would I want to leave him by himself and stay behind in Mexico. That would only bring problems and hassles for us both, don’t you think? But if you really share Dr. Pratt’s opinion that it would be much better for my health not to have an abortion and to have the child all these difficulties can be overlooked in one way or another.23
Although Kahlo’s letter rationally relays various considerations, conspicuously missing from it is an indication of intense desire to have children. Zamora accordingly suggests that Kahlo “was not obsessed by frustrated maternity,” adding that it was, however, “an idea she encouraged.”24 And Sarah Lowe explains why Kahlo would have encouraged it: “in the context of Mexican social codes … having a child, indeed … motherhood itself, not only was an indispensable aspect of femininity but virtually defined womanhood.”25
Thus the presumption that Kahlo desperately wanted children, implicit in Herrera’s analysis of Henry Ford Hospital, corresponds to a social, symbolic significance of motherhood in Mexico. Motherhood was entangled in Mexico’s postrevolutionary concern for social stabilization. During the ten years of revolution, 1910 to 1920, Mexico was economically, socially, and politically chaotic. The country saw ten different presidents, most of whom began their tenure after a violent overthrow of the previous administration. The 1920 election of Álvaro Obregón brought relative calm and an administration intent on constructing national unity and economic equilibrium despite competing ideological forces.26 But even during Obregón’s presidential administration, conflicting reconstruction strategies invited ideological and political competition. Much of the industrial infrastructure had to be repaired or rebuilt. There were demands for land and labor reform that would more broadly distribute ownership and profit. Extensive illiteracy, lack of mass communication systems, and a nascent education program complicated the goal of integrating the country’s diverse urban and rural populations into an informed democratic citizenry. Stabilization was a long, arduous process, and the problems that Obregón faced in 1920 plagued presidential administrations through the 1930s.
In the midst of chaos and instability, the mythically steadfast family became a pervasive symbol for stabilizing the country. In the mythic family, the ideal woman excelled in the domestic sphere, nurturing the family, while the paradigmatic man attended to public affairs.27 Ironically, the gendered stereotypes of husband and wife reinscribed European mores fervently promoted during Porfirio Diaz’s 1876 to 1910 presidency, against which revolutionary factions united in rebellion. Although the rhetoric of postrevolutionary nationalism spurned the Profirian era’s embrace of European values and material culture, it also