Margaret Chowning is the Muriel McKevitt Sonne Chair Professor of Latin American History (emerita) at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Wealth and Power in Provincial Mexico from the Late Colony to the Revolution (Stanford, 1999), Rebellious Nuns: The Troubled History of a Mexican Convent (Oxford, 2006), and Catholic Women and Mexican Politics, 1750-1940 (Princeton, 2023). She is working on a book of urban history in Mexico, with special attention to the impact that liberal policies and liberal “values” exerted on gender relations and urban life in the nineteenth century.

Her presentation, “Why Gender History Needs Women’s History (and vice-versa),” is drawn from her experience conceptualizing, researching, and organizing her recent book, Catholic Women and Mexican Politics.