| Summary: | The Mexican Catholic Feminine Youth (JCFM) is one of the many Catholic lay organizations which were set up against the anticlerical politics of the revolutionary Mexican State in the 1920's and 1930's. Founded in 1926, at the very beginning of the Cristero counterrevolution (1926-1929), the JCFM successfully mobilized and organized during more than a decade ten of thousands of young girls and women from age 15 to 35, based on the parochial nucleus, covering a large part of the national territory. Aside with the defence of the Catholic Church, which status was not officially recognized by the state, the JCFM intended to participate in the rebuilding of a politically and ideologically divided country. Hence the JCFM took a stance for the education of women and children, as the state reformers did. But unlike their revolutionary counterparts, the JCFM promoted a Christian model of society, which the Catholic Church as a whole thought was threatened by the revolutionary politics, in particular the ones led by revolutionary national caudillos like Plutarco Elías Calles and Lázaro Cárdenas. Notwithstanding its conservative background, the JCFM allowed a generation of young women to commit themselves in the public space and create a citizenship as Mexican and Catholic women.
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