In any discussion about how life is changing for women in Mexico City, one name looms large. Described as “the most famous female artist in history” by Tate Modern, Frida Kahlo’s rise to full international icon occurred a half-century after her death. But her enduring importance to many as a key Mexican feminist is reflected in the floods of women (and men) who continue to visit La Casa Azul, her cobalt blue-walled former home in the city’s Coyoacán district.  On the morning I visit the house (in 1958 it became the Frida Kahlo Museum), I encounter a trio of trainee women teachers from Vancouver, Canada, who are reflecting on Kahlo’s 1932 painting Henry Ford Hospital, which, with trademark candour, portrays the miscarriage Kahlo suffered while in Detroit.  “It seems as if a lot of women wouldn’t talk about it, the issue was very taboo,” says Danielle Logan of the bloodstained self-portrait. “Still to this day, a lot of women feel stigma around miscarriage. Frida is the first person to put it into art, and make a topic like this accessible to a wider group of people.”  “Look at this painting, and how Frida was feeling,” says Danielle’s friend, Emily Nickason. “There is so much stigma attached to these things; it’s really important that she made it art. It says it’s OK that you feel those things too.”  For the women at the museum, Kahlo represents values such as “empowerment”, “freedom”, “independence”, “honesty” and “being true to yourself”. Or, as the director of the museum, Hilda Trujillo, puts it: “Frida did what she wanted. She was brave in a very conservative society. Young women today identify with Frida; they find strength in her, and they identify with that strength.”  With a major feature film based on a best-selling book of her life, a record-breaking $5.6m (£3.7m) sale for a work of Latin American art, and devotees from Madonna to Isabella Rossellini, Kahlohas become a 21st-century cultural icon. Yet at her death in 1954, she was hardly known outside her native Mexico. Her rising importance over the past three decades is perhaps due to fascination with her personal life, and the intimate way in which she documented its challenges as a woman and an artist.  I meet Giselle Peña, whose main reason for coming to Mexico City from San Diego is to visit Kahlo’s former home with her daughter, Mercedes, and son, Xavier. “Although I hope Mexico isn’t as conservative as it used to be, it really still is,” Peña tells me. “I think that women are still taught to serve the man, and to be the pillar in the family – everyone leans on the woman.”  Peña says she particularly wanted to visit Kahlo’s home with her daughter because she had been unable to discuss certain issues with her own mother. “In society, women are taught to be not as outspoken, to take a certain amount of grief in your life because that’s what you are supposed to do. But Frida didn’t.”  For psychology student Myriam Ramos, who works for a progressive Catholic NGO, some ways in which the city has been changing for women are very positive. “There have been improvements in the law like the decriminalisation of abortion in Mexico City,” she says. “Women here still have to go through the stigmas and pressures of their families if they decide to have an abortion, but at least now they have access to safe and clean procedures – whereas the women outside this city still undertake huge risks.”  The actress Maya Zapata agrees: “There have been some changes against certain attitudes towards women here in Mexico City, and hopefully this might influence the rest of the country, as cities can be a catalyst of progress and forward thinking.”  Yet many day-to-day experiences in Mexico City are troubling for both women. “There is a world apart between some wealthy areas of the city and some not so wealthy,” says Ramos. “The other day, I went out with some friends to a high-to-middle-class area of the city. It was a hot day, I was wearing a short dress, and I felt very comfortable – I had no issues all day. But on my way back home on the bus (I live in a not so wealthy area of Mexico City), I immediately started to feel uncomfortable. Two men got on the bus followed by two young girls wearing leggings, and these men were all over them. Then, when the girls got off the bus, the men moved over to me and carried on saying things.  “I remember that I used to take public transport when I was in high school, and it was not a pleasant experience. The buses would be packed and you always ended up being squashed and groped – it was like being abused in public and nobody would say anything, not even other women. Having lived through that, now I don’t want to give up these improvements so I defend them – but I receive lots of verbal abuse by doing so.”  Zapata, too, is conscious that much still needs to change: “My mother, by sheer chance, ended up becoming an actress after working first for the costume department in Televisa. But because she was a woman of a certain class – she is morena, or brown-skinned – she could only work interpreting roles of maids in telenovelas; she wasn’t allowed to do anything else. And that is something that has changed very little: the colour of your skin can still determine the whole of your life. Perhaps there is a little bit more consciousness, but it’s still very much the case nowadays.  “In terms of class, there is a huge sector of the population which isn’t represented at all, and these are the people with little money and of a darker skin colour. As an actress, I have noticed that this type of discrimination intensifies even more when you are a woman; we are sexualised by the system. I’ve sometimes tried to speak out against some of these things, and I’ve been called a ‘feminazi’, ‘feminoid’ – all sorts of names”  Born in 1907 in Coyoacán, Kahlo was a marginalised voice for many reasons: she was a woman, an invalid after polio during childhood left her with a damaged leg, the child of migrant and indigenous ancestry (her mother was a devout Catholic of Spanish-indigenous descent, her father a German-Hungarian immigrant) – and it was from these limitations that she somehow found the freedom to break every rule and be true to herself.  As an 18 year-old student planning to study for a medical degree, Kahlo had an accident that almost killed her. A trolley car collided with a bus in which she was travelling and a metal handrail punctured her abdomen, splintering her pelvis, shattering her spinal column and collarbone, and leaving her already damaged leg broken in 22 places.  Over her lifetime she would face more than 30 operations, and become dependent on medication and alcohol to manage the pain. But perhaps the most devastating effect of the crash was Kahlo’s inability to bear children. The early years of her marriage to the preeminent muralist and painter Diego Rivera were marked by multiple miscarriages, which she documented with an honesty that is astonishing even today.  Rivera described his wife as “the first woman in the history of art to treat, with absolute and uncompromising honesty, one might even say impassive cruelty, those general and specific themes which exclusively affect women”. Perhaps it is because Kahlo’s work peels back the deepest layers of her being, expressing her self-discovery in such a direct and visceral way, that her message appears universal to a modern society that is obsessed with self-disclosure.  “Kahlo must have felt so powerless in her [sick] bed, but in her portraits she had that power,” one of the Canadian trainee teachers tells me. “The power over her self-image, of how the world sees and understands you, it was in her hands.”  For Iris Salazar, an industrial engineer, Kahlo is “an icon for both men and women. She just did what she wanted, she dressed as she wanted, she claimed her heritage in the way she wanted. Her way of living is something we aspire to; to do nothing else except from what you want to do. I don’t know a woman, or man, who wouldn’t like to be a little bit like Frida.”  According to Trujillo: “Frida represents the duality of human nature. She wrote beautifully but swore profusely when she spoke, she is full of contradictions. She’s become a symbol for modern women, as she didn’t respect social conventions, she did what she wanted. She represents the values of a contemporary woman: she is free, independent, and is not overcome by anything.”  If that is true, has the city where she was born and spent most of her life learned from her example? Ramos is dubious: “There has been a very big campaign to sell Mexico, and Mexico City itself, as a great tourist destination. This is the most modern city in Latin America but also the poorest, so it’s all about showing off but not really dealing with its problems. It has brought good changes like equal marriage and women-only sections on public transport – yet I have arguments with men sitting in that section who do not want to move. Some have become verbally abusive but I tell them, ‘sorry, it’s not your section’.  “Men have difficulty thinking of women as equals and to give them their place, especially in the lower economic levels of society like where I live. The rules that exist for women here are very deeply embedded in society, and it’s the families of these women that put pressure on them. Can you imagine Frida’s family putting pressure on her for deciding to live in a separate house to her husband? That’s the change I’m waiting for – a change in the mentality of our society.”  Camilla Brett is an arts and culture consultant based in Mexico City. She directs and produces theatre and has recently founded Prospero Teatro Mexico.  What is your experience of being a woman in Mexico City? How have things changed for women and what still needs to improve? Share your experiences and thoughts in the comments below, on Twitter using #GuardianMexico or by email to mexicocity.week@theguardian.com
Unconventional and free-spirited, the artist is revered as a female role model who took on the taboos of her day. Her home city draws admirers from across the world, but how far has it come on equality?