Advocating Suffrage and Sovereignty
Chapter 1 traces the increasing involvement of Dominican women in national politics through the 1920s and 1930s from the U.S. Occupation to the first decade of the Trujillo regime. During this period, Dominican women used the Pan-American arena to press for changes at the local level and they employed the rhetoric of egalitarian rule to assert their place in the theatre of democracy that Trujillo had begun to act out locally for the international stage. By proving themselves as skilled, networked, and non-threatening agents, the women active prior to and during the first decade of the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo made themselves central to a carefully orchestrated national and international reputation, garnered concrete political gains like suffrage, and allowed for their continued engagement with the politics of the Dominican state through an intense period of transition.