History and Human Rights

The Epilogue demonstrates how the UN Charter’s women’s and human rights promises inspired feminists throughout the Americas, and how the Cold War stifled the movement and largely erased the historical memory of inter-American feminism. Paulina Luisi and Marta Vergara helped organize an inter-American feminist meeting in Guatemala in 1947 that articulated broad meanings of inter-American feminism and global women’s and human rights. However, the Cold War’s pitched battle between communism and capitalism narrowed both “feminism” and “human rights” to mean individual political and civil rights. The Cold War also contributed to historical amnesia about this movement. The epilogue explores how Cold War politics affected each of the six feminists in the book. Each woman sought in different ways to archive the movement and write inter-American feminism into the historical record. The epilogue also provides connections between their movement and the global feminist and human rights movements that emerged in the 1970s through the 90s. It argues that the idea that “women’s rights as human rights” was not invented in the 1990s; rather, it drew on the legacy of early twentieth-century inter-American feminism.

Mobilizing Women’s Rights as Human Rights

This chapter examines how, during the Second World War, Latin American feminists continued to push broad meanings of international women’s rights and human rights in spite of little support from their U.S. counterparts. The women from the U.S. Women’s and Children’s Bureaus who replaced Doris Stevens in the Inter-American Commission of Women avoided promoting women’s “equal rights” because of the fraught Equal Rights Amendment debate in the U.S. Latin American feminists effectively pushed these U.S. counterparts on a number of issues, including toward advocacy for maternity legislation, which Latin American feminists asserted as a human right. The Atlantic Charter and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms, which underscored social and economic rights, inspired Latin American feminists’ broad calls for human rights. Their framings included women’s rights, and greater economic security and multilateral relations in the Americas. These demands came together at the 1945 Chapultepec conference where a number of Latin American feminists in the Inter-American Commission of Women also paved the way for Latin American countries to appoint women to their delegations going to the conference that would create the United Nations.

The Great Feminist Battle of Montevideo

The chapter explores how tensions over Doris Stevens’s leadership exploded at the 1933 Seventh International Conference of American States in Montevideo, where Bertha Lutz launched serious challenges against her. There, Lutz allied with representatives from the U.S. State Department and U.S. Women’s and Children’s Bureaus in the new administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, including Sophonisba Breckinridge, who also opposed Stevens’s leadership of the Commission. The conflict between Stevens’s “equal rights” feminism, focused on political and civil rights, versus an inter-American feminism that also encompassed social and economic justice, became even more pronounced in the wake of the Great Depression, Chaco War, and revolutions throughout Latin America. Feminist debates took center stage in Montevideo. There, Lutz promoted women’s social and economic concerns. But her assumptions of U.S./Brazilian exceptionalism prevented her from effectively allying with growing numbers of Spanish-speaking Latin American feminists who opposed Stevens’s vision. The 1933 conference pushed forward the Commission’s treaties for women’s rights, and four Latin American countries signed the Equal Rights Treaty. It also inspired more behind-the-scenes organizing by various Latin American feminists and statesmen, including the formation of a new group, the Unión de Mujeres Americanas, that would later bear fruit.

The Latin American Contribution to the Constitution of the World

This chapter explains how Latin American feminists pushed women’s rights into the United Nations Charter at the 1945 United Nations Conference on International Organization (UNCIO) in San Francisco. Bertha Lutz and a number of Latin American feminists with whom she collaborated–Minerva Bernardino from the Dominican Republic, Amalia de Castillo Ledón from Mexico, and Isabel Pinto de Vidal from Uruguay–as well as Jessie Street from Australia, were responsible for pushing women’s rights into several parts of the UN Charter and for proposing what became the UN’s Commission on the Status of Women. They did this over the express objections of the U.S. and British female delegates to the conference who believed that women’s rights were too controversial or not important enough to include. These Latin American women also worked alongside representatives from “smaller nations” and from U.S. non-governmental organizations like the NAACP to push “human rights” into the Charter. At the UNCIO, the racism that Lutz experienced from U.S. and British delegates, lack of U.S. and British support, and overweening power of the "Big Four" in the constitution of the United Nations, caused her to turn away from her long-time Anglo-American-philia and identify as a "Latin American."

United Fronts for Women’s Rights and for Human Rights

This chapter illustrates how Latin American popular front feminists seized leadership of the Inter-American Commission of Women at the 1938 Eighth International Conference of American States in Lima and continued to expand the movement. Drawing on the groundwork paved by Ofelia Dom쭧uez Navarro, Clara Gonzoz, Paulina Luisi, Bertha Lutz, and Marta Vergara, who continued organizing in these years, the Unión de Mujeres Americanas, the Confederación Continental de Mujeres por la Paz, and a new force of Mexican poplar front feminists united. They promoted women’s social and economic rights, anti-fascism, anti-racism, and anti-imperialism as interconnected struggles. A leader in this network, the communist feminist Esperanza Balmaceda, who was appointed to the Mexican delegation to the Lima conference, collaborated there with Latin American feminists, the U.S. State Department, and U.S. female reformers in the Roosevelt administration to remove Stevens as chair of the Commission. At the same time, they mobilized a broader defense of what the Lima conference called “derechos humanos.” There and at the Congreso de Democracias in Montevideo, Uruguay, co-organized by Paulina Luisi, feminists asserted the need for a grassroots movement, for women’s rights treaties, and for broad commitments to human rights in the Americas.

The Birth of Popular Front Pan-American Feminism

This chapter charts the rise of Popular Front Pan-American feminism. Starting in the mid-1930s, this movement emphasized women’s social and economic, as well as civil and political rights, and allied with a trasnational popular front movement that promoted workers’ rights and opposed rising global and national fascism. Marta Vergara, a member of the Inter-American Commission of Women and member of the Chilean Communist Party, was critical to this development. Allying with Doris Stevens, she also broadened the Commission’s agenda. As the Commission’s representative at the 1936 regional International Labor Organization conference in Santiago, Chile, and at the 1936 Pan American peace conferences in Buenos Aires, Vergara helped expand the meaning of the Equal Rights Treaty to promote women’s social and economic rights, specifically the right to maternity legislation. Although she worked with Stevens, she also recognized Stevens’s lack of investment in workers’, anti-imperialist, and anti-fascist movements. While in Buenos Aires, Vergara built bridges with other leftist feminists from Argentina who together helped create a new organization embodying Popular Front Pan-American feminism: the Confederación Continental de Mujeres por la Paz. This group would be critical to expanding the relevance and reach of inter-American feminism.

Feminismo americano

The prologue introduces the reader to Pan-American feminism: a movement that promoted women’s rights throughout the Americas over the first half of the twentieth century. It argues that inter-American feminism was at the vanguard of global feminism and international human rights. One of the movement’s signal contributions was its promotion of women’s rights treaties at Pan American and League of Nations conferences. The movement was also defined by its increasingly expansive definition of feminismo americano pioneered by Spanish-speaking Latin American activists, that included women’s political, civil, social, and economic rights; anti-imperialism; anti-fascism; and anti-racism. The movement culminated after the Second World War when, at the 1945 founding of the United Nations, a group of inter-American feminists pushed women’s rights and human rights into the UN Charter. The prologue introduces the six feminists at the heart of this activism: Paulina Luisi (Uruguay), Bertha Lutz (Brazil), Clara Gonzoz (Panama), Ofelia Dom쭧uez Navarro (Cuba), Doris Stevens (the United States), and Marta Vergara (Chile). Their friendships and their conflicts, over language, race, class, nation, empire, and different understandings of “women’s rights” and feminist strategy, were critical to the movement’s dynamics and its greatest accomplishments.

Feminismo práctico

This chapter explores coalitions that Latin American feminists forged in opposition to Doris Stevens. After the 1928 conference, Stevens became the chair of the Inter-American Commission of Women. Many Latin American feminists, including Clara Gonzoz (one of the first appointed to the Commission), Ofelia Dom쭧uez Navarro, and Paulina Luisi, found that Stevens’s commitments to anti-imperialism were thin, and that she ran the Commission unilaterally, excluding Latin American feminists’ countervailing ideas. Stevens controlled the Commission finances, participants, and agenda, which she focused exclusively on the Equal Rights and Equal Nationality treaties. Spanish-speaking feminists in turn forged stronger bonds with each other and promoted their own feminismo prࢴico, defined by solidarity around local struggles, anti-imperialism, and promotion of women’s social and economic rights. Dom쭧uez became a pivotal mouthpiece. Disillusioned with Stevens after the Commission’s 1930 meeting in Havana, Dom쭧uez became infuriated several years later when Stevens criticized her for not promoting women’s suffrage during the Cuban revolution against Machado. Dom쭧uez, who had been imprisoned by this dictatorship, penned a fiery response to Stevens and disseminated their correspondence throughout the region. This insurgency, and the friendships between Dom쭧uez, Gonzoz, Luisi, and others would be the seedbed for a Latin-American-led inter-American feminism.

The Anti-imperialist Origins of International Women’s Rights

This chapter explores how a group of feminists from Central America, the Caribbean, and the U.S. who spoke out against U.S. imperialism, revitalized Pan-American feminism and developed an international treaty for women’s rights. In 1926, at the Inter-American Congress of Women in Panama City, Panamanian Clara Gonzoz and Cuban Ofelia Dom쭧uez Navarro, carried the torch of Paulina Luisi’s Pan-Hispanic feminism. They argued for international women’s rights treaties and spoke out against U.S. empire in the region, including in the Panama Canal. Two years later, at the Sixth International Conference of American States in Havana, Cuba, anti-imperialist feminist solidarity emerged between Cuban feminists (including Dom쭧uez) and women from the U.S. National Woman’s Party who, together, gate-crashed the conference. Led by U.S. feminist Doris Stevens, these women marched in the streets of Havana and achieved a hearing at the conference plenary. At a time when U.S. marines were dive-bombing Nicaragua, feminists’ calls for national sovereignty and women’s sovereignty in an Equal Rights Treaty gained the favor of many Latin American statesmen in Havana. Although the treaty did not pass, their efforts resulted in the creation of the Inter-American Commission of Women which would give organizational form to Pan-American feminism for several decades.

A New Force in the History of the World

This chapter explores the birth of Pan-American feminism through a conflict between Uruguayan Paulina Luisi and Brazilian Bertha Lutz. Both women helped develop a new inter-American movement for women’s political, civil, economic, and social rights, and both drew on ideals of a Latin-American-led Pan-Americanism that followed the First World War. However, Luisi privileged a Pan-Hispanic movement led by Spanish-speaking women that could counter U.S. hegemony, while Lutz upheld the U.S. and Brazil as continental leaders. At the 1922 Pan-American Conference of Women in Baltimore, Maryland, Luisi’s proposal created a new inter-American feminist group, but Lutz and U.S. feminist Carrie Chapman Catt became its leaders. This 1922 conference and the Pan-American Association of Women that emerged from it would be critical to unprecedented resolutions at the 1923 Fifth International Conference of American States for the study and discussion of women’s rights at future diplomatic Pan-American conferences. Yet Lutz and Catt’s organization failed to unite many Latin American feminists because of their own dim views about Spanish-speaking feminists’ capacity to organize. These tensions and their conflicts with Luisi demonstrate how centrally discord around language, race, nation, and empire, shaped the early Pan-American feminist movement.