Katherine M. Marino. Feminism for the Americas: The Making of an International Human Rights Movement. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. 368 pp. $34.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4696-4970-2.
Reviewed by Patricia Harms (Brandon University)
Published on H-Diplo (November, 2019)
Commissioned by Seth Offenbach (Bronx Community College, The City University of New York)
At the 1995 United Nations Beijing Conference for Women, Hilary Rodham Clinton announced that “women’s rights are human rights and human rights are women’s rights” (p. 235). This pivotal statement was both celebrated and contested for its global implications, perceived to be a significant turning point in the women’s movement. However, as Katherine Marino’s new work, Feminism for the Americas, convincingly demonstrates, the idea of women’s rights as human rights has long been a part of feminist discourse thanks to a group of pan-American women whose activism during the first half of the twentieth century led to its integration into the 1945 UN Charter of Human Rights. Just how this comprehensive sociopolitical feminist agenda came to exist is the story within this exciting new book, which effectively relocates the leadership of the pan-American feminist movement from the Northern Hemisphere to Latin America, fundamentally disrupting current scholarship on the subject.
Both the time period and the set of actors on whom Marino has chosen to focus indicate a departure from previous studies on feminism within the Americas. The time frame for this study falls between World War I and the signing of the United Nations Charter of Human Rights in 1945, a historical period which is critical in helping to reframe traditional understandings of the hemispheric feminist movement. Scholarship has emphasized feminist activism leading up to the achievement of suffrage in the global North early in the twentieth century and then leaps ahead to events following the 1975 World Conference of Women in Mexico City, reflecting the assumption that feminist activity dwindled in the aftermath of the achievement of suffrage for some women. This is of course not true for many feminists and especially so in Latin America where in the years following World War I, feminist activism flourished. To this point, of the six individuals that feature most prominently within this book, five are from Spanish- or Portuguese-speaking countries. The core of Marino’s story revolves around the work of Uruguayan Paulina Luisi, Bertha Lutz from Brazil, Clara González from Panama, Cuban Ofelia Domínguez Navarro, Chile’s Marta Vergara, and Doris Stevens from the United States. While each of these actors is well known within their regions, their relationships with one another and the networks they developed have not been well explored. As each activist emerges at conferences and on the public stage, Marino carefully details their personal background and political context, enriching our understanding of each woman’s influence on hemispheric feminist ideas and their intellectual development. As Marino exposes their passionate advocacy and agonizing decisions over political strategy, these women spring to life. In so doing, Marino shifts our academic gaze from the presumption of northern feminist leadership to the political, economic, and social reform ideals that emerged from Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking America. Although the author covers a great deal of economic and political context, these six individuals remain at the center of the story, demonstrating their full agency and influence and essentially reversing the traditional academic directional emphasis from a north-to-south axis to a south-north trajectory.
The book is organized into eight chapters that follow a loose chronological format that highlights the increasing complexity of feminist ideals over the decades and contact between these six leaders. While the conferences have been explored in other works, Marino delves deeply into the motivations and experiences of these actors. As the chapters unfold, the author explores the feminist fissures that emerged, laying out the escalating tensions, feminist ideologies, and power struggles between the women. The first several chapters focus on the rise of feminismo americano, a phrase coined by Rosa Borja de Icaza in 1936. Chapter 1 introduces the reader to the initial hemispheric women’s meetings between Paula Luisi, Bertha Lutz, and Carrie Chapman Catt in the aftermath of World War I. These first encounters in 1922 in Baltimore and the 1923 Fifth International Conference of American States in Santiago, Chile, reveal the varying perspectives of language, ethnic identity, and empire, rifts that would shape the movement. These early leaders shared a sense of superiority as educated, middle-class, white female reformers, embracing a teleological view of the history of civilization and progress that suggested that not all women were ready for suffrage. Chapter 2 introduces new leaders who rejected the exceptionalism proffered by Lutz and Chapman Catt, arguing that women’s rights were explicitly linked to national sovereignty and challenging US imperialism within the Americas. Hailing from the US protectorates of Panama and Cuba, Clara González and Ofelia Dominguez Navarro pushed the agenda at the 1928 Havana conference, which culminated in the creation of the Inter-American Commission of Women (IACW). Marino argues that the inclusion of this diversity of women propelled Doris Stevens’s euphoric pronouncement that “international feminism was born in Havana” (p. 66).
Chapter 3 explores the full impact of the fissures that come to characterize the transnational women’s movement, embodied in the relationship between Panamanian Gonzalez and Doris Stevens from the United States. Stevens was a formidable leader who had played a pivotal role in the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution in 1920, which enshrined her feminism. Stevens’s strength and action-oriented form of organizing catapulted the IACW onto the international stage. Now sharing leadership of the IACW with González, the strident nature of her feminist perspectives drew the ire of many Latin American feminists who rose up to challenge her leadership. At issue were questions over the relationship of the IACW with government bodies (the requirement that governments approve their respective commissioners connected the group more intimately with both the US State Department and state power, threatening its autonomy), the political struggle for suffrage, and the broader socioeconomic crises that erupted during the 1930s global Depression.
These tensions climaxed at the 1933 IACW meeting in Montevideo, which is the focus of chapter 4. Marino positions Doris Stevens as something of a fulcrum around which hemispheric feminism evolved during this period. Within the movement, divided as it was by class and political ideology, especially around peace activism, ethnic identity, and US imperialism, Stevens became a lightning rod for these debates. While Latin American women believed in women’s moral superiority related to the issue of peace and resisted the constant power struggles with the US State Department, Stevens for her part held to a different feminism, one that maintained an unflagging certainty in US/Brazilian exceptionalism. Consequently, a growing movement emerged to remove Stevens from her position in the IACW. Ultimately, the IACW lost its political autonomy in 1938, becoming part of the Pan-American Union, and a new US delegate was appointed, essentially replacing Stevens.
Chapters 5 and 6 explore what Marino refers to as Popular Front pan-American feminism and the emergence of human rights within an international resolution. Following the diminution of Doris Stevens, a new set of feminist ideals emerged, influenced by pacifist and communist women, workers and liberals. Through her woman’s association, Chilean Marta Vergara expanded the feminist agenda to include state-sponsored maternity legislation, grassroots activism, and international antifascist solidarity. This group believed that women, workers, intellectuals, and activists, and not just statesmen, made peace and democracy. The 1938 Lima conference was a pivotal moment when, influenced by pan-Africanist and Popular Front movements, a “growing intersectional form of inter-American feminism—one that addressed racial equality as well as class and gender equality” resulted in several resolutions, including “Freedom of Association and Freedom of Expression for Workers,” the “Lima Declaration in Favor of Women’s Rights,” and the “Declaration in the Defense of Human Rights” (p. 166).
Marino argues that the 1945 Chapultepec conference demonstrates that the ideals enshrined in these resolutions had gained traction throughout the Americas. Chapter 7 explores two resolutions that identified women’s rights in the post-World War II era. The first recognized the importance of the IACW as a fundamental part of pan-Americanism while the second argued that in order to gain full democratic cooperation, women must be included in the delegations to the conference in San Francisco where the United Nations was being formed. Here the interdependent concepts of individual and social rights, women’s rights and human rights emerge. The final chapter highlights the importance of Latin American women to the constitution of the world. Bertha Lutz (who was often in conflict with other Latin American women) successfully navigated a complex feminist and antifeminist space to get the final wording into the UN Charter of Human Rights. The subject of multifaceted tensions lies at the core of this work. What is fascinating about the story as Marino lays out the argument is that despite the tensions between these six women and their intense dislike of Stevens and even Bertha Lutz, it was through the efforts of Lutz and Stevens that the UN Charter came to include women’s rights as human rights. The legacy of this activism can be seen in the rise of the Women’s International Democratic Federation and the various world congresses that culminated in the 1975 United Nations Conference on Women in Mexico City.
Feminism for the Americas is an invaluable contribution to our understanding of transnational organizing and fills a large historical gap as Marino traces the lives of these six individuals (and many more), who frequently faced alienation and hostility from within their own nations and forged alliances across the hemisphere, facilitating their very survival as activists. It disrupts the traditional focus on US feminists and instead centers the story within relationships that ultimately reflect more accurately the influence of Latin American women on global feminism. Marino compellingly argues that beyond shaping a hemispheric movement, these women played a key role in the creation of an international human rights framework. The book explores the narrow feminism of the early movement, which gradually expanded to include broader questions of class, ethnicity, and gender as well as pacifism and imperialism. Casting the net wide, Marino embarked on an exhaustive, multinational archival search, one that yielded primary sources from seven countries and newspapers from nineteen countries. As Marino exposes her subjects’ passionate advocacy and agonizing decisions over political strategy from their personal correspondence and conference minutes, the threads from this extraordinary breadth of primary sources are woven into a seamless story. In short, Feminism for the Americas creates a road map for decades of future research.
Patricia Harms is an associate professor of history at Brandon University in Manitoba, Canada, and has also served as chair of the Gender and Women’s Studies program. She is a Latin American scholar with a research focus on Guatemala, women, and gender. Her upcoming monograph on Guatemalan women in the capital city focuses on the rise of feminist movements within a revolutionary context. She is also involved with the Hispanic Association of Manitoba, an organization designed to improve the lives of Spanish-speaking immigrants in southwest Manitoba.
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Citation:
Patricia Harms. Review of Marino, Katherine M., Feminism for the Americas: The Making of an International Human Rights Movement.
H-Diplo, H-Net Reviews.
November, 2019.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=54252
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