Katherine Marino's study of early- to mid-twentieth-century feminism in Latin America, what she terms ‘feminismo americano’, is both enlightening and engaging. The book makes several central and highly significant arguments. First, it demolishes the widely accepted belief that US and European women pioneered the feminist movement. Instead, it illustrates how Latin American women led the struggle for women's hemispheric emancipation from the 1920s through to the 1950s. Marino further credits these women with advancing a more far-reaching and advanced understanding of feminism than their US counterparts did. She also highlights the extent to which the transnational networks these women built facilitated their work and were the source of personal support. Finally, the book establishes that these women repeatedly linked women's rights to human rights, thus challenging the idea that one could exist without the other.
Marino tells the story of the Latin American feminist movement by recounting the roles played by six leading feminists: Paulina Luisi (Uruguay), Bertha Lutz (Brazil), Ofelia Domínguez Navarro (Cuba), Clara González (Panama), Doris Stevens (United States) and Marta Vergara (Chile). To do so she draws on a wealth of documents and the treasure trove of letters these women wrote to each other, many of them over decades. These letters offer much insight into these women's personalities, private thoughts and attitudes, public statements and relationships with each other. As a body, they provide insight into the interior and exterior lives of women whose beliefs, decisions and actions were decisive to the formulation and actualisation of feminismo americano.
These six women, along with the other women who make a more fleeting appearance in the book, were highly skilled, articulate, determined and dedicated political actors. They were also educated women, whose privileged social positions allowed them to travel and afforded them access to key political players in their respective nations and across the hemisphere. The six did not function as a unified front. For example, Luisi, Domínguez Navarro, González and Vergara, but not Lutz, agreed that Stevens, the self-appointed leader of the Inter-American Commission of Women (IACW), failed to grasp Latin American women's realities, perpetuated arrogant and imperialist and racist policies vis-à-vis Latin Americans, and was neither fit to direct the IACW nor trustworthy. Despite this, these women's shared perceptions and goals facilitated their development of deep, lasting bonds that sustained them through the multiple setbacks and challenges each faced from her own government and all faced from the US government.
In addition to advancing a definition of feminism that was anti-imperialist and upheld national and regional sovereignty, most Latin American feminists decried racism and the lack of protective legislation for women workers, especially laws that would ensure the safety and well-being of pregnant women and mothers. They also advanced what Marino terms ‘Popular Front Pan-American feminism’, which drew on the ideas of pacifist, communist, working-class and liberal women to promote legislation that favoured working-class women, racial and class unity and global anti-fascism.
Lutz, as noted above, did not share all of these women's goals. She aligned herself with the United States, believed that Brazil was superior to its Spanish-speaking neighbours and considered the United States and Britain to be allies, not opponents. She did, however, clash with Stevens because she believed that she, not Stevens, should lead the IACW. Lutz's faith in the United States and Britain began to crumble only when, at the founding meeting of the United Nations in San Francisco in 1945, she realised how disdainfully official representatives from those two countries viewed her and other Latin Americans.
Ironically, the San Francisco meeting represented one of Latin American feminists’ greatest victories, due largely to the collective work of Lutz, the Spanish-speaking women she had earlier looked down upon and male delegates from Latin America. They skilfully surmounted the febrile US and British opposition to demands that women qua women be explicitly included in the language of the UN's founding document and to the creation of the UN Commission on the Status of Women. In so doing, they established that women's rights are indeed an integral part of human rights, five decades before Hillary Rodham Clinton uttered the same sentiment at the United Nations Beijing Conference on Women in 1995 (p. 235).
Marino was able to tell the story of these six notable women because they left extensive archives that allowed her to bring their histories to light. However, as she notes, the story of the broader feminist movements of which they were part and the contributions made by the many non-privileged women who left no such archives behind remains to be told. I agree. Indeed, one concern I have about Marino's portrayal of these women is that it does not adequately consider their place in and relation to feminist movements in their respective nations. As a result, these women often appear to operate on their own, not as part of a group. In addition, her subjects’ ability to amass and preserve their papers speaks to the world of privilege in which they operated. This is a reality that many historians, among whose numbers I count myself, must frequently confront: the availability of the elite's papers and the concomitant dearth of similar materials for the non-elite. This begs the question many of us ask ourselves: by foregrounding the elite, whose papers exist, do I contribute to obscuring the role non-elite women played in defining, practising and furthering feminism or other movements?
Marino's book wrestles the mantle of feminist leadership from US and British women, and places it on the worthy shoulders of Latin American feminists, whose contributions many historians have largely overlooked. In so doing, it deepens and clarifies our understanding of the hemispheric feminist movement and of the highly significant contributions these six women made – both as individuals and in conjunction with each other – and makes us realise how advanced Latin American feminists were and how correspondingly backward were those from the United States. I enthusiastically recommend this book for undergraduates, graduates and the general public. Marino convincingly establishes that, far from being apprentices of the US feminist movement, these Latin American feminists were its vanguard.
