Places of Pan-American Feminism and International Organizations

Map contained in Paulina Luisi's booklet "Planisphere indicating the current position of women's political rights in the world," published in 1929.

Public domain

Building a movement involves both conflict and cooperation. During the early 1900s, feminists in North, Central, and South America navigated these dynamics at international organizations and conferences. A feminist is someone who believes that women should have the same rights and opportunities as men. These platforms helped feminists to recognize their shared goals across borders and build transnational networks.

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Think of a time when you worked as part of a group or team. What were you able to accomplish that you wouldn’t have been able to do alone? How did you overcome challenges as you worked toward your shared goal?

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After the devastation of each World War, many national governments wanted to promote cooperation and diplomacy. In the Americas, organizations like the Pan-American Union (PAU) and United Nations (UN) helped to foster diplomatic and trade relations. Feminists hoped to leverage this spirit of cooperation to cultivate resources for organizations founded by and for women. In other cases, transnational alliances provided new political opportunities between activists in countries where women could vote, like the United States, and places where women could not, such as Cuba.

But working together was not always easy. By the turn of the 20th century, some Latin American countries had begun to view U.S. foreign policy as imperialistic, due to US military interventions in Central and South America. Heightened distrust and ill will towards the US also influenced the experiences of Latin American feminists. While they recognized the benefits of the US’s political influence, they also wanted to ensure that women from the US did not dominate their struggles for equality.

Despite these challenges, the cooperative purpose of international organizations aligned with the goals of women’s rights activists and helped to advance their cause across borders. The places in this article illustrate how feminists used international conferences and organizations to pursue women’s equality throughout the Americas.

This map shows the locations of the different places featured in this article.

Belvedere Hotel in Baltimore, MD

Photo by Smash the Iron Cage, CC BY-SA 4.0

1. Belvedere Hotel

After US women won the vote in 1920, US suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt founded the League of Women Voters (LWV) to increase women’s voter turnout. The organization also believed that increasing women’s involvement in international affairs could bring about peace among nations. The LWV first attempted to achieve “international friendliness” by organizing a Pan-American Conference of Women (PACW). The conference would address key women’s issues, such as education, property rights, child welfare, and suffrage.

The PACW was hosted in the ballroom of the Belvedere Hotel in Baltimore, MD in April 1922. Organizers planned the conference to coincide with the LWV’s third annual convention. More than 2,000 women from 23 American countries and territories, including Puerto Rico and the Philippines, attended.

Although the PACW was intended to build relationships between women from the US and Latin American countries, power was not held equally. US women had more than their fair share of influence over the conference proceedings. They also took competing pressures into account. While the LWV wanted to satisfy Latin American delegates, they also wanted to retain the support of policymakers. Because the US State Department permitted but did not sponsor the conference, PACW organizers were careful to avoid topics that would provoke government officials. US women also chose issues that they assumed affected women throughout the Americas, instead of asking which issues Latin American feminists wanted to address.

Although women from the US led all of the sessions, Latin American delegates had several opportunities to speak throughout the conference. For instance, Mexican feminist and revolutionary Elena Torres argued that US women should use their new voting rights to oppose US interventions in Mexico.

By the end of the conference, US women’s interests prevailed. Carrie Chapman Catt became the honorary chair of a new Pan-American Association for the Advancement of Women, which was created at the conference. By the late 1920s, however, Catt’s attention had shifted from the Pan-American arena to European-American connections. She believed that connecting with European feminists would hold more sway among global political leaders.

The Belvedere Hotel was listed in the National Register of Historic Places on August 29, 1977.

Pan-American Union Building, Washington, D.C.

Photo by Bestbudbrian, CC BY-SA 4.0

2. Pan-American Union Headquarters

For United States suffragist and lawyer Doris Stevens and National Woman’s Party (NWP) leader Dr. Alice Paul, women’s suffrage was just one step towards equality. After the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, their new goal was to pass a constitutional Equal Rights Amendment in the US to end legal discrimination against women.

Cuban lawyer Dr. Flora Díaz Parrado had similar goals to secure women’s equality in Cuba. In early 1928, the Sixth Pan-American Conference was hosted in Havana. Although the conference included women’s issues, there were no women delegates and men’s support ranged from undecided to fully opposed. Cuban leaders, including Díaz Parrado and social reformer and pharmacologist Dr. Elena Mederos de Gonzales, gathered women in Havana to protest their exclusion. Díaz Parrado also invited women from the NWP. Alice Paul sent Doris Stevens and Jane Norman Smith as representatives.

Díaz Parrado’s invitation helped Stevens realize that transnational support for an international Equal Rights Treaty could pressure US lawmakers to change domestic policy. She and Paul had previously displayed little interest in Pan-American feminism and now realized they could establish the NWP as an international leader. But they falsely believed that Latin American feminists were inexperienced and they did not take them seriously.

Despite these tensions, women from the US, Cuba, and other Latin American countries cooperated to achieve their shared goal. They successfully pressured the Pan-American Union (PAU) into allowing them to speak at the conference. Stevens and Smith joined representatives from Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic to propose the Inter-American Commission of Women (IACW). It was the first all-female intergovernmental organization dedicated to women’s political and civil rights in the Americas. For over a decade, Stevens served as the Commission’s first chair.

Some of the IACW’s early accomplishments include a resolution to encourage the appointment of more women as delegates, an all-female committee dedicated to women’s citizenship status, and rallying support for Equal Nationality and Equal Rights treaties. In 1938, the IACW became an official, permanent part of the PAU. When the PAU was rechartered as the Organization of American States in 1948, the IACW started to be known by the acronym CIM. This represented the organization’s name in Spanish, La Comisión Interamericana de Mujeres.

Pan-American Union Headquarters was added to the National Register of Historic Places on June 4, 1969. It was designated a National Historic Landmark on January 13, 2021.

War Memorial Veterans Building, San Francisco, CA

Photo by Sanfranman59, CC BY-SA 3.0

3. San Francisco Civic Center Historic District

Between April and June 1945, 3,500 representatives from 50 countries gathered at several buildings in San Francisco’s Civic Center to establish the United Nations (UN). During these meetings, Brazilian feminist and biologist Bertha Lutz led a group of Latin American women delegates to demand the inclusion of women’s rights in the UN Charter.

According to Lutz’s memoirs, women delegates from the US and United Kingdom objected to her proposal. US delegate Virginia Gildersleeve declared that it would be a “very vulgar thing” to ask “for anything for women in the Charter.” Gildersleeve believed that women’s rights were already sufficiently covered in her own proposal for human rights. Lutz remarked that “women from the countries where women have the most rights are the most conservative.”

Nevertheless, Lutz, Dominican activist Minerva Bernardino, and Uruguayan senator Isabel Pinto de Vidal successfully argued for the inclusion of “men and women” in the Charter’s preamble. Their proposal also led to the establishment of the UN Commission on the Status of Women in 1946.

On June 26, 1945, the UN Charter was signed at Herbst Theatre in the Veterans Building. Out of 850 delegates, only four women signed the Charter: Lutz, Bernardino, Gildersleeve, and Wu Yi-Fang of China.

The Veterans Building is one of two buildings in the War Memorial Complex, a contributing property in the San Francisco Civic Center Historic District. The district was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1978 and designated as a National Historic Landmark in 1987.

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For more stories of Pan-American feminists, check out the companion article, Places of Pan-American Feminism and Labor Rights.

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Bibliography

Marino, Katherine M. “The International History of the U.S. Suffrage Movement.” The 19th Amendment and Women's Access to the Vote Across America. National Park Service. Last updated October 10, 2019. https://www.nps.gov/articles/the-internationalist-history-of-the-U.S.-suffrage-movement.htm.

Pan American Union. Bulletin of the Pan American Union 54, no. 6 (June 1922): 637-638.

Rupp, Leila J. Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement. Princeton University Press, 1997. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv173f16w.

Sator, Fatima and Elise Dietrichson. “Women and the UN Charter.” Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Accessed December 29, 2021. https://www.soas.ac.uk/cisd/research/women-in-diplomacy/women-in-the-un-charter/.

Threlkeld, Megan. “The Pan American Conference of Women, 1922: Successful Suffragists Turn to International Relations.” Diplomatic History 31, no. 5 (2007): 801–828. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24916101.

Towns, Ann. “The Inter-American Commission of Women and Women’s Suffrage, 1920-1945.” Journal of Latin American Studies 42, no. 4 (2010): 779–807. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40984958.

Wamsley, E. Sue. A Hemisphere of Women: The Founding and Development of the Inter-American Commission, 1915–1939. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2022. Accessed February 10, 2022. ProQuest Ebook Central.

The content for this article was researched and written by Jade Ryerson, an intern with the Cultural Resources Office of Interpretation and Education.