Pan American Women
Pan American Women
U.S. Internationalists and Revolutionary Mexico
Megan Threlkeld
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS
PHILADELPHIA
POLITICS AND CULTURE IN MODERN AMERICA
Series Editors
Margot Canaday, Glenda Gilmore, Michael Kazin, Thomas J. Sugrue, and Stephen Pitti
Volumes in the series narrate and analyze political and social change in the broadest dimensions from 1865 to the present, including ideas about the ways people have sought and wielded power in the public sphere and the language and institutions of politics at all levels—local, national, and transnational. The series is motivated by a desire to reverse the fragmentation of modern U.S. history and to encourage synthetic perspectives on social movements and the state, on gender, race, and labor, and on intellectual history and popular culture.
Copyright © 2014 University of Pennsylvania Press
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Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.
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University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
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A Cataloging-in-Publication Record is available from the Library of Congress
ISBN 978-0-8122-4633-9
Frontispiece: Pan American Unity Mural: The Marriage of the Artistic Expression of the North and of the South on this Continent, Diego Rivera. Courtesy of City College of San Francisco, © 2013 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
For Trey
Contents
Chapter 1. The Best Kind of Internationalism
Chapter 2. The Pan American Conference of Women
Chapter 3. The Limits of Human Internationalism
Chapter 4. The Peace with Mexico Campaign
Chapter 5. Politicizing Internationalism
Chapter 6. Not Such Good Neighbors
Introduction
In the summer of 1931, Ellen Starr Brinton, a pacifist from Pennsylvania, traveled to Mexico City as a representative of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), which had been founded during World War I by activists in the United States and Europe. Part of Brinton’s mission was to solicit topics on U.S.-Latin American relations for study and discussion by the U.S. section of WILPF. To that end she met with several groups of women students in Mexico City, who provided her with what she called “irritating suggestions.” Their list of potential topics included Mexicans’ hatred of the United States, discriminatory attitudes toward Mexican students in the United States, and “appropriation by residents of the U.S. of the term ‘Americans, or North Americans.’” All U.S. Americans had an “irritating superiority attitude,” the students told Brinton. “Your manners in this country suggest that you feel yourselves above us, and make us conscious that the United States is a powerful nation. You ‘high hat’ everyone you meet. Naturally we do not like it.” They compared the segregation of Mexican students in the United States to that of African Americans, arguing it was done not with regard to “intelligence or language, but entirely as a matter of race.” Finally, they resented what they saw as misuse of a key term. “We are Americans as well,” the students informed Brinton. “You should call yourselves E---- U---- (using the Spanish equivalent of ‘United Statesians’).” When Brinton, bewildered, replied that there was no such word in English, “the serene answer was that we should get one.”1
Brinton’s bewilderment and irritation—and the Mexican students’ frustration—capture the tensions between U.S. women’s internationalist ideals and Mexican women’s nationalist aspirations that lie at the heart of this book. Brinton and her colleagues in WILPF and in other U.S. organizations saw themselves as leaders of a globalizing women’s movement that originated in the United States and Europe but had reached most of Latin America only recently. They believed they had much to teach women throughout the Americas about their campaigns for international peace, women’s rights, and other causes. As Brinton’s attempt at information gathering suggests, they also believed they had something to learn from Latin American women. But Brinton’s irritation indicates she did not get the kinds of responses to her questions that she expected. The young women with whom she met demanded that Brinton recognize her own subject position as a “United Statesian,” and that she acknowledge the larger relationship between the United States and Mexico that framed this encounter between women of the two nations. They further demanded that Brinton confront her own implicit presumption that the United States was representative of all “America.” Like many U.S. women involved in activism across nations and cultures at this time, Brinton believed that her identity as a woman would allow her to forge bonds with women in Mexico and other Latin American countries. She assumed that even amid differences of race and nationality, gender would provide common ground on which all American women could build hemispheric connections. When the Mexican students continued to draw attention to her nationality, Brinton floundered.
What follows is an investigation of how women like Ellen Starr Brinton negotiated challenges to their internationalist ambitions like the ones posed by these Mexican students. Pan American Women examines U.S. women’s efforts to advance inter-American cooperation among women and to further hemispheric peace between the world wars. I focus on U.S. women’s work in Mexico, where diplomatic tensions and the ongoing Mexican Revolution heightened the significance of their enterprise. With different and sometimes competing agendas, groups like WILPF, the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), the League of Women Voters (LWV), and the Inter-American Commission of Women (IACW) tried to organize Mexican women and to influence U.S. foreign policy toward Mexico. They convened conferences, established