Pan American Women - Megan Threlkeld Politics and Culture in Modern America

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meanwhile, were ready to join internationalist networks as part of their efforts to promote global peace and to recruit allies in their struggles against U.S. imperialism in Mexico. All these organizations employed similar methods that followed on Jane Addams’s articulation of human internationalism: personal interactions, exchanges of information, and shared experiences. These internationalist efforts were especially significant in light of the fact that after 1920 the United States and Mexico no longer had a diplomatic relationship. In fact, cooperation among U.S. and Mexican women laid some of the groundwork over the next few years for the restoration of formal diplomatic relations.

      Nevertheless, U.S. and Mexican women did not approach the new internationalism in the same ways. Among U.S. women there was considerable divergence in their goals and methods. Women in the YWCA and the PAIWC sought “safe” contacts in Mexico, women who could not be branded as radical or politically inappropriate. By contrast, WILPF and the WPS cultivated contacts, such as Elena Torres and Elena Landázuri, who were more politically active. Mexican women, for their part, were prepared to engage in the methods of human internationalism, but they had a clearly defined agenda that U.S. women did not necessarily share. The Mexican Revolution, the spread of economic nationalism in Mexico, and the resentment against the United States resulting from repeated interventions infused Mexican women’s internationalism in ways that posed potential conflicts for U.S. women. Elena Torres and Elena Landázuri wanted to use internationalism to defend their own nation, and to get U.S. women to speak out against theirs. Internationalism may not have been much more than “spiritual” for Jane Addams and her followers, but for Mexican women it was undoubtedly political.

      Torres and Landázuri were about to have another chance with a different group of U.S. women. The U.S. League of Women Voters began making plans in 1921 to hold its own hemispheric conference of women. As an organization born out of the victory for women’s suffrage, the league seemed to the members of the Consejo Feminista Mexicano like an ideal partner with whom to share their agenda for women’s advancement in Mexico. That perception would be put to the test in Baltimore, Maryland, in April 1922.

       Chapter 2

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      The Pan American Conference of Women

      In April 1922, more than two thousand women and men from twenty-one American nations descended on Baltimore, Maryland. Convened by the U.S. League of Women Voters, the Pan American Conference of Women (PACW) centered on “subjects of special concern to women,” including education, child welfare, and women’s political status. But the league also acknowledged another, overriding concern. “Peace among nations is essential to the work that women have most at heart,” declared the call to the conference. Seeking to capitalize on the spirit of internationalism flourishing in the early 1920s, the league hoped to further the cause of global peace by fostering “international friendliness”: “The League believes that friendliness with our neighbor countries will be stimulated and strengthened when women from all parts of the western hemisphere come together for sympathetic study of their common problems.”1 To that end, league members invited delegates from each of the twenty-one American nations to come to Baltimore—where the league had already planned to hold its third national convention in April 1922—for an inter-American conference.

      With this conference, the League of Women Voters became the first U.S. organization to put inter-American women’s internationalism into practice on such a large, coordinated scale. Formed in 1920 out of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, the nonpartisan league’s early goals included equal status for women under the law and prevention of war through international cooperation. It did not belong to the same pacifist tradition as the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, but its members shared a belief in women’s power to effect political change both nationally and internationally.2 The Pan American conference seemed the perfect chance to implement the ideals of Jane Addams’s human internationalism: women gathered together to share information and experiences, engage in personal interactions, build solidarity around common causes, and foster global peace. Unlike the conveners of the Women’s Auxiliary Conference in 1916, league members took great pains to learn about the leading women activists in each country, and to extend invitations to them, rather than inviting women simply because they happened to be married to or fathered by a man attending a separate conference. The league guaranteed the participation of women already committed to various causes, women who would be able not only to share information but potentially to implement whatever strategies or suggestions arose in Baltimore. Every Latin American delegate had several opportunities to speak publicly throughout the conference, ensuring that attendees would hear more than just U.S. women’s voices. The original list of topics for discussion included not only education and child welfare, but also women’s suffrage and the limitation of armaments. These were later modified, though, by the U.S. State Department, which sanctioned but did not sponsor the conference.3

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      Figure 2. Maud Wood Park, center, opens the Pan American Conference of Women. Maryland governor Albert Ritchie is second from the left.

      Chicago Tribune, April 23, 1922.

      The Pan American Conference of Women is thus significant for several reasons. First, it demonstrated how women’s internationalism served as a form of gendered diplomacy. By emphasizing “international friendliness” as the goal of the conference, league members made it clear they understood their actions as part of a broader effort to promote peace and understanding among American nations. The diplomatic potential of the conference extended beyond anything the participants themselves hoped would come of it. Both U.S. and Mexican government officials saw the conference as an opportunity to further reconciliation between the two nations, which still did not have a formal diplomatic relationship.

      In its sheer size, the conference also illustrated the extent to which women activists across the Americas were committed to the promise of Addams’s human internationalism. The reasons for their commitment varied, however. U.S. women, newly enfranchised, wanted to stake a claim, a political voice for themselves in international relations. They wanted to extend and coordinate activism for suffrage and women’s rights beyond the United States, and they wanted to further hemispheric peace by bringing together women from across the Americas. Though many Latin American women may well have shared the latter two goals, they were looking for more. For instance, Mexican women, represented in Baltimore by Elena Torres and members of the Consejo Feminista Mexicano, continued to demand that U.S. women use their newfound political power to oppose interventionist U.S. policies and exploitative U.S. business practices in Mexico.

      Although U.S. and Mexican women’s dedication to internationalism may have been equal, their roles in Baltimore were not. U.S. women had disproportionate power to shape the agenda and the outcome of the conference, more than any Latin American women. The League of Women Voters took it on themselves to direct the proceedings with minimal input from the non-U.S. participants. While professing a mutual desire to learn from each other, conference organizers circumscribed Latin American women’s contributions. Even when Mexican women expressly asked to have U.S. policies toward their country included on the agenda, league officials balked. To be fair, the LWV had to operate within a set of constraints—like reliance on the approval of the U.S. State Department—that limited their ability to allow discussion of controversial topics. But the fact remains that the organizers set the agenda and chose topics for discussion based on what they assumed were common concerns of all women in the Americas, while admitting they knew little of women’s concerns outside their own country. This imbalance called into question the cooperative nature of human internationalism.

       Gendered Diplomacy

      The idea for the Pan American Conference of Women came from Lavinia Engle, an active member of the Maryland League of Women Voters. Engle thought that in addition to providing the fledgling league with widespread publicity, such a conference would be an ideal way to promote inter-American cooperation. Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover was interested in furthering trade with South

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