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peaceful relations. On several occasions during the 1920s and 1930s they congratulated themselves on having propelled policy makers toward peace. They also grew more sophisticated in their methods, abandoning gendered arguments and appeals to womanhood in favor of more modern, politically savvy tactics.

      But by the outbreak of World War II, many of their efforts among Mexican women had collapsed. Scarce resources and the growing threats in Europe and Asia contributed to this decline, but circumstantial explanations are insufficient. Even with their authority on the issues and their years of experience, U.S. women struggled to effect change in Mexico, to convince women living within a very different political and social context of the efficacy of U.S. methods and goals. The absence of a stable democracy in Mexico, for instance, gave women there a different perspective on suffrage and the significance of the vote. U.S. women’s appeals to peace and nonviolence, meanwhile, felt to some Mexican women like a thinly veiled directive to abandon their Revolution.

      U.S. women internationalists overestimated the viability of their agendas in Mexico because they assumed their ideals were universal enough to apply readily. They often brushed aside or ignored input from Mexican women that reflected the specific issues and challenges they faced. At the very moment that U.S. women were seeking to engage Mexican women and incorporate them into international networks, Mexican women were trying to negotiate the social and political upheaval of the Mexican Revolution—a fiercely nationalist revolution fueled in part by a reaction against decades of exploitative U.S. economic and foreign policies. As a result, U.S. women found themselves in a difficult position as they tried to forge gendered bonds in Mexico. At the same time that these U.S. internationalists were looking beyond their own borders and promoting global cooperation, Mexican women were becoming politicized in ways that tied them more closely to their own nation. U.S. internationalists envisioned “worlds of women” beyond the borders of nation-states, and beyond the nationalism that they argued had led to a world war.² Mexican women saw in the Revolution an opportunity to claim their national citizenship in previously unavailable ways. For U.S. women, nationalism was an ethos to be overcome; for Mexican women it was an identity and a strategy to be embraced. To U.S. women, internationalism represented the path to a more peaceful and equitable future. To Mexican women, internationalist rhetoric often seemed like old patterns of U.S. hegemony in a new guise. Even as many U.S. women protested U.S. imperialism in Latin America, they replicated imperialist patterns in their own organizations. Even as they abandoned an idealized, “spiritual” internationalism in favor of more politically sophisticated approaches, they failed to adapt their movement to the particular needs of Mexican women. They grew skilled at using international platforms to advance their agendas, but still could not forge lasting bonds. These were the tensions that underlay Ellen Starr Brinton’s experience in Mexico City.

       Defining Women’s Internationalism

      Both in terms of their ideology and their activism, Brinton and her WILPF colleagues adhered to what I term “women’s internationalism.” This concept has received increasing attention from historians over the last twenty years, though not all of them label it as such. What began in the 1990s with historian Leila Rupp’s exploration of the communities and collective identities of the International Council of Women, the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (later the International Alliance of Women), and WILPF has grown slowly but surely into a field richly populated with studies of other organizations and other dimensions of the global interactions among women between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.³ I will address the thorny question of “internationalism” before I attempt to define the concept as a whole. For Rupp’s subjects, internationalism was a “spirit rather than a formal ideology.” Words such as “feeling” and “force” conveyed “the almost mystical quality of internationalism as an imagined community.”⁴ The term also had particular significance in the early twentieth century apart from its practice by women. As an ideal for cooperation among nation-states and for the creation of supranational systems of law and governance, it drew followers even as the great powers expanded their empires and careened toward World War I. Internationalism found its ultimate expression in the ideology of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, who envisioned the League of Nations (led by the United States) as the center of a just, peaceful world order.⁵ These visions of a world without war, characterized by the spread of democracy and human rights, significantly informed the ethos of women internationalists during this period.

      I find most useful diplomatic historian Akira Iriye’s broad definition of internationalism as a “global consciousness,” the “idea that nations and peoples should cooperate instead of preoccupying themselves with their respective national interests or pursuing uncoordinated approaches to promote them.”⁶ Many of the women with whom I am concerned held this idea very dear; they argued that women had both an opportunity and a duty to take part in internationalist work. With one exception, the organizations to which they belonged are best characterized as nongovernmental organizations. These organizations began to emerge over the course of the nineteenth century, born from an awareness that “they shared certain interests and objectives across national boundaries” and “could best solve their many problems by pooling their resources and effecting transnational cooperation.”⁷ Beginning as early as the 1840s, educated women in the United States sought to participate in and began to form their own such organizations.

      Not all scholars agree on the differences between “internationalism” and “transnationalism.” Historians of U.S. foreign relations, among others, have used the former to denote formal relations among nation-states, and the latter to describe the movement of people, goods, and ideas across national boundaries.⁸ Among women’s historians, by contrast, “internationalism” has generally been used to characterize activism across borders before 1945, and “transnationalism” to describe the period after World War II and especially since the 1970s. As historians Ellen Carol DuBois and Katie Oliviero have observed, “The distinction was meant to pose an opposition between the multiple, diverse, worldwide voices speaking on behalf of women’s needs and rights in our own era, and the allegedly hegemonic, falsely monolithic, Eurocentric leadership of an earlier period.” These and other scholars have challenged the rigidity of that distinction, arguing that the transnationalist feminism of the later twentieth century had important precursors that deserve to be labeled as such, but they acknowledge that differences remain between the organizations of the earlier period and the “less formal networks of interactions” of the later one.⁹

      For my purposes, the term “internationalism” indicates the primacy of nationality and of the nation-state as foundational principles within a given organization, while “transnationalism” conveys the primacy of an organization’s subjects, objects, or goals and methods. Internationalist groups worked among nations; transnationalist groups worked across them. The division between the two categories is not absolute. It may shift depending on an analysis of an organization’s agenda versus its accomplishments. For example, in the 1930s the Inter-American Commission of Women took a transnationalist approach in its efforts to secure a hemispheric treaty protecting the legal nationality of women who married foreign-born men, a measure designed to protect women in all American countries. But structurally, the commission was composed of twenty-one women, one from each American nation, and it was created by the Pan American Union, an intergovernmental organization. Furthermore, legislation protecting married women’s nationality had to be secured by separate national governments. In these respects the composition of the commission was internationalist in nature. The history of women’s organizing across national boundaries suggests that the categories of internationalist and transnationalist are two points on a continuum rather than either-or definitions, but they are useful distinctions, not least when examining U.S. women’s intentions and accomplishments in Latin America.¹⁰ I refer in this book to “transnationalism” when appropriate, but I use “internationalism” to signal U.S. women’s inability to dissociate themselves—consciously or unconsciously—from their national identities and from their assumption of national superiority over Latin Americans.

      For the women I study, internationalism was first and foremost a spirit and a practice of cooperation among women from different nations to advance common interests, especially peace. What then made this women’s internationalism? First, an assumption

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