Feminism for the Americas - (Gender and American Culture) by Katherine M Marino (Paperback)

About the Book

"... reveals the story of six dynamic women who drove Pan-American feminism from the 1920s-1940s: Uruguayan Paulina Luisi, Brazilian Bertha Lutz, Chilean Marta Vergara, Cuban Ofelia Dominguez Navarro, Panamanian Clara Gonzalez, and U.S. citizen Doris Stevens. The deep friendships and intense rivalries among these women during an era marked by imperialism, racism, and fascism gave rise to a feminism sensitive to multiple forms of oppression. This advocacy sped changes for women throughout the Americas--suffrage, equal nationality rights, rights to hold public office, equal pay for equal work, and maternity legislation. But just as importantly, these six leaders were forerunners in understanding the complexity of power relations in international affairs, and they used their expertise to not only shape the trajectory of international women's rights but include human rights as defined and established in the United Nations Charter"--

Book Synopsis

This book chronicles the dawn of the global movement for women's rights in the first decades of the twentieth century. The founding mothers of this movement were not based primarily in the United States, however, or in Europe. Instead, Katherine M. Marino introduces readers to a cast of remarkable Latin American and Caribbean women whose deep friendships and intense rivalries forged global feminism out of an era of imperialism, racism, and fascism. Six dynamic activists form the heart of this story: from Brazil, Bertha Lutz; from Cuba, Ofelia Domíngez Navarro; from Uruguay, Paulina Luisi; from Panama, Clara González; from Chile, Marta Vergara; and from the United States, Doris Stevens. This Pan-American network drove a transnational movement that advocated women's suffrage, equal pay for equal work, maternity rights, and broader self-determination. Their painstaking efforts led to the enshrinement of women's rights in the United Nations Charter and the development of a framework for international human rights. But their work also revealed deep divides, with Latin American activists overcoming U.S. presumptions to feminist superiority. As Marino shows, these early fractures continue to influence divisions among today's activists along class, racial, and national lines.

Marino's multinational and multilingual research yields a new narrative for the creation of global feminism. The leading women introduced here were forerunners in understanding the power relations at the heart of international affairs. Their drive to enshrine fundamental rights for women, children, and all people of the world stands as a testament to what can be accomplished when global thinking meets local action.

Review Quotes

"[An] often thrilling account. . . . Marino's book is an important work for any scholar or student interested in Latin American feminisms, Pan-American movements, the history of human rights, or even histories of how whiteness has operated in Latin American politics."--The Americas

"A brilliant and ambitious new account of the origins of global feminism . . . . Feminism for the Americas reconstructs a radical, transnational, and influential movement for women's equality and social justice."--International Feminist Journal of Politics

"As Marino exposes her subjects' passionate advocacy and agonizing decisions over political strategy from their personal correspondence and conference minutes, the threads from this extraordinary breadth of primary sources are woven into a seamless story. . . . Feminism for the Americas creates a road map for decades of future research."--H-Net Reviews

"Beautifully researched with a cross-section of primary sources--newspapers, photos, letters drawn from archives in six different countries. The magnitude of the research is never lost on this reader; the book should be assigned to all doctoral students pursuing transnational historical research, feminist or not, as a model for what the final product should look like."--Pacific Historical Review

"Charts the rise of pan-American feminisms that promoted social justice, human rights and anti-fascism. . . . When Anglophone arrogance became intolerable, the compañeras created their own version of pan-Americanism, sometimes recast as pan-Hispanism. Marino makes the case that this collective political effort had an impact on mid-20th-century international politics. The compañeras made feminism part of Popular Front movements to resist fascism in the 1930s, and influenced the work of the League of Nations and the early United Nations."--London Review of Books

"In this valuable contribution to the historiography of social movements in the Americas, Marino chronicles the impact of the women's movement of leaders from six countries--Uruguay, Brazil, Panama, Cuba, the US, and Chile--in the interwar years. . . . Marino successfully demonstrates that this was a vital period in Pan-American relations."--CHOICE

"Marino's excellent study is a necessary contribution to the history of feminist organizing in the early twentieth century. . . . This timely book extends trends in the fields of U.S. history and U.S. feminist history that seek to employ a more hemispheric orientation, but it also foregrounds how Latin American feminists, with their U.S. counterparts following, took the lead in establishing a global feminist movement."--Journal of American History

"Marino's historical analysis is timely and necessary, for it renders accessible this neglected arena of the complex struggle for women's rights in the Western Hemisphere."--Latino Book Review

"The best book on Western Hemispheric feminism in at least two decades. . . . A necessary starting point for anyone contemplating research on inter-American feminism. . . . Marino has given us a masterpiece."--Hispanic American Historical Review

"Would make a welcome addition to courses on feminist theory and women's roles in the Americas, and it should encourage scholars to dig deeper into the lives and works of feminists who were on the frontlines without necessarily publishing books or articles about feminism."--Library Journal