Abstract
When many U.S.-based feminists hear the phrase “women's rights are humans rights,” they think of scholar-activists like Charlotte Bunch and Catherine MacKinnon, two leaders of the 1980s and 1990s. However, leading up to this U.S.-based work is the decades-long advocacy of feminists in Latin America throughout the early and mid-20th century. In her book, Feminism for the Americas, Katherine M. Marino presents this largely untold history of how the notion of “women's rights are human rights” emerged from Latin American feminist activism, rather than (and often in spite of) U.S. advocacy. Set in the period between the first- and second-wave feminist movements in the United States—often viewed as an unproductive time—Marino tells the story of six feminist activists across the Americas and their deeply productive yet often unrecognized work. Marino turns away from a U.S.-centric lens to unveil how this period of Latin American feminist history was hugely influential for the international women's rights movement of today.
In the United States, it was not until the latter half of the 20th century that fights for women's economic and social rights began to gain traction alongside civil and political rights. However, Marino recounts the development of a progressive Pan-American feminism centered on economic and social rights developed much earlier by these feminist activists across the Americas. The activists at the center of her book include Paulina Luisi of Uruguay—considered the “mother” of Latin American feminism—Clara González of Panama, Ofelia Domínguez Navarro of Cuba, Doris Stevens of the United States, and Marta Vergara of Chile. She traces how the paths of these women intertwined across several decades of advocacy work.
Yet not all of these Pan-American feminists shared the same expansive vision, and their work over the years was far from homogenous. While some scholarship paints Latin American feminism with broad strokes, Marino carefully highlights where this activist work was complicated by racist ideologies around whiteness, language, and class. U.S. activists like Doris Stevens and Latin American women who could speak English or French and pass as white were more likely than women of color to have the privilege and resources to attend international conferences, to be placed in positions of prominence on committees, and to have greater influence. Moreover, they tended to subscribe to the notion of U.S. and European superiority and had the least expansive ideas on women's rights. While these trends complicated this Pan-American feminist work, the ways that certain activists formed alliances and continued to push for an expansive feminist vision were unrelenting. According to Marino, the most transformative potential for that vision lay with its focus on a “practical” feminism “that was concerned not only with equal rights for women under the law but also with challenging multiple forms of political, economic, and social oppression and violence” (p. 89) through its connection to the socialist, antifascist, and anti-imperialist movements of the time.
Another notable feature of Marino's historical account is the way she displays the complexity of maternal rights within this movement. At times, Latin American feminism is portrayed as overly-maternalistic and conservatively aligned with Catholicism. Alternatively, Marino's book conveys the thoughtful ways that the family unit was incorporated into this “practical” feminism. It was common in the United States to see working women's maternal rights through racist and classist eyes—something only of concern for black, brown, and poor women, since white, middle-class mothers, it was presumed, should not be working—and to relegate such issues to the private sphere. Many U.S. activists also found maternal rights to be problematically exceptionalist (why should women deserve “special” treatment?). On the other hand, the practical feminismo americano vision included maternal rights as part of a woman's basic needs. Moreover, it envisioned the family as a legitimate social welfare unit. Marino demonstrates how this approach to social welfare was more inclusive across race and class for many women in Latin America, but was constantly thwarted by U.S. resistance.
While a deeply historical account, this book's density of detail may be best suited for scholars and less suited for teaching or a practitioner audience. Nonetheless, this density speaks to the impressive archival work that Marino presents. This history of women's rights activism highlights a period of time, group of women, and historical lens that have largely been overlooked and undervalued in both human rights and feminist scholarship, much to the detriment of researchers in these fields. Over time, it was the unrelenting efforts of these Pan-American feminists that created the most forward movement for post-World War II international feminism. They played a crucial role in pushing women's rights into the international human rights conversation at a time when European and U.S. leadership found feminist concerns passé. Not only were they successful at including women's rights in the United Nations Charter, but ultimately, they “broadened the meanings of international women's rights and global feminism”(p. 168). Along with offering an important historical account, Marino reminds anyone invested in feminist work to expand their point of view beyond a U.S.-centric lens.
