Pan American Women. Megan Threlkeld
their desire for “emancipation.”25 As a result of this ongoing orientalism, nonwhite and non-Western women struggled to claim a place for themselves in many international women’s organizations and to have their experiences and concerns heard.26 This was a legacy with which U.S. women wrestled throughout the 1920s and 1930s as they sought to build networks in Latin America. Ellen Starr Brinton’s resentment of the charge that all U.S. Americans were guilty of “high-hatting” Mexicans was merely one example among many of U.S. women’s struggles to comprehend Latin American accusations of arrogance and superiority.
In addition, disparities among women internationalists were growing. Though many U.S. women shared a desire to establish connections with women around the world and to enjoy peaceful international relations, they were not politically or ideologically homogenous. When it came to the issue of peace, for instance, some were political leftists who were opposed to all forms of war and wanted to see an immediate end to international conflict. Jane Addams and WILPF fit into this category. Others, including Carrie Chapman Catt and the League of Women Voters, were more moderate; they argued for gradual methods of eliminating war through international law. Some women did not oppose war at all on principle, but believed the need for it could be reduced by encouraging friendships between elite women of different countries. A group called the Pan American International Women’s Committee wanted to facilitate business among male diplomats and government officials by bringing their wives and daughters into closer contact. Given their close (though informal) relationship with the Pan American Union, the committee was also adamant about remaining “non-political.” This set them in marked contrast to groups such as WILPF and the LWV. Other differences among women internationalists centered on their methods. When a WILPF section sprang up in a new country, its members were encouraged to adopt a uniform set of policies and guidelines. The YWCA, by contrast, believed strongly in the need to adapt its program and approach depending on the needs of individual countries into which it was expanding. All of these groups were internationalist, but few of them agreed on the best way to achieve their goals—or on what those goals were in the first place.
The Western Hemisphere
Understanding the broader contexts within which Ellen Starr Brinton was working does not explain, however, why she was in Mexico. Many U.S. women internationalists took a new interest in Latin America during the early twentieth century. Since the 1820s, when the majority of Latin American countries won their independence from Spain, orators and politicians throughout the hemisphere had claimed that all the new American nations shared an identity distinct from that of the European powers they had rebelled against. Popularized in the 1880s, the term “Pan Americanism” conveyed that sense of unity and common interest. Framing commercial and strategic interests as common to all “Americans” dated back to the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, but it took on new significance after the outbreak of World War I, when it was mobilized as a rhetorical defense against potential German encroachment.27 Whether explicitly or implicitly, many U.S. women internationalists saw in Pan Americanism an opportunity to reach out to Latin American women by capitalizing on these preexisting ties. Some groups incorporated the word into their names, such as the Pan American International Women’s Committee. In 1919 the U.S. section of WILPF established a Pan American Committee. In 1922 the LWV organized the Pan American Conference of Women. The term was a concise rhetorical way to encompass the hemisphere, but it also signaled a unity of purpose and a common identity among “Americans.”28
But those professions of unity had long been contested. Critics of Pan Americanism, particularly Latin American opponents of U.S. foreign policies, charged that it was little more than rhetorical cover for U.S. dominance and exploitation. The early twentieth century represented the height of U.S. intervention in Central America and the Caribbean Basin. The legacy of the Monroe Doctrine and the Roosevelt Corollary established the Western Hemisphere as the domain of the United States in the minds of many U.S. Americans. While the former aimed to keep European powers out of the Western Hemisphere, the latter effectively sanctioned the policing of Latin American countries by the United States to maintain stability and foster democracy. President William Howard Taft’s policy of “Dollar Diplomacy” extended this idea by encouraging U.S. bankers to offer loans to foreign governments in exchange for U.S. control over infrastructure and public finances. Protecting these loans frequently necessitated armed intervention on the part of the U.S. government. By 1922, U.S. troops occupied all or part of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Panama, Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. These interventions created widespread resentment in Latin America and inspired popular and political resistance.29 Many women were among the anti-imperialists and pacifists within the United States who mounted campaigns against such actions. Thus even as they employed and drew on the rhetoric of Pan Americanism, some internationalists also critiqued it.
Inter-American cooperation among women held the potential both to move beyond the problems of Pan Americanism and to re-create them. In her analysis of the founding of the Inter-American Commission of Women, K. Lynn Stoner argued that “inter-American feminists shared motives and a spiritual basis for their alliance. They placed women’s issues above national interests, and they sought democratic relations among themselves, with men, and among nations.”30 But it is important to understand the limits of that cooperation as well. U.S. women internationalists were immune neither to the arrogance of imperialist internationalism and feminism nor to the “culture of imperialism” that pervaded the country in the early twentieth century.31 WILPF, for example, protested Dollar Diplomacy and U.S. economic imperialism in Latin America vigorously during the 1920s, and yet did not question the validity of imposing its own programs and perspectives on Latin American women. Furthermore, like their European colleagues, few U.S. internationalists spoke the language of the women they targeted. Neither Ellen Starr Brinton nor most of her associates spoke Spanish, Portuguese, or any indigenous languages. Inter-American conferences located in the United States were generally conducted in English, and correspondence to and from Latin America frequently had to be translated.
The epitome of the imperial U.S. feminist and woman internationalist was Carrie Chapman Catt. Numerous scholars have pointed out that her tactics for exporting the women’s suffrage movement to Latin America closely resembled earlier efforts to “civilize” non-Western women.32 Latin American feminists from Puerto Rico to the Southern Cone reacted to Catt with frustration and indignation.33 After analyzing Catt’s attitudes toward inter-American cooperation, for example, historian Christine Ehrick concluded that Catt “in no way considered a Pan American women’s movement as a union among equals, but as a means to ‘civilize’ this part of the world and improve the image of the United States at the same time. These attitudes on the part of many North American feminists and the increasingly nationalistic and anti-U.S. rhetoric emanating from many Latin American sectors during these years worked to create a wide gulf between many Latin American feminists and their counterparts in the United States.”34 This was how imperialist feminism manifested itself in the inter-American context—as attempts by U.S. women to “help” Latin American women advance as they had, for instance by securing the vote, and to implement unilaterally their programs for peace and hemispheric cooperation, with little regard for or knowledge of either the cultural differences across the region or the extent of resentment toward the United States.
The potential for a “wide gulf” to emerge was only heightened in Mexico, which among Latin American countries had one of the longest-standing contentious relationships with the United States. Unlike the warring European nations cited by Jane Addams, the United States and Mexico had never shared a “spirit of internationalism.” The U.S.-Mexican War of 1846–1848, during which the U.S. army occupied Mexico City, and after which the United States forced Mexico to cede nearly half its land, left many Mexicans very bitter. Some cordial feeling was restored in the 1860s, when the United States helped Mexico evict the French, who had installed an emperor in Mexico City. Between 1876 and 1910, dictator Porfirio Díaz encouraged U.S. investments as part of his plans for economic modernization. U.S. funds helped build thousands of miles of railroads, provided electricity to the major cities, and developed extensive mining industries. A U.S. company first produced oil in Mexico in 1901. Over 10,000 barrels were produced that year; by 1910 the number was over 3.6 million.35 This level of economic investment led to much more favorable