Pan American Women. Megan Threlkeld
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International Women’s Committee had grown out of the Women’s Auxiliary Conference and that their main goal was Pan American unity, it is not surprising that Emma Bain Swiggett sought her contacts through the members of Pan American Scientific Congress and the Latin American diplomatic corps. She exchanged numerous letters with Ignacio Bonillas, Mexican ambassador to the United States, and with Henry Fletcher, U.S. ambassador to Mexico, asking for names of Mexican women to whom she could reach out, but neither was particularly helpful. In the end the woman who became her principal Mexican contact was Adelia Palacios, a teacher whose name Swiggett knew because Palacios had attended the first Pan American Scientific Congress in 1908–1909. The YWCA, by contrast, sought out U.S. contacts in Mexico, rather than Mexican women. In other countries, such as China and Japan, part of the association’s mission was to serve missionaries and other U.S. women stationed abroad. Although the YWCA’s hopes for Mexico were centered more on Mexican women, reaching out to U.S. women and men in Mexico City gave them insight on current political and religious tensions that might hinder their efforts, and on whether a Mexican association would be useful. The YWCA also leaned heavily for guidance and support on the Young Men’s Christian Association, which had been operating in Mexico City since 1902.
Both the PAIWC and the YWCA were concerned with recruiting certain types of Mexican women, and avoiding others—especially radical women like Elena Torres and Hermila Galindo. Swiggett remarked to a colleague in early 1919 that though she was frustrated with the slow growth of the Mexican branch of the PAIWC, she took comfort in the fact that “our one member”—Palacios—“is the right sort and I hope we may soon have others.”49 Swiggett did not expand on what she meant by the “right sort,” but given the committee’s emphasis on Pan American unity and traditional ideals of womanhood, it is not difficult to imagine that Swiggett wanted members who would not be controversial within the official Pan American community, and whose personal and professional backgrounds were unobjectionable. The YWCA was more explicit. In a confidential letter to the director of the Pan American Union, one official noted that “Some of the Mexican women have become very radical. One of these is Señorita Hermila Galindo…. The work of the Y.W.C.A. is very greatly needed to counteract these too radical influences and help Mexican women to develop in a safe and natural way.”50 The association’s desire to avoid the feminists who had spoken out about birth control and divorce at the Yucatán congresses indicates that they sought to be of service to Mexican women in more traditional ways, and wanted Mexican contacts who would fit that mold. This approach on the part of these two organizations undercut the implicit universalism of Jane Addams’s human internationalism; both groups discounted on principle the knowledge and experiences of “radical” Mexican women. At the same time, both the PAIWC and the YWCA reinforced the emphasis on “spiritual” internationalism in their efforts to avoid ideological conflicts. These groups sought politically safer roads to internationalism.
The two peace organizations, on the other hand, welcomed activist and openly feminist women. When searching for potential recruits in Mexico, WILPF targeted women who had participated in the Yucatán congresses and eventually established contact with Elena Torres. Torres expressed interest in starting a branch in Mexico, and later supported WILPF’s efforts while president of the Consejo Feminista Mexicano.51 As president of the CFM, Torres also reached out to another peace organization in the United States, the Women’s Peace Society. How Torres learned of the WPS is unclear, since they were a very small group and were not seeking to expand outside the United States. But in December 1919 Torres contacted Elinor Byrns, the society’s executive secretary, because members of the Consejo Feminista were “anxious to come in contact with the various international women’s organizations, that they may know more of Mexico and her conditions.”52 Neither the WPS nor the CFM had the resources to do more than exchange letters and information, but they did that with frequency and increasing affection over the next two years. Both WILPF and the WPS sought contacts in Mexico who would help them further their efforts toward peace, and both welcomed the interest of one of the leading Mexican feminists during this period.
Once these myriad contacts had been established, the next step was to implement one of the central tenets of the new women’s internationalism—sharing information about the history, experiences, and goals of women in the United States and Mexico. Correspondence was cheap and relatively easy, provided that translators or a common language could be found. Generally, U.S. women wrote in English and Mexican women in Spanish, and all relied on translators within their organizations. A few Mexican women, including Elena Torres and Elena Landázuri, a member of the Consejo Feminista Mexicano who became the principal contact for WILPF, had spent time in the United States and wrote English well. Letters were also occasionally exchanged in French, which until this period was more likely than Spanish or English to be the second language of educated women in the United States or Mexico respectively.
Sharing information about themselves and their organizations was a way for U.S. and Mexican women to discover and establish common interests. Circular letters, pamphlets, periodicals, newspaper articles, press releases, and other media allowed a group’s ethos to fit into an envelope. When Rosa Manus contacted Salvador Alvarado, she sent a brief summary of the 1915 peace conference at The Hague. When Emma Bain Swiggett reached out to Adelia Palacios, she included a pamphlet outlining the main achievements of the Women’s Auxiliary Conference. U.S. women were not the only ones to follow this pattern. With her letter of introduction to the Women’s Peace Society, Elena Torres included a flyer detailing the mission and goals of the Consejo Feminista Mexicano.53
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the distances involved and the fact that Mexico was still experiencing periodic outbursts of revolutionary violence, the process of corresponding and sharing information was not as easy in practice as it was in theory. Letters got lost in the mail. Occasionally, operatives entrusted with messages of introduction or packets of information failed to deliver them for one reason or another. WILPF had a longstanding problem with a member of its California branch, who for several years represented herself as an intermediary for Jane Addams and Emily Greene Balch with the Consejo Feminista, but when Balch finally began corresponding directly with Elena Torres in 1922, they discovered their intermediary had not been fulfilling her duties.54 Maintaining a regular correspondence was also difficult when various women were ill or absent from their posts for long periods of time. Adelia Palacios endured a long illness during the winter of 1921. Elena Landázuri was away from Mexico City for three months in 1922 during the final illness and death of her mother. Addams and Balch also struggled with ill health. Travel abroad, which was common especially among WILPF and YWCA members, only made regular communication more difficult, since letters often had to be forwarded multiple times before they reached their intended recipients.55
Given these difficulties, many women recognized that the ideal way to share information in the pursuit of common ground was in person. Of the four organizations considered here, the YWCA and the Women’s International League sent representatives to Mexico; the Pan American International Women’s Committee and the Women’s Peace Society did not. Their different organizational structures offer some explanation. The YWCA and WILPF were constituted by sections and branches established in countries around the world. The PAIWC, by contrast, was based in Washington and operated primarily through correspondence during the periods between its major gatherings in conjunction with the scientific congresses. The WPS dedicated itself to lobbying in New York and Washington, and never intended to establish national sections in other countries.
The women who traveled to Mexico on behalf of the YWCA and WILPF had varying experiences. WILPF representative Rose Standish Nichols visited Mexico City twice over the course of 1920 to try to start a section there. She spoke with “twenty-five or thirty women” who “seemed interested and eager to form a group.”56 Nichols did not encounter Elena Torres or Elena Landázuri, but another U.S. member, Zonia Baber, met with them both during the same period. Baber, a professor of geography and a close friend of Jane Addams, traveled extensively in Mexico during the early 1920s. She did not know Torres well, but she was well liked both by Landázuri and by Adelia Palacios, with whom she interacted frequently. Two YWCA representatives, Harriet Taylor and Caroline Smith, traveled to Mexico in May 1921 to examine the feasibility of establishing a branch of the association there. They reported that their meetings with various groups of Mexican