Pan American Women. Megan Threlkeld
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president of WILPF, distinguished between what she saw as masculine realms of international diplomacy, characterized by formal, officially sanctioned exchanges among men, and the nongovernmental, less formal, interpersonal modes of exchange among women.11 Women, Addams and her supporters argued, were suited by nature and habit to interact on a personal level. If cultivated properly, those personal exchanges could grow and flourish to a point at which shared experiences and shared knowledge of peoples and cultures across national boundaries could do as much to prevent war as any diplomatic treaty. Addams referred to this as “human internationalism,” to differentiate it from what she saw as impersonal, formal agreements and interactions among governments. Other proponents took this gendered argument one step further, claiming that motherhood endowed women with the authority to promote peace. At a women’s peace conference in 1915 U.S. suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt encouraged her audience to take up the internationalist banner: “O, my sisters, this, henceforth, is the especial task of the World’s Mothers…. It is for us to foster Internationalism, that promise of the civilization yet to come.”12 According to Catt, and to other women alarmed by the outbreak of violence in Europe, women’s roles as mothers both authorized and obligated them to explore and endorse alternatives to war.
Second, I use “women’s internationalism” to denote cooperation across borders in the interest of advancing women’s status. Doris Stevens, the first chair of the Inter-American Commission of Women, did not share Addams’s and Catt’s belief that women’s nature as social beings or their experiences as mothers drove them to enact internationalism in gendered ways. During her tenure with the IACW, Stevens used whatever methods she could to advance her goals of securing hemispheric treaties on married women’s nationality and women’s equal rights. In some instances she cultivated personal relationships with women in ways that evoked Addams’s practices; in others she lobbied male diplomats and drafted legislation just as any nongovernmental agent or organization might do. But her goal, the function of her internationalism, was to recognize and to secure women’s rights on a global scale.13 This was a less idealistic, more sophisticated approach to internationalism, and its adherents were often younger and more politically shrewd in their methods. Clearly, there was significant potential for overlap between these two definitions of women’s internationalism, but they remained distinct approaches.
This is a history of internationalism, but it is not an internationalist history. Where other recent works have been concerned with the impact of internationalist ideas in other parts of the world, my primary focus is on U.S. women and their organizations.14 More specifically, I am interested in national organizations rather than regional ones. There were myriad charitable and service organizations begun along the U.S.-Mexico border in response to the influx of refugees after 1911, like the Pan American Round Table of San Antonio, Texas, but their agendas were local rather than hemispheric. I am also interested in secular groups rather than explicitly religious and missionary ones whose primary purpose was to proselytize. There were hundreds if not thousands of Protestant missionaries in Mexico during the Revolution, significant numbers of whom were women.15 But they did not see themselves as internationalists like Jane Addams or Doris Stevens, and their goal was to win converts, not to promote peace or advance women’s status.
Changing Dynamics
By the 1910s, international organizations and connections among women across national borders were well-established phenomena. As early as the 1830s, educated upper- and middle-class women in the United States and western Europe were exchanging letters and visits in which they discussed their common struggles for women’s rights, abolition, temperance, and other causes. These early networks laid the foundations for the organizations that developed by the 1880s.16 The International Council of Women, established in 1888, was the first organization dedicated to connecting women around the world. Other significant groups included the World Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and the International Woman Suffrage Alliance. All these groups grappled with questions about identity, mission, and representation. Whether dedicated to one cause or many, whether claiming to represent nonwhite, nonelite, or non-Western women or not, this “first wave” of women’s internationalism sharpened the desire of its participants to advance women’s status and to secure a more peaceful world.17
The outbreak of World War I lent a new urgency to their efforts. By 1915 the war had sparked a new wave of women’s internationalism, one that was more attuned to international relations and diplomacy, and more convinced of the connection between global peace and the status of women.18 In April 1915 more than one thousand women from every warring nation met at The Hague to discuss bringing an end not only to the current war but to all future wars. In her closing address to the congress, Jane Addams noted with awe and pride that at a time when the “spirit of internationalism had apparently broken down,” these women had come together “to protest from our hearts, … to study this complicated modern world, [and] to suggest ways by which this large internationalism may find itself and dig new channels through which it may flow.”19 All the participants believed that world peace could not be guaranteed without extending the parliamentary franchise to women, and that women had a responsibility to claim for themselves an active role in international relations. These beliefs were at the core of the organization founded at the congress, the International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace, later reconstituted as the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.
The nature of women’s internationalism was shifting in other ways as well. In the nineteenth century, women reformers often saw themselves as embarking on a grand civilizing mission to spread “Western” culture and ideologies, particularly those centered on domesticity and female moral authority. The World Woman’s Christian Temperance Union sought to “liberate” women in China, India, Japan, and other regions by convincing them of their potential power within abstinent, Christian families and societies.20 Generations of European and U.S. suffragists and feminists relied on and perpetuated assumptions of “Western” superiority and “Eastern” backwardness and savagery as they sought to establish their own moral authority and to argue for their own advancement.21 Manifestations of this discourse among women have been called “feminist orientalism” or “imperial feminism,” signifying the belief that “Western” goals and modes of activism—generally liberal, republican, individualist, and Protestant—were the standards by which to measure all feminisms and all women’s status.22 This literature articulates the ways in which U.S. women assumed their platforms were both superior and universal, and thus were sure to be embraced by Latin American, African, Asian, and Middle Eastern women. I am interested though in their internationalist platforms as well as their feminist ones. U.S. women believed their own methods for securing peace and global cooperation, as well as for securing women’s advancement, were superior to any others. Therefore I use the phrase “imperialist internationalism” in addition to “imperialist feminism” to refer to this dynamic.23
In many ways, women like Jane Addams and those in WILPF had abandoned the most blatantly imperialistic forms of this rhetoric by 1915. These women internationalists saw themselves as citizens of a world community rather than as agents of Western civilization. They established for themselves an active and influential role in international politics by holding conferences and lobbying governments. WILPF, for instance, devoted much of its time in the late 1910s and early 1920s to urging the Allied powers to redesign the Versailles Treaty to include disarmament, and to pressuring the United States to join the World Court. Although their efforts were only moderately successful, they did earn the respect of government officials in many countries.24
Elements of the orientalist ethos persisted, however. Organizations like WILPF that originated in Europe and in the “neo-Europes”—Australia, Canada, and the United States—not only struggled to include women of non-European descent in their ranks but they also persisted in viewing northern and western Europe and the United States as the “core” of their internationalist realms, and Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America as the “periphery.” Membership practices and organizational rhetoric further marginalized vast numbers of women. Annual conferences were held in Europe or occasionally in the United States, and proceedings were conducted only in French, German, or English. Leaders often spoke of their desire to “help”