Pan American Women. Megan Threlkeld
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on moral grounds, and followed the nonresistance philosophy of William Lloyd Garrison and Mohandas Gandhi. Its official founder and first chair was Fanny Garrison Villard, the abolitionist’s daughter, who funded the group for its first several years. But the society’s ethos and policies were largely shaped by Elinor Byrns. A practicing lawyer who had once run for local office on the Socialist ticket, Byrns established the society’s commitment to total pacifism and universal disarmament. Most of the society’s work throughout 1919 and 1920 focused on lobbying the state government in New York and the federal government in Washington, D.C., to end military appropriations and compulsory military training in public schools.14 Hampered by its small size, small budget, and internal strife between Villard and Byrns, the WPS never approached the scale of WILPF or other women’s peace organizations, but its absolute pacifism later proved appealing to Mexican women seeking support within the United States against U.S. military interventions in Mexico.
Opposing World War I was a dangerous stance to take, as Addams, Balch, Villard, and Byrns knew all too well. In the atmosphere of heightened patriotism and xenophobic nationalism that spread across the country in 1917 and 1918, pacifists, feminists, socialists, and radicals of any kind were held in contempt. Opponents of both peace and women’s suffrage increasingly linked the two causes with radicalism and socialism in attempts to discredit women like Addams and Balch. Some women activists succumbed to the pressure and pursued less controversial paths. Carrie Chapman Catt, who had been a founding member of the Women’s Peace Party in 1915, withdrew from the group and famously threw the support of the National American Woman Suffrage Association behind Wilson and the war effort. She took personal pride in the fact that by 1917, hers was a bourgeois organization, “with nothing radical about it.”15 Within the Left, the split over World War I deepened the divide between socialists, who opposed the war, and progressives, who largely supported it. That split hardened after the Bolshevik Revolution in November 1917; over the next several years, socialists and communists—and those suspected of associating or sympathizing with them—came increasingly under attack.16
Not all women internationalists opposed U.S. entry into World War I. While committed to creating a more peaceful world, the Young Women’s Christian Association supported Woodrow Wilson’s mission to “make the world safe for democracy.” This was in keeping with the association’s longstanding vision of Christian internationalism and support for missionary work overseas. The YWCA had emerged out of mid-nineteenth-century reform movements in Britain and the United States. Though the movements arose separately in the two countries, they united in 1894 to found the World Young Women’s Christian Association, which served as an umbrella organization for all national associations. Although the YWCA of the U.S.A. was not formally incorporated until 1906, members had been active locally since the 1860s—running boarding houses, employment bureaus, and community centers in cities such as New York, Boston, and Dayton, Ohio. During World War I, that kind of experience was in high demand both in Europe and on the home front. Volunteers supplied housing and recreational activities to women’s military auxiliaries in France, and opened “hostess houses” across the United States for the families of servicemen. Located near training camps, the houses offered protection to soldiers’ wives and children and provided a wholesome, moral environment for servicemen’s recreation.17 The association’s ability to provide both relief and moral guidance made it hugely popular among Progressive reformers. By the end of the war, the YWCA’s programs, profile, budget, and membership had all expanded dramatically. With over half a million members in 1920, it was the third-largest women’s organization in the country, behind only the General Federation of Women’s Clubs and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.
The YWCA’s earlier experiences overseas and its shift toward political action in the early 1920s shaped its international ethos as much as did World War I. Association “secretaries,” as workers abroad were called, had been posted to India and China since the 1890s. Their encouragement of local initiatives and local leadership, as opposed to imported programs, established a pattern that later associations in Mexico and Latin America would follow.18 The U.S. association also assumed a more politically active character after 1920. Pressured by working-class members, the YWCA began supporting workers’ rights and lobbying for labor laws. More significantly, association leaders created space for workingwomen to articulate their demands and help shape this new direction. No longer was it enough for the YWCA to reform individuals; its emphasis had broadened to include reforming society as a whole through political action for social justice.19 Not coincidentally, the National Board in the early 1920s loosened the requirement that members had to conform to strict Protestantism, asking instead that they make a “statement of faith” and “take as a model to inform their life individually and socially, the life of Christ.” This fueled the association’s dedication to pluralism.20
On its establishment in 1906 as the YWCA of the U.S.A., the National Board divided its work into two divisions, home and foreign.21 Before 1914, the main focus of the Foreign Division was on Asia, but after World War I its members turned their attention closer to home. The work of the Foreign Division during the interwar period was steered by Sarah Lyon, who served as its director from 1920 to 1944. Originally from New Jersey, Lyon graduated from Mt. Holyoke College in 1906, and worked for several local YWCAs in various capacities before joining the national staff.22 She ran the division “with the zeal and efficiency of a general,” requiring frequent reports from secretaries abroad and closely monitoring local political situations in those countries. Lyon’s influence largely dictated which overseas projects received funding from the U.S. association. She chose her targets selectively. In the early 1920s, for example, Lyon pursued opportunities in the Philippines, because it was a U.S. protectorate, and in Mexico, because of its geographic proximity. She also based her decisions on which projects were likely to become self-sustaining in the shortest time possible.23 Mexico City, which could boast a significant number of U.S. citizens in residence and where the Young Men’s Christian Association had flourished since 1902, seemed a promising target.
Unlike both the Women’s International League and the YWCA, the Pan American International Women’s Committee was the only internationalist organization born during World War I that did not expressly refer to the war as an impetus for its formulation. It took shape in the wake of a conference organized by the wives of representatives to the Second Pan American Scientific Congress. This Women’s Auxiliary Conference, held in Washington, D.C., from December 28, 1915, to January 7, 1916, was attended by wives and daughters of Latin American delegates to the Scientific Congress, as well as a handful of other prominent U.S. women—including Jane Addams, whose closing address on human internationalism inspired many in her audience. Emma Bain Swiggett, whose husband was the executive secretary of the Scientific Congress, took charge of the women’s conference and directed the formation of the PAIWC over the course of the following year. Very little is known about Swiggett; she graduated from Indiana University, and married her husband in 1892.24 She coordinated the committee’s work throughout the first decade of its existence, and authored its mission to “stimulate and co-ordinate the work of the women of Pan America for social and civic betterment.”25 Made up of women with little history of political activism (Addams did not join), the Pan American committee was very different ideologically from the Women’s International League, the Women’s Peace Society, and the YWCA, but its members did believe that greater friendship and cooperation among the women of the Americas would promote friendly relations among their governments. “Pan Americanism embodies beautiful ideals,” one member maintained, “and may it not be that after all, the intelligent work of women through favorable avenues of sympathy will be the means of creating in time the real Pan American Spirit.”26 Despite the fact that World War I did not lead explicitly to the committee’s formation, the rhetoric of Pan Americanism pervaded calls for hemispheric solidarity in these years, and would have evoked anti-German patriotism among the committee’s audiences.27
Thus women’s internationalism in the late 1910s and early 1920s grew out of both the existing networks of white middle-class women’s activism and the immediate crisis of World War I. The Women’s International League and the Women’s Peace Society arose in opposition to the war, while the Young Women’s Christian Association and the Pan American International Women’s Committee drew