Pan American Women. Megan Threlkeld
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revolutionary feminism emerged first in the Yucatán, in eastern Mexico. The same month that Jane Addams addressed the Women’s Auxiliary Conference in Washington, a very different group of women assembled in Mérida, the Yucatecan capital. In January 1916 the governor of the state, Salvador Alvarado, called two feminist congresses to raise consciousness of women’s subordination among Yucatecans and to empower working- and middle-class women to advance their own interests.35 Yucatán had become a kind of laboratory for testing radical social ideas during the Revolution, thanks in part to Alvarado himself. Venustiano Carranza had appointed him governor in 1915, but his ideas concerning women’s issues were more radical than those of most of his party. Alvarado believed all women should receive a solid education, encouraged them to participate in civic life, promoted literacy, and even changed the civil code to allow unmarried women to work outside the home. But the empowerment of women Alvarado sought had its limits; he wanted to elevate women’s status in order for Mexico to be seen as a modern nation, but he still believed that a woman’s most important role was that of a wife.36
The congresses revealed a range of views among Mexican women, but the majority demanded greater access to education and liberation from the “yoke of tradition,” even though most did not go so far as to reject marriage and motherhood.37 Not surprisingly, since the majority of the delegates were teachers, the resolutions of the first congress in January stressed schooling and teaching as the best ways to liberate women and make their contributions to the family and to society more valuable. A few women did express more radical views. Hermila Galindo, a leading Mexican feminist and personal secretary to President Carranza, drew nationwide attention to the congress when she advocated for birth control and access to divorce. Galindo did not actually attend, but in a paper read by a colleague she argued that the new approach to women’s education should include instruction on anatomy and hygiene, since women’s sex drive was just as strong as men’s and they needed to be educated about their own bodies. She also argued forcefully against the sexual double standard, and demanded women’s right to divorce.38 Taken together, these opinions were interpreted by many in the audience, not to mention the press, as promoting free love and sexual equality for women.39 In fact, most of the delegates were more moderate; they supported Alvarado’s plan for expanding women’s education, and instead of the right to divorce, they demanded that Alvarado reform the civil code to allow single women to leave home at age twenty-one, as men were allowed to do.40 Although the focus of feminist activity shifted to Mexico City shortly after Alvarado left office in 1918, these early conferences in the Yucatán marked the first organized feminist activity in Mexico and influenced later feminist conferences in the 1920s.
New feminist leaders emerged from the Yucatán congresses, some of whom would have significant interactions with U.S. women internationalists over the next decade. One of the more radical was Elena Torres Cuéllar. Torres was a schoolteacher from Guanajuato who traveled to Yucatán to attend the congresses. She was a friend of Hermila Galindo, and read Galindo’s paper at the first congress. Enamored with the feminist and revolutionary environment of the region, Torres stayed on in Mérida after the conference. Alvarado, impressed with Torres’s motivation and background in education, put her in charge of opening a Montessori school. Torres also became an active participant in the Yucatán Socialist Party.41 In 1918 she helped organize the Latin American Bureau of the Third International, which aimed to foster solidarity between Russian and Mexican workers.42 In 1918 or 1919, she moved to Mexico City, where she cofounded the Consejo Feminista Mexicano (Mexican Feminist Council, CFM) in August 1919.
Like Galindo, Torres was frustrated by the limitations of revolutionary rhetoric for women. She saw herself not as a “useful political instrument” for Mexico’s modernization, but as an equal citizen.43 Dedicated to the economic, social, and political emancipation of women, Torres’s group became over the next few years the most important feminist organization in Mexico, and the focal point of most interactions between U.S. and Mexican women internationalists. Its goals ranged from equal pay for equal work to civic improvements such as neighborhood inspections and children’s parks to political rights and reform of the civil code. The CFM demanded enforcement of the laws protecting women workers that were spelled out in the 1917 Constitution, including overtime pay, safe working conditions, and maternity leave. It claimed equal political rights for women, including the right to vote in local and national elections and the right to run for and hold public office.44 The CFM platform was not quite as radical as Torres’s personal beliefs; there was no mention of birth control or divorce, for instance. But the group’s demands did reflect Torres’s concern with women as workers, demanding the establishment of wages “considering woman as head of a family,” and mechanisms for establishing workplace safety and sanitation.
The Consejo Feminista drew strength and legitimacy from revolutionary rhetoric, even as its members pushed back against its limits and sought international connections to bolster their standing. The group’s platform reflected the revolutionary atmosphere in which it was created, incorporating “effective realization of the rights of citizenship granted by the present Constitution and its [enlargement]” and “equal political rights for men and women.”45 Central to Elena Torres’s mission was to “aid in the reconstruction of our country.”46 But there was also a clear internationalist cast to the CFM agenda. The group’s call to Mexican women included a demand for cooperation “with women around the world to abolish war, end militarism, and ensure the rights of weaker peoples to live in peace, harmony, and perfect liberty.”47 Torres was eager to establish contacts with international women’s organizations, to “promote a feminine entente-cordiale among the women of the whole world in order to bring about permanent peace and international amity.”48 Although it is difficult to pin down the origins of the CFM’s internationalist impulses, it is possible they grew from members’ understanding that the Yucatán congresses had drawn interest from U.S. and European women, and thus that Mexican women’s struggle for emancipation could attract international support. It is also possible that Elena Torres’s involvement with the Third International influenced her global thinking as she and her colleagues drew up their platform.
Mexican feminism was thus bound up with the Revolution in important ways, as women like Elena Torres demanded equal access to the new measures of citizenship promised by the 1917 Constitution. Despite their loyalty to the Revolution, however, some Mexican feminists, including Torres, were willing to explore and develop connections with women in other countries, including the United States. Even in the midst of a rising tide of anti-U.S. sentiment, Torres and her colleagues turned in the late 1910s and early 1920s to U.S. women for help in achieving their feminist goals. This suggests that for them, at least, nationalism and internationalism could coexist.
Practicing Human Internationalism
Most U.S. women did not fully understand the nuances of the Mexican Revolution, nor the depth of anti-U.S. sentiment in Mexico. But they did understand the contentious nature of U.S.-Mexican relations, and the potential for those relations to deteriorate as the negotiations over Article 27 dragged on. As the “old” internationalism was breaking down, when diplomacy and formal agreements were no longer sufficient to stem the tide of U.S.-Mexican animosity, U.S. women stepped into the fray to practice human internationalism.
If formal, legal internationalism was measured in treaties and conventions and assessed by examining whether or not they were observed or implemented, the efficacy of human internationalism was harder to gauge. U.S. women pursued it by establishing contacts with Mexican women, maintaining a correspondence with those contacts, sharing information about themselves and their organizations, sending U.S. representatives to Mexico, recruiting Mexican women to form groups in Mexico City, convening conferences, and implementing a host of other initiatives. That is to say, they pursued the kind of work social activists and nongovernmental organizations have always done, and they did it with limited resources and finite amounts of time and energy. In the early years of this inter-American endeavor, their efforts seemed to pay off.
Any group of U.S. women hoping to expand its work in Mexico needed first to establish contacts in the country. How different organizations sought those contacts, and what kinds of women they hoped to find, varied significantly according