Gendering Antifascism

In her meticulous study of the Victory Board (Junta de la Victoria) in Argentina, Sandra McGee Deutsch has unearthed a previously overlooked all-women movement that proves to be a fundamental missing link in the histories of anti-fascism and feminism, not only in the country but also in Latin America. The Victory Board did not emerge in a vacuum as many of its members had previously participated in earlier local women's organizations, Popular Front Pan-American feminism, and international agencies like the Inter-American Commission of Women. During this period, they mobilized around women's rights as well as national and international causes such as World War I, General José Félix Uriburu's coup in 1930, and the Spanish Civil War. Prompted by the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 and taking its name from Winston Churchill's “V for Victory” slogan, the Victory Board was created to deliver material aid to the Allies during World War II. Yet, as McGee Deutsch aptly demonstrates, it went beyond simply organizing women for a socially acceptable philanthropic activity inscribed within traditional gender roles: it carried a strong message of anti-fascism and democratic values across the country, engaged in South-South and South-North solidarity, and promoted women's rights. McGee Deutsch convincingly argues that the Victory Board became “the pivotal Argentine women's political organization before suffrage in 1947” (p. 4; emphasis in original).Through painstaking archival work, the author reconstructs the Victory Board's institutional workings at both the national and the local levels, revealing an extensive and efficient operation. Most affiliates were in the city of Buenos Aires as well as the provinces of Buenos Aires, Santa Fe, and Entre Ríos, but in 1943 the organization declared that it had 113 chapters in the interior, 22 secretariats, and 45,000 members. While the Victory Board collected monetary donations—and depended on them to pay for rent, operational costs, and supplies—the main contribution expected from members was that they knit and sew garments for soldiers, refugees, and children in Europe. Equally important, the Victory Board encouraged members to gather together in groups to accomplish these tasks. McGee Deutsch argues that the emphasis on women's own work made the war “their own,” and thus the Victory Board was far more effective in popularizing anti-fascism in the country than other anti-fascist organizations like Acción Argentina, the largest Argentine anti-fascist group, which did not require this form of hands-on, personal engagement.Although the Victory Board appealed to women as housekeepers and mothers and engaged them in domestic activities that conformed to gender roles, tempering opposition among husbands and fathers, it did not endorse a single notion of womanhood, nor was it uniformly maternalistic. Furthermore, McGee Deutsch effectively demonstrates that although the Victory Board avoided the feminist label and refrained from upholding reproductive rights, it was an exceptional space of female politization and empowerment. The group promoted women's political rights, supported female participation in civil defense and education, and encouraged female self-expression, service in public roles, and personal liberation. In contrast to anti-fascist men and the organizations they controlled, which were largely uninterested in questioning female political and social exclusion, women activists made the Victory Board a true school of democracy where lessons in anti-fascism went beyond writings and speeches and materialized in everyday practices that trained members in the exercise of citizenship. This involved managing chapters, meeting garment quotas, sending aid abroad, organizing events, procuring donations, circumventing obstacles, dealing with government and social opposition, and establishing transnational collaborations with the British and US governments as well as with similar anti-fascist groups in Latin America, most notably the Uruguayan Acción Femenina por la Victoria—an aspect that the author examines in detail. Significantly, a unique characteristic of the Victory Board was its heterogeneity in terms of class, nationality, politics, age, and ethnicity, examples of which McGee Deutsch illuminates in many of the chapters through individuals’ life stories. Thus, professionals, factory workers, farmers, housewives, Jews, Catholics, Argentines, foreigners, grandmothers, young adults, Communists, Radicals, and Socialists, among others, were required to collaborate and debate in a plural setting, providing them a valuable education in egalitarianism, multiculturalism, and anti-racism.McGee Deutsch argues that the Victory Board's biggest challengers were nationalists who, though not always openly fascist, associated anti-fascism with Communism and Jewishness, condemned women's public roles, argued that charity began at home rather than with sending aid abroad, denounced and threatened the group, lobbied against its activities, and even attacked some of its chapters. Hostility reached its peak after the military coup in 1943, when General Pedro Pablo Ramírez took power and the regime embraced neutrality, forcing the Victory Board to go underground. The group resurfaced in April 1945 after Argentina, with the Allied victory in sight, declared war on the Axis in March. It then dissolved in 1947 with Juan Domingo Perón as president. McGee Deutsch argues that the end of the war, Perón's popularity and program of social justice, and the women's suffrage law approved in 1947 removed the Victory Board's main purposes. The Communist Party's new hostility against the United States and Great Britain and the end of the Popular Front strategy prompted divisions in the Victory Board and led to the loss of Communist support. The Communist-backed Unión de Mujeres de la Argentina created in 1947 further crippled the Victory Board. McGee Deutsch appropriately finishes her book with the end of the organization. Still, I wish she would have devoted a chapter to reconstruct in detail the paths taken by some of the Victory Board's members after its dissolution, which would have thus effectively illustrated how their experiences in the organization had prepared them for political life, activism, and democratic citizenship under Peronism and in the following decades.Superbly researched and elegantly written, McGee Deutsch's book is a remarkable contribution to the scholarship of women's activism and organizing in Latin America. It is also a timely invitation to reconsider the deeply gendered meanings of anti-fascism and democracy—a topic that is even more fitting in the current context of rising totalitarian ideas in the region and the world

Political science · Politics · Social activism · Sociology · Anarchism and Radical Politics · Argentine historical studies · Gender Studies · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · Law

• Entrevista a Sandra McGee Deutsch

  Open Access•Sandra Mcgee Deutsch, Ernesto Bohoslavsky et al.•Avances del Cesor•2023

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