Born in Cuba, Made in the Americas

As female attorneys celebrated their newly acquired right to argue cases before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1879, contemporaneously, the War of the Pacific was unfolding in the Southern Hemisphere. The War of the Pacific—a territorial conflict between Bolivia, Peru, and Chile— hindered the United States’ ability to conduct foreign commerce as well as threatened the territorial integrity of the Americas (Bastert 1959: 379). These two seemingly unrelated events would eventually provide the strategic access points by which women across the Western Hemisphere would coalesce publicly to petition their respective American governments for equal rights under the law.In the aftermath of the War of the Pacific, in 1889 the United States hosted delegates from seventeen Latin American countries in Washington, DC at the First International Conference of American States (also known as the first Pan-American Conference), ostensibly as part of an effort to cultivate peace and foster amicable commercial relations throughout the Americas.1 Following that successful first gathering, the Pan-American Union was established and convened nine additional conferences between 1889 and 1948 that met throughout the hemisphere. In every case, only men participated officially as delegates and representatives of their states, and neither were “women’s issues” addressed nor were women allowed to participate as delegates, participants, or speakers—that is, until the sixth Pan-American Conference held in 1928 in Havana, Cuba.The Havana conference was convened eight years after the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified, and after almost a decade of U.S. suffragists working but failing to secure an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). Recognizing that international pressure was often a necessary complement to domestic political organizing, the National Woman’s Party (NWP) established a Committee on International Action (CIA) to that end. By gathering together the majority of the hemisphere’s nation-states every five years, the Pan-American Union became an efficient and potentially powerful target of ERA organizers. Thus, Doris Stevens, the chair of the NWP-CIA, attended the Havana conference with the goal of putting international pressure on the United States by utilizing international law and diplomacy as her primary weapon (McKenzie 2011: 130–32).At the same time, in Latin America and the Caribbean, feminist and women’s movements had decades of transnational, trans-Atlantic, and anti–U.S. imperialism activist experience, as well as well-established lines of communication and collaboration with the U.S. suffragists, feminists, and women’s movement leaders. That history, coupled with Latin American and Caribbean feminist and women’s movements’ organizational acumen, multilingualism,2 and social and cultural capital, made the Havana conference an equally appealing target for intervention by feminists from throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. Conference delegates were confronted daily by the feminist lobbyists: women showed up to sessions (a first for the conference), approached them at dinner, and questioned them at their yacht clubs and offices. As Muna Lee, NWP member representing Puerto Rico,3 wrote in the “From the Archives” report that follows in this issue: “Wherever there were women, there was that insistent question. ‘When shall we have our hearing?’”Press reports on the women’s activism were published daily in local and international papers. Borrowing strategies and techniques deployed by feminists in Latin America and the Caribbean, and by U.S. suffragists during their successful 1879 U.S. Supreme Court petition, this international coalition of women secured an opportunity to present their case for an equal rights treaty not only to the congress of American nation-states gathered there, but to the world press reporting on the event. Women from dozens of organizations throughout the hemisphere harmonized their lobbying efforts to compel delegates they identified as amenable to approve their petition to speak before the assembly. The Havana conference marked the first time in history when women would disturb this boys-only club by petitioning delegates for the right to speak before conference members.Unable to ignore the unrelenting transnational feminist alliance, the Pan-American Union ultimately extended an invitation to speak before the conference. An Equal Rights Committee organized by the women selected four representatives from the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the United States to speak on their behalf. That radical 1928 amalgamation of women in Havana understood the power of international treaties: reform that happened at a global level set a precedent that could not be ignored as it would supersede domestic laws. Following the women’s speeches, the Pan-American Union delegates unanimously approved a resolution to constitute the first intergovernmental organization in the world—the Inter-American Commission of Women (IACW)/Comisión Interamericana de Mujeres (CIM)—dedicated to women’s issues.The IACW/CIM’s first mandate would be to investigate the nature of women’s and men’s rights under existing political and civil law in the twenty-one American and Caribbean republics. This combination of coalitionism, transnational feminism, diplomacy, and media tactics birthed the first “generator of hemispheric policies that link public policy with international legal framework on human rights,” one that continues to “shape the public policy agenda from a rights-based perspective for the full citizenship of women and the elimination of gender-based discrimination and violence” (OAS 2020)

Constitution · Economic history · Ethnology · Latin Americans · Political science · Spanish Civil War · Supreme court · Western hemisphere · American Constitutional Law and Politics · History · International Labor and Employment Law · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law

• The Power of International Positioning

  Open Access•Beatrice Mckenzie•Gender & History•2011

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• A New Approach to the Origins of Blaine's Pan American Policy

  Russell H Bastert•Hispanic American Historical Review•1959

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