Based on her award-winning dissertation, Katherine Marino's book convincingly argues for the place of Latin American feminists, not only as crucially important thinkers and activists, but also in the development of foundational ideas of human rights. Countering the idea that Latin American feminists lagged behind their US and European counterparts, Marino demonstrates how these women took the lead in developing pivotal ideas surrounding social and economic rights and intersectionality in the early twentieth century. Mainstream white US and European feminists did not seriously consider these ideas until late in the century. Marino argues that an anti-imperialist, anti-fascist, pan-American feminismo americano led to the inclusion of human rights (and specific mention of women) in the 1945 charter of the United Nations, the equal eligibility of women to participate as delegates, and the establishment of the UN Commission on the Status of Women (221).

Marino's often thrilling account centers on the lives, convictions, and political struggles of six activists: Paulina Luisi, a Uruguayan doctor often recognized as the mother of Latin American feminism; Bertha Lutz, a Brazilian biologist who helped draft both the Brazilian constitution of 1934 and the UN charter; Clara González, a Panamanian lawyer who championed an anti- imperialist feminism for women of all social classes; Ofelia Domínguez Navarro, a Cuban lawyer and communist who championed a race- and class-conscious intersectional feminism; Marta Vergara, a Chilean journalist crucial to anti-fascist Popular Front feminism throughout the Americas; and Doris Stevens, the US head of the Inter-American Commission of Women (IACW) for a decade and the figurehead against which the rest of these feminists fought to advance their more expansive aspirations. Marino names and celebrates other important Latin American feminists, including several important Mexican feminists, but her concentration on the friendships, strategic alliances, and complex power struggles of these six activists highlights the degree to which the idiosyncratic convictions of individual feminists have influenced our global understandings of human rights.

The book's narrative concentrates on these activists’ organizing efforts and the communications surrounding a plethora of international meetings in the interwar period. In many ways, Marino's book is about the rise and fall of Doris Stevens's problematic leadership of the IACW. Her single-minded ambition for an international treaty for gender equality at the expense of all other issues, coupled with her racist and classist ideas about everyday Latin American women, united her peers against her (especially González, Domínguez, and Vergara). Marino highlights the degree to which the US domestic struggle over the Equal Rights Amendment (and the discourses of protectionist legislation versus legal equality) hindered US feminism and had detrimental impacts on Pan-American feminismo americano.

A second unifying narrative of the book centers on the problematic leadership of Brazilian feminist (and eugenicist) Bertha Lutz. This history builds to a climax when Lutz, along with Minerva Bernadino and Amalia de Castillo Ledón, advanced as three of only six official women delegates to the 1945 meeting in San Francisco that founded the United Nations. The only other female delegates, from the United States and the United Kingdom, were against forwarding specific mention of women's rights in the charter and did everything they could to prevent the Latin American women from doing so. Although none of these three women were Popular Front feminists, Marino argues that the grassroots strength of Pan-American Popular Front feminism in the previous decades provided them with the foundation and language to propose the “promotion of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms regardless of race, sex, condition, or creed” (200) as part of the preamble of the UN Charter.

Marino's book is an important work for any scholar or student interested in Latin American feminisms, Pan-American movements, the history of human rights, or even histories of how whiteness has operated in Latin American politics. Her writing and arguments are nuanced and specific enough to satisfy exacting scholars, and clear and engaging enough to be useful for undergraduate classrooms.