Historians of Latin America will not be surprised by E. Sue Wamsley's thesis: US feminists involved in the founding and early years of the Pan American Union's Inter-American Commission of Women (IACW) behaved imperialistically toward Latin American feminists, who brought their own experience and agency to Pan American organizing, thus limiting US domination. Wamsley is particularly critical of the US National Women's Party (NWP), equal-rights feminists who, she argues, sought to leverage control of the IACW to further their agenda in Euro-American feminist and League of Nations spheres of action.
Drawing on the papers of several leading US feminists and the archives of the IACW, NWP, and the US League of Women Voters, Wamsley has produced a richly documented organizational history of the struggle to create the IACW within the Pan American Union and then a history of the commission's first decade, with NWP leader Doris Stevens as its chair. She argues that the IACW is worthy of study as the first quasi-governmental international feminist organization, one that forced some progress toward women's international legal equality in the 1930s, and in which Latin American feminists exercised agency in relation to both powerful male officials and US feminists.
Focusing on elite, educated liberal feminists who were claiming some quasi-governmental authority, Wamsley frames her book within historiographies of women, diplomacy, and foreign relations, rather than those of gender and social movements, political parties, or labor and unions. Thus, her focus is on power struggles within the IACW among nationally defined groups of women. The resulting narrative features a gallery of Latin American feminists who engaged in diverse negotiations with each other and with US feminists over the leadership and agenda of the IACW, but who are not deeply anchored by Wamsley in their shifting national and inter-Latin American contexts. For example, how did the collapse of oligarchic Liberal governments affect the experience and agendas that Latin American feminists were bringing to the IACW?
Nonetheless, Wamsley shows the considerable number of Latin American women—and some male allies in government—who engaged with the IACW. Historians of Latin American elite feminists in the 1910s through the 1930s will find new details about their protagonists in this book. The downfall of Doris Stevens and her replacement by Ana Rosa de Martínez Guerrero of Argentina in 1939 was in large part due to US party and labor politics, not least the attitude of New Dealers to protective women's labor legislation. Placing the IACW in broader political, social, and historiographical contexts would have made this more than an organizational history.
The classism and racism of elite liberal feminists are well documented, as are their roles in reproducing systems of capitalist, racist, and imperialist oppression domestically and internationally. Wamsley acknowledges this, but for the most part she characterizes US IACW leaders’ behavior as aggressive, arrogant, and bullying, rather than asking how they likely perceived even their white Latin American counterparts as racially inferior, or how Latin American IACW activists may have asserted the racial fitness of their own organization and that of their governments and nations, either overtly or by refusing to allow Stevens to treat the IACW as her fiefdom.
Wamsley mentions NWP assistance to Puerto Rican suffragists in the late 1920s and Muna Lee's simultaneous volunteer service as the IACW's first director of information and publicity. Married to Luis Muñoz Marín, bilingual, and resident in Puerto Rico for a decade, Lee perceptively argued that women, “like Puerto Rico, are dependents. We are anomalies before the law” (85). The impossibility of a Puerto Rican delegation to the IACW underscores that Latin American IACW activists were engaging not simply arrogant US feminists, but also a hemispheric imperialist hegemon that could withhold the Nineteenth Amendment from its own colonial citizens.
