Pan American Women: U.S. Internationalists and Revolutionary Mexico

Abstract

The history of failure can be as instructive as that of success, as Megan Threlkeld demonstrates in this study of U.S. women's rights advocates and their efforts to collaborate with counterparts in Mexico during the 1920s and 1930s. Building on two decades of scholarship on Mexican women and her own extensive research in U.S. women's organizations archives, Threlkeld delves into the divergent political and sociocultural milieu within which each group worked. Despite their best efforts, U.S. women had little to no impact on Mexican suffragists' near victory in the 1937–1938 period. (Women did not win full suffrage in Mexico until 1953.) Threlkeld argues that U.S. women's failure to exert influence was due to their relative lack of power within their own country to respond to Mexican women's self-identified priorities; the profoundly different national contexts within which women worked; and U.S. women's imperialist, and often racist, world view. After winning the vote, women in the United States sought to insert themselves in international diplomacy and extend their influence beyond national borders. During the 1920s, relations between the United States and Mexico were tense. The United States had intervened into Mexican territory and affairs, and was unwilling to officially recognize President Álvaro Obregón. Gendered diplomacy—the argument that women brought new solutions to international diplomacy—created an opening for women to insert themselves. Jane Addams and Emily Greene Balch, for example, active in the International Women's League for Peace and Freedom, sought to temper intervention in the affairs of other countries. Collaboration with Mexican women was integral to this work. Progressives, however, faced red-baiting that significantly limited their capacity to make an impact. Coming from a quite different position, the wives of diplomats and businessmen also engaged in the politics of persuasion in international affairs, though the logic of gendered diplomacy limited their influence.