Feminism for the Americas is the best book on Western Hemispheric feminism in at least two decades, because it solves the dispute about whether the term feminism could apply to Latin America or whether it was misappropriated by Latin American women or imposed by North American women during the beginning of the US expansionist century. Marino, through deep exploration of archival sources from throughout the Americas, is able to show that feminism emerged across the hemisphere from differing cultural and historic roots, rising from modest, local societies to regional, national, and international organizations. These strands of feminism cooperated when compromises were mutually beneficial and divided over irreconcilable differences. Because Marino traces feminismo americano in the first half of the twentieth century, a century of US imperialism, two world wars, and the Great Depression, she demonstrates that feminism influenced peace movements, the definition of human rights, and the presence of major political philosophies, such as fascism, democracy, and communism. Feminism too was influenced by industrialization, omnipresent male domination, religion, war, and the clashing political philosophies of the era. New historical challenges stimulated contrasting feminist solutions, even while all groups advocated essential social principles of women's self-determination and the enhancement of peace and human rights. In short, she declares that feminism was native to all the American nations, that it evolved, and that it was never static or rigidly defined.Marino enhanced her political and institutional history of American feminism with biographical studies of at least four of the movement's leaders. Each of the four women came from a different country and held different opinions about the meaning of feminism. They also influenced the movement at different times throughout the late nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth, when their national and hemispheric environments faced advancing challenges and crises in Western Europe and the Americas. Marino connects larger organizations with the smaller, local associations, showing that dominant and well-funded organizations were connected with workingwomen's groups personally and politically. By following alliances, antagonisms, and planned personal ambushes intended to diminish an individual's power, one must conclude that women were as jealous of their authority within the movement as many authoritarian male politicians. Personalism and caudillismo equated with male political domination existed, albeit in a diluted form, among women contending for power. The biographies of leading feminists also show that in a single life individual thinking evolved because of the cross-fertilization of ideas and hemispheric historical periods.The bibliographic scholarship is invaluable. Marino has deeply researched this complicated and far-reaching project. She has excavated individual women's archives. She has unearthed organizational records and correspondents. Newspapers and government records lay out formal dealings between the women, their governments, and the international community. Marino has traveled to archives in the United States, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Mexico, and Cuba, and she shares her findings in footnotes and the extensive bibliography, making the book a necessary starting point for anyone contemplating research on inter-American feminism. Only Asunción Lavrin's Women, Feminism, and Social Change in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, 1890–1940 (1995) attempted to peg down a history of Latin American feminism in its various forms, and that work covers only the Southern Cone. Marino has given us a masterpiece.
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Open Access
Oct 1, 2020
Caitríona Beaumont 
