Feminism for the Americas

Katherine M. Marino overturns the familiar map of international feminism. Rather than treating Europe and the United States as the intellectual center from which women’s rights traveled outward, she reconstructs an interwar Pan-American network led by figures including Bertha Lutz, Ofelia Domínguez Navarro, Paulina Luisi, Clara González, and Marta Vergara. Their campaigns joined suffrage to equal pay, maternity protections, antifascism, and national self-determination, making Latin American activists architects—not late adopters—of global rights language.

The book’s strongest achievement is archival and relational. Letters, conference records, newspapers, and personal rivalries reveal politics being made through translation, friendship, travel, and painstaking negotiation. Marino shows how activists moved between national organizations, the Inter-American Commission of Women, the League of Nations, and the emerging United Nations. The eventual inclusion of women’s equal rights in the UN Charter appears not as diplomatic benevolence but as the result of organized pressure accumulated across decades.

This is not a celebratory story of effortless sisterhood. US activists often treated their own priorities as universal and reproduced imperial hierarchies within Pan-American institutions. Latin American feminists developed alternative alliances, sometimes invoking Pan-Hispanic identity, while also disagreeing among themselves over race, class, labor, nationalism, and the acceptable terms of cooperation with states. The book therefore makes unequal power inside feminist coalitions part of the history rather than an embarrassing footnote.

For feminist readers, the central lesson is methodological as much as historical: institutions remember the people who sign final documents more readily than the networks that made those documents possible. Marino restores organizers whose ideas about economic rights, peace, and anti-imperialism exceeded a narrow equality agenda. She also demonstrates why transnational feminism must ask who controls the meeting, the language, the archive, and the definition of the universal.

The focus on prominent organizers and formal international venues cannot represent every Indigenous, Afro-descendant, rural, or working-class current in the hemisphere. That limit is best treated as an invitation to read outward, not as a reason to dismiss the book. It is an essential foundation for anyone studying global feminism, human-rights history, or the recurring tension between solidarity and geopolitical power.