‘Manifiesto De Solidaridad Continental’ Alliances and Inequalities: Inter-American Feminist Networks 1840–1948

ABSTRACT

Conventional narratives of the emergence of the feminist movements in the Americas focus on the US and the Seneca Falls meeting. Most works separate feminist politics from anti-racist or class struggles, and also different feminisms from one another. By contrast, this paper focuses on the connected histories and genealogies and the simultaneous articulation of diverse feminist politics in the Americas. Focusing on feminist networks between Latin America, the Caribbean and the US, the paper zooms in on, first, the context of abolitionism, transnational, and imperial feminisms emerging between 1840 and 1880, and, second, on international feminist co-operations in the context of the International Conferences of American States 1880–1948. Shedding light on the entangled histories of strategic feminist solidarities as well as their intersectional dimensions and politics, the paper seeks to encourage a more manifold imaginary of past movements and their current successors such as the ‘Ni una menos’ movement 2017 Women’s March.

KEYWORDS:

• Feminist networks
• inter-American
• feminism and abolitionism
• feminist solidarity
• intersectionality
• feminist internationalism

Acknowledgements

The author is truly appreciative of the institutional, intellectual and material support of the Center for InterAmerican Studies at Bielefeld University and the BMBF research project ‘The Americas as Space of Entanglements’ as well as to the library of the Iberian Institute Berlin were part of the research was conducted.

Disclosure statement

The author reported no potential conflict of interest.

Notes

1. For an overview on transnational approaches to feminism and internationalist feminism(s), see Offen (2010), particularly the contributions by Holton, Rupp, Miller, and DuBois and Sandell 2015.

2. See e.g. Freeman (1973, 1975), Carden (1974), Buechler (1990), and Max Ferree and Hess (1985, 1995) who conceptualise the so-called ‘second wave’ feminists as predoiminantly white, straight, and middle-class, thereby obscuring the impact of African-American, Chicana, socialist and Lesbian feminists. Buechler (1990) depicts African-American and socialist feminisms as ‘Races and Classes: counter-movements’ in the chapter of the same title.

3. See Shepherd 137.

4. Shepherd points at the active resistance of women against their enslavement, shipping, abuse, and exploitation: ‘From what we know of the female role in the trade and slavery, it is safe to assume that women, who formed about thirty-eight per cent of each shipment, participated in these anti-slaving actions.’ (2008, 135) And further: ‘There is overwhelming evidence that enslaved women did not give their bodies for reproduction or productive labor willingly, neither did they accept passively the use of their bodies from brutal forms of enslavement. … [T]he records are full of examples’ (2008, 139).

5. As Dietze (2013, 45) points out, the abolitionist movement was divided over the ‘women question’. While US feminism emerged from abolitionism in the sense that female abolitionists realised their participation was denied due to their gender, the supposedly similar oppression of women and enslaved Africans enabled political alliances (Dietze 47). Simultaneously, however, it nurtured the racial difference by scandalising white (mostly bourgeois) women being treated as bad as slaves. According to Dietze, the solidarity faded as soon as the situation of the (formerly) enslaved seemingly improved. On the emergence of the women’s rights movement from the anti-slavery movement, see also Kish Sklar (2000).

6. On early male supporters of feminism, see also Fagan Yellin (1992), Sanchez-Eppler (1993), and Carrol DuBois (1978, 1998, and 2010).

7. See History of the Equal Rights Treaty Signed at the VII International Conference of American States by Uruguay, Ecuador and Cuba. Printed as a gift to the Inter American Commission of Women Central Headquarters Pan American Union, Washington D.C., 1934.

8. See also Lugones 2007 who elaborates on the ‘modern/colonial gender system’ that introduced colonial gender hierarchies that positioned colonised persons very differently.

9. The First International Conference of American States from October 1889 to April 1890 resulted in the foundation of the International Union of the Americas (later the Pan-American Union, today Organization of American States/OAS).

10. Also in 1930, the ‘International Equal Rights Campaign’ took place in the Hague, in the context of which women’s organisations claimed citizenship rights for married women independently from their husbands, see DuBois (2010).

11. The so-called ‘Rio Pact’ refers to the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance—stating that an attack against one member is to be considered an attack against all. It is also known as the ‘hemispheric defense’ doctrine.

12. See St Hill (2011) for a ‘strategic universalist feminism’, questioning the ‘relevance and value of holding “difference,” especially as it relates to culture and nationality, central to feminist theorising on gender inequality in the contemporary Caribbean’ (191). Threlkeld mentions that nationalism was important for Mexican feminists after the Mexican Revolution, but to be overcome by US feminists, or different conceptions of motherhood and equality vs. differences (3).

13. For the claim of a new historical record by Latin American women, see Miller (1991).

14. The concept intersectionality has been established in the context of African-American feminist legal and social studies and was inspired by the claims of social movements, in particular by African-American, ‘Third World’ and socialist feminisms. For ‘intersectionality’ in the Americas, see Roth (2013), Roth (2015), Viveros Vigoya (2013), and Wade, Urrea Giraldo, Viveros Vigoya (2009).

15. Safa further underscores the importance of the 2000 Santiago declaration, in which Latin American states explicitly recognised Afro-descendent populations as victims of racism who had been denied rights to equal participation in the political, social, economic and cultural life of their countries. She states: ‘Santiago and the build-up to the Third UN World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerances, held in Durban, South Africa in September 2001, engendered considerable activity in the Latin American and Caribbean region, particularly in Brazil’ (Safa 49).

16. Safa names two major national feminist networks active by the time of the Durban conference in 2001: the Articulação de Mulheres Brasileiras (AMB) (Alliance of Brazilian Women) and the Rede Nacional Femenista de Saúde, Direitos Sexuais e Direitos Reprodutivos (National Feminist Network for Health, Sexual and Reproductive Rights), which ‘assumed a racial perspective on gender and published demographic data on Afro-descendent women for the conference.’ (Safa 55).

17. For different feminisms and different feminist alliances of solidarity, see e.g. Suárez Návaz and Aída Hernández (2008), Espinosa Damián (2009) Espinosa Damián, Diricio Chautla, and Sánchez Néstor (2010), Espinosa Damián and Lau Jaiven (2011), Espinosa Miñoso, Correal, and Muñoz (2014), and Castillo, Dudley, and Mendoza (2014).

18. Suárez Návaz and Aída Hernández (2008), Espinosa Damián (2009), Espinosa Damián, Diricio Chautla, and Sánchez Néstor (2010), Espinosa Damián and Lau Jaiven (2011), and Roth (2013).

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Julia Roth

Julia Roth is professor for American Studies with a focus on Gender Studies and member of the and lecturer at the Center for InterAmerican Studies at the University of Bielefeld in Germany. Prior to her current position she was postdoctoral researcher at University of Bielefeld in Germany as part of the BMBF funded research project ‘The Americas as Space of Entanglements’ and postdoctoral fellow at the research network ‘desiguALdades.net—Interdependent Inequalities in Latin America’ at Freie Universität Berlin and lecturer at Humboldt University Berlin, Freie Universität Berlin and the University of Potsdam. Her research focuses on postcolonial and intersectional gender perspectives and the Caribbean, feminist movements and right-wing populism and gender and has led her to Mexico, the USA, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Peru, Nigeria and Argentina.