women to effect change through personal interactions and shared knowledge.
Once a gathering like the Women’s Auxiliary Conference, or a visit to Mexico like those by Zonia Baber or Caroline Smith and Harriet Taylor, had done so much to foster new friendships and establish common ground among women, internationalists sought to ensure that their work would continue. The most obvious answer was to form a group—whether a new organization entirely, like the Pan American International Women’s Committee, or a new branch of an existing organization, like the YWCA or WILPF—and then to establish an agenda for that group. Emma Bain Swiggett turned the committee that had planned the Women’s Auxiliary Conference into the PAIWC. Once she had secured contacts in as many Latin American countries as possible—including Adelia Palacios in Mexico—Swiggett decided that the first issue the committee would address would be child welfare. In May 1918 she sent a letter to all her contacts asking them to compile and share information on infant mortality and maternal health in their countries.63 The organization’s first “Bulletin,” which appeared in 1921, centered on child welfare and published much of the information collected by committee members throughout the Americas.64
The YWCA and WILPF, meanwhile, continued their efforts to start new sections in Mexico City. The Mexican men and women with whom Harriet Taylor and Caroline Smith spoke were enthusiastic about the prospect of establishing an association in Mexico City. They believed the YWCA “middle-of-the-road policies would attract women from a broad spectrum—Marxists and ‘free thinkers,’ Roman Catholics, members of the pro-American business community—by offering them a place to serve that was free of partisan politics.”65 Taylor and Smith recommended starting a Mexican YWCA, but slowly, arguing that gathering support and resources from the local community would take time. They noted that the successful organization of a branch of the Young Men’s Christian Association a few years earlier was cause for optimism. In fact, the Mexican YMCA had guaranteed Taylor and Smith an “immediate membership” of three hundred women from among the families and friends of their own members. The U.S. association allocated funds, and Smith returned to Mexico City in May 1922 as the new group’s first executive secretary. The first members of the board took office in October 1923.
WILPF, for its part, struggled to identify potential members. Both Rose Standish Nichols and Zonia Baber, the representatives who traveled to Mexico City in 1920, made efforts to gather a group of women for a new section, but none of them panned out, likely due in part to Nichols and Baber’s personal rivalry. By coincidence, however, they both reported to Jane Addams and Emily Greene Balch that the Mexican woman ideally suited for the task of forming a section was Elena Landázuri. Addams knew Landázuri well; the latter had lived in Chicago for several years, stayed at Hull House on more than one occasion, and traveled to Vienna in 1921 as an official delegate to WILPF’s third international convention. She was also a member of the Consejo Feminista Mexicano, and a friend of Elena Torres. Ideally, WILPF leaders in Geneva would have liked to start a Mexican section from scratch, but failing that, Balch was prepared to have Landázuri transform the Consejo Feminista Mexicano into one. She asked her to sit down with Torres and “see what could be done” toward that end.66 Landázuri promised to do what she could to start a Mexican section, though she gave Balch no reason to believe the council could be transformed. She enclosed a translation of their program, with the certainty that Balch would approve of it, and continued, “I do not think that other groups or individuals will follow the program of the League as near as this group follows it.” However, she noted, “everything that goes beyond what is the general attitude of the public … is bound to create a certain antagonistic spirit around it and I do not want to limit the scope of the W.I.L. to the feminist group.” Landázuri ended though on a positive note. “In view of all this,” she concluded, “I have decided to select myself the group that will integrate the W.I.L. here. I feel very hopeful, because you can sense here in the air a spirit of renaissance and freedom that has to bear its fruits. I know that the ideal of the W.I.L. will be understood by many and supported, just give me some time and I feel that I will offer a strong competent group to support the League.”67 Landázuri was aware that the Consejo Feminista was not ideal as a WILPF section because it had an agenda of its own, but she was confident she could organize a separate group to affiliate with Geneva. Balch accepted her offer, and sent Landázuri a set of guidelines for starting a section.
Getting new branches and sections off the ground frequently led to new trials. With Adelia Palacios as her only contact, Emma Bain Swiggett was often frustrated with the slow rate of progress in securing Mexican members of the Pan American International Women’s Committee. Eventually Palacios sent several names of other women who might be persuaded to join the committee, but when Swiggett contacted them, only one responded.68 The slow progress of the YWCA, meanwhile, was deliberate. In the wake of Taylor and Smith’s reconnaissance trip in 1921, the U.S. Foreign Division decided to proceed carefully for several reasons. First, none of the U.S. secretaries who might reasonably be asked to live in Mexico City for a year or two to help get the branch off the ground spoke any Spanish, and they needed time to study the language. Second, unlike WILPF, which could hold meetings easily in members’ homes, the YWCA needed its own facility to carry out its mission—part of which was to serve as a boarding house for young women in the city. Searching out and acquiring a suitable building took time. Finally, the association did not want to attract undue attention from the Catholic Church. Taylor and Smith believed that their main opposition would come from members of the Church hierarchy; ordinary Catholics, they argued, would welcome the group once they understood its mission.69
The Women’s International League, meanwhile, struggled with whether to establish a new section in Mexico from scratch, or to join forces with an existing group, such as the Consejo Feminista. Emily Greene Balch strongly preferred the former. Her previous experience in other countries had convinced her that when an existing group agreed to become a national section, WILPF’s agenda had to compete for attention with the group’s previous one. Balch was happy to have Elena Landázuri working on her behalf in Mexico City, and she was happy to hear that the council had voted to become a section, but she was skeptical about how that decision had come about and how well peace would fit with the CFM program. Peace was important to the Mexican group’s platform, but it was not central. A letter from Elena Torres in April 1922 confirmed Balch’s fears. Torres told her the council was “very interested” in WILPF: “We have gladly accepted the suggestion to form a National Section, but until now we have not proceeded owing to the fact that we have being working in making propaganda in favor of the women questions in social ground, [sic] and because we have not had the appropriate conditions to succeed in this respect, connected with your League.”70 This reiterated to Balch the necessity of Landázuri’s forming her own section, since it was clear that WILPF’s agenda was not the only one of the Consejo Feminista. Torres’s reply indicated that while the council may have been able to adopt the League’s agenda on top of their own, their work for peace would never be as central as it would have been to an organization that owed its very existence to those aims. Given WILPF’s standard practice of establishing sections from scratch that were entirely focused on peace, affiliating with the Consejo Feminista was probably not the best course of action, but in the early 1920s Balch and Addams had few other options than to continue relying on Elena Landázuri to carry out their work in Mexico.
Despite these difficulties, by the early 1920s U.S. women’s efforts seemed to be off to a good start. Steady correspondences had been established. Plans were in the works for both a Mexican section of WILPF and a Mexican branch of the YWCA. The former was officially established in 1922, the latter in 1923. The Women’s Auxiliary Conference had been a success, and Swiggett’s plans to form the Pan American International Women’s Committee were under way. Reflecting the often informal nature of human internationalism, there were very few concrete arrangements in place. U.S. women’s internationalism in Mexico was built on personal contacts and information exchange, but it was also dependent for its existence on individual initiative. In other words, women’s internationalism had been established but was far from being institutionalized. But these initial steps were important, particularly given that they occurred concurrently with the decline and severing of U.S.-Mexican
