offset by extraordinarily high costs of living and a lack of job security. Mexicans were not opposed to progress in methods and machinery, Torres noted, but she questioned the “superiority” of a group of people who brought “the most frightful misery to thousands of families,” and who were willing to sacrifice “human interests before all others.”80 Torres demanded that the WPS, and any other groups seeking an ally in the CFM, “castigate severely all those North American citizens who foment revolutions in other countries solely for the purpose of securing arms sales and maintaining the lives of their factories.”81
Torres’s and Landázuri’s communications with U.S. women proved that they were more than willing to join internationalist ventures, but they expected to be more than just silent partners. The reactions they received indicated that U.S. women, particularly members of the Women’s Peace Society and the U.S. section of WILPF, took the CFM’s concerns seriously, but that they were unlikely to take meaningful action to address them. The WPS lacked the resources and organizational dedication to send Torres much more than their goodwill. Elinor Byrns read Torres’s invective against the “U.S. imperialists” to other members of the society, who asked her to assure Torres “that we are not all of us here eager for profits from petroleum and that we are very much ashamed of the people who want to throw us into war with Mexico.” But, Byrns noted, “I am afraid that the people who are willing to go to war are now in power.”82 The U.S. section of WILPF passed a resolution in August 1920 favoring “constructive and friendly co-operation with Mexico” and opposing armed intervention, but there is no record that they took any further action.83 Both groups likely felt hamstrung by their previous commitments to their own peace programs, and by their lack of money and influence with policy makers, but the fact remains that they did not prioritize the Mexican women’s demands to the same extent they did their own. U.S. women were drawn to Mexico in part because of contentious U.S.-Mexican relations, but they did not condemn U.S. economic imperialism or exploitative business practices, even when expressly asked to do so by Mexican women.
Both U.S. and Mexican women saw promise and possibility in Jane Addams’s new “human internationalism.” The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and the Women’s Peace Society saw it as a chance to advance their fight for a permanent peace. The Young Women’s Christian Association was eager to extend its mission for social and economic justice to Mexican women and girls. The Pan American International Women’s Committee believed that promoting Pan Americanism among women would lead to greater hemispheric cooperation and harmony. By 1922 three of the four organizations (all except the WPS) seemed poised to solidify their new branches and new connections in Mexico. Members of the Consejo Feminista Mexicano, meanwhile, were ready to join internationalist networks as part of their efforts to promote global peace and to recruit allies in their struggles against U.S. imperialism in Mexico. All these organizations employed similar methods that followed on Jane Addams’s articulation of human internationalism: personal interactions, exchanges of information, and shared experiences. These internationalist efforts were especially significant in light of the fact that after 1920 the United States and Mexico no longer had a diplomatic relationship. In fact, cooperation among U.S. and Mexican women laid some of the groundwork over the next few years for the restoration of formal diplomatic relations.
Nevertheless, U.S. and Mexican women did not approach the new internationalism in the same ways. Among U.S. women there was considerable divergence in their goals and methods. Women in the YWCA and the PAIWC sought “safe” contacts in Mexico, women who could not be branded as radical or politically inappropriate. By contrast, WILPF and the WPS cultivated contacts, such as Elena Torres and Elena Landázuri, who were more politically active. Mexican women, for their part, were prepared to engage in the methods of human internationalism, but they had a clearly defined agenda that U.S. women did not necessarily share. The Mexican Revolution, the spread of economic nationalism in Mexico, and the resentment against the United States resulting from repeated interventions infused Mexican women’s internationalism in ways that posed potential conflicts for U.S. women. Elena Torres and Elena Landázuri wanted to use internationalism to defend their own nation, and to get U.S. women to speak out against theirs. Internationalism may not have been much more than “spiritual” for Jane Addams and her followers, but for Mexican women it was undoubtedly political.
Torres and Landázuri were about to have another chance with a different group of U.S. women. The U.S. League of Women Voters began making plans in 1921 to hold its own hemispheric conference of women. As an organization born out of the victory for women’s suffrage, the league seemed to the members of the Consejo Feminista Mexicano like an ideal partner with whom to share their agenda for women’s advancement in Mexico. That perception would be put to the test in Baltimore, Maryland, in April 1922.
Chapter 2
The Pan American Conference of Women
In April 1922, more than two thousand women and men from twenty-one American nations descended on Baltimore, Maryland. Convened by the U.S. League of Women Voters, the Pan American Conference of Women (PACW) centered on “subjects of special concern to women,” including education, child welfare, and women’s political status. But the league also acknowledged another, overriding concern. “Peace among nations is essential to the work that women have most at heart,” declared the call to the conference. Seeking to capitalize on the spirit of internationalism flourishing in the early 1920s, the league hoped to further the cause of global peace by fostering “international friendliness”: “The League believes that friendliness with our neighbor countries will be stimulated and strengthened when women from all parts of the western hemisphere come together for sympathetic study of their common problems.”1 To that end, league members invited delegates from each of the twenty-one American nations to come to Baltimore—where the league had already planned to hold its third national convention in April 1922—for an inter-American conference.
With this conference, the League of Women Voters became the first U.S. organization to put inter-American women’s internationalism into practice on such a large, coordinated scale. Formed in 1920 out of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, the nonpartisan league’s early goals included equal status for women under the law and prevention of war through international cooperation. It did not belong to the same pacifist tradition as the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, but its members shared a belief in women’s power to effect political change both nationally and internationally.2 The Pan American conference seemed the perfect chance to implement the ideals of Jane Addams’s human internationalism: women gathered together to share information and experiences, engage in personal interactions, build solidarity around common causes, and foster global peace. Unlike the conveners of the Women’s Auxiliary Conference in 1916, league members took great pains to learn about the leading women activists in each country, and to extend invitations to them, rather than inviting women simply because they happened to be married to or fathered by a man attending a separate conference. The league guaranteed the participation of women already committed to various causes, women who would be able not only to share information but potentially to implement whatever strategies or suggestions arose in Baltimore. Every Latin American delegate had several opportunities to speak publicly throughout the conference, ensuring that attendees would hear more than just U.S. women’s voices. The original list of topics for discussion included not only education and child welfare, but also women’s suffrage and the limitation of armaments. These were later modified, though, by the U.S. State Department, which sanctioned but did not sponsor the conference.3
Figure 2. Maud Wood Park, center, opens the Pan American Conference of Women. Maryland governor Albert Ritchie is second from the left.
Chicago Tribune, April 23, 1922.
The
