of Women is thus significant for several reasons. First, it demonstrated how women’s internationalism served as a form of gendered diplomacy. By emphasizing “international friendliness” as the goal of the conference, league members made it clear they understood their actions as part of a broader effort to promote peace and understanding among American nations. The diplomatic potential of the conference extended beyond anything the participants themselves hoped would come of it. Both U.S. and Mexican government officials saw the conference as an opportunity to further reconciliation between the two nations, which still did not have a formal diplomatic relationship.
In its sheer size, the conference also illustrated the extent to which women activists across the Americas were committed to the promise of Addams’s human internationalism. The reasons for their commitment varied, however. U.S. women, newly enfranchised, wanted to stake a claim, a political voice for themselves in international relations. They wanted to extend and coordinate activism for suffrage and women’s rights beyond the United States, and they wanted to further hemispheric peace by bringing together women from across the Americas. Though many Latin American women may well have shared the latter two goals, they were looking for more. For instance, Mexican women, represented in Baltimore by Elena Torres and members of the Consejo Feminista Mexicano, continued to demand that U.S. women use their newfound political power to oppose interventionist U.S. policies and exploitative U.S. business practices in Mexico.
Although U.S. and Mexican women’s dedication to internationalism may have been equal, their roles in Baltimore were not. U.S. women had disproportionate power to shape the agenda and the outcome of the conference, more than any Latin American women. The League of Women Voters took it on themselves to direct the proceedings with minimal input from the non-U.S. participants. While professing a mutual desire to learn from each other, conference organizers circumscribed Latin American women’s contributions. Even when Mexican women expressly asked to have U.S. policies toward their country included on the agenda, league officials balked. To be fair, the LWV had to operate within a set of constraints—like reliance on the approval of the U.S. State Department—that limited their ability to allow discussion of controversial topics. But the fact remains that the organizers set the agenda and chose topics for discussion based on what they assumed were common concerns of all women in the Americas, while admitting they knew little of women’s concerns outside their own country. This imbalance called into question the cooperative nature of human internationalism.
Gendered Diplomacy
The idea for the Pan American Conference of Women came from Lavinia Engle, an active member of the Maryland League of Women Voters. Engle thought that in addition to providing the fledgling league with widespread publicity, such a conference would be an ideal way to promote inter-American cooperation. Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover was interested in furthering trade with South America, Engle pointed out to LWV president Maud Wood Park, and would likely help secure support from the Harding administration, while Carrie Chapman Catt could help identify potential delegates using her contacts from the International Woman Suffrage Alliance.4 No Latin American woman had the right to vote in 1922, and the alliance had branches only in Argentina and Uruguay, but Catt had developed an extensive network of contacts through a survey the group conducted in 1902 on the political status of women around the world.5 By corresponding with U.S. commercial attachés in Latin America, Secretary Hoover also helped identify politically and socially active delegates, rather than simply extending invitations to the wives of Latin American diplomats.6 In June 1921, Park established a committee to determine the feasibility of such a conference, decide how many Latin American delegates might realistically be expected to attend, and draw up a tentative agenda outlining the purpose and goals of the conference that could be used to generate publicity.7
Reflecting the newfound power of women voters, Park also organized a delegation to the White House. On June 29 she led a group of conference backers, including Maryland and National LWV officials, a representative of the City of Baltimore, and the governor of Maryland, to a meeting with secretary of state Charles Evans Hughes. After securing his approval, the conference committee, chaired by Dorothy Hubert and LWV executive secretary Minnie Fisher Cunningham, began to make definite arrangements.8 They wrote to members of the Latin American diplomatic corps, asking for the names of prominent women in their countries. In October the U.S. State Department issued invitations on behalf of the league to every Latin American country, asking governments to appoint delegates.9 The Pan American Union also lent its enthusiastic support. Director Leo Rowe promised Engle and Cunningham he would “keep after” the State Department to issue the invitations promptly and even speak to as many Latin American ambassadors as he could personally, to convey his own belief in the significance of the conference.10 By October 1921, the conference was beginning to take shape.
Conference planners recognized the significance of their work as women diplomats. The league argued that by convening a group of women to discuss common concerns, they were furthering international cooperation. In other words, this was not just women getting together to discuss “women’s issues” separate from international politics. As Engle had originally pointed out, a conference promoting inter-American peace and cooperation was an ideal way for the league to generate publicity and establish a voice for women in international relations. A popular argument for women’s suffrage throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was that women’s influence would improve U.S. politics and society by making them more humane and by reducing corruption. After winning the vote in 1920, U.S. women used similar rhetoric to establish their authority over international issues ranging from disarmament to national defense.11 The Baltimore conference attempted to do the same for diplomacy. Advance press coverage reflected the league’s success in this regard. The San Antonio Express asserted, “Diplomatic service of this sort heretofore has been entrusted to men; but in view of the new civic position woman has assumed in the United States … the time has come when she should enter this larger sphere of action.”12 The Baltimore Sun agreed: “Nothing could more strikingly demonstrate how far the world has moved in the last few years from old precedents and customs than this great international gathering of women. For weal or woe, for good or ill, the heretofore politically submerged sex is asserting an equal right with man to guide and govern the earth.”13
A few months before the conference opened, League of Women Voters vice president Marie Stewart Edwards articulated the organization’s own understanding of this gendered diplomacy: “By emphasizing the preservation of the race as a necessary function of government we can perhaps supplement the masculine idea which overemphasizes the preservation of property to the exclusion of other things, and by combining the two we may eventually do away with this queer theory that to protect property and to protect the human race we must create engines for the destruction of both.”14 Edwards saw in the Baltimore conference an opportunity to counteract the prevailing trends in inter-American relations, to put an end to the cycles of violence and aggression like that between the United States and Mexico. Her characterization of masculine politics as focused on property rights resonated particularly with the Mexican situation, given the centrality of land and subsoil resources to the U.S.-Mexican dispute. “Preservation of the race,” meanwhile, was a common way in which women peace activists framed their mission, linking their work to their familial and social roles as mothers.15 This juxtaposition was at the heart of the role the LWV envisioned for itself in U.S. foreign policy. The ballot was not only a chance to improve U.S. politics and society; it was a tool for improving the world, a way for women to exert authority over international relations. “The mothering heart and conscience of women have always been at the service of those close at hand,” the league declared. “For the first time in history these qualities are being consciously directed to meet world-wide needs.”16 In the weeks leading up to the conference that vision seemed poised to become reality.
U.S. league members were not the only ones who saw promise in these new forms of gendered diplomacy. Their government saw an opportunity in the Pan American Conference to conduct diplomacy through women. With regard to Mexico in particular, the appeal of “international
