human internationalism was a practice, not just a theory; it expanded her vision of social democracy to encompass the globe.5
And women were its natural practitioners. Addams’s gendered belief in women’s special mission to preserve peace informed human internationalism. As she explained to her audience at the Women’s Auxiliary Conference, “From the beginning of time this understanding of peoples, of natural intercourse, of social life versus political life, has largely been in the hands of women, and therefore it is an obligation which women have in this generation as peculiarly their own.”6 This assertion echoed closely the sentiments both Addams and Carrie Chapman Catt had expressed at the international women’s peace conference at The Hague the previous spring. Catt deliberately appealed to the “common bonds” of sisterhood and to women as the “World’s Mothers.”7 Such inclusive, communal language was prevalent among women in organizations trying to build solidarity across national boundaries during the early twentieth century.8 Addams’s human internationalism represented an opportunity for women to lead the way toward a more cooperative, peaceful world. Women internationalists’ qualifications, she felt, stemmed not from legal or diplomatic expertise but from settlement work, from moral reform campaigns, from agitation for woman suffrage, and most important, from their inherent nature as women and their desire to connect with women in other countries to promote global friendship and prevent war.
Figure 1. Jane Addams, 1915.
Jane Addams Collection, Swarthmore College Peace Collection.
In characterizing human internationalism as a female enterprise, Addams also deemphasized its political nature. Her distinction between “social life” and “political life” suggested that for women the former took precedence, while men ostensibly retained responsibility for the latter. In her speech to the International Congress of Women in 1915, she told the delegates that the solidarity that brought them together in wartime was compelled by “spiritual forces” and constituted a “spiritual internationalism.” Thus, as she distinguished women’s internationalism from more legalistic forms, she also tried to cast it as neutral, steered by women’s natural impulses rather than by great power politics. Even though Addams often strove to remain nonpartisan, she never intended for her peace work to be apolitical, as evidenced by her efforts to lobby President Wilson to mediate the European conflict just a few months after the women’s congress at The Hague. Her emphasis on spiritualism portrayed women activists as agents of a higher power, and their activism as a natural duty. At the same time, it reinforced among women the sense of internationalism as an imagined community.9
Although World War I provided the most immediate and pressing backdrop for Addams’s reformulations of internationalism, it was no coincidence that she delivered an address on the topic at a conference promoting inter-American cooperation. Many women internationalists in the United States hoped to extend their work into Latin America, both because of the long-standing presumed affinity among the nations of the Western Hemisphere and because of the increase in anti-Americanism since the implementation of the Platt Amendment in Cuba in 1903, the declaration of the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine in 1904, and the military occupation of Haiti in 1915. U.S. women wanted both to capitalize on the unifying rhetoric of Pan Americanism and to counteract the perception that the United States was an empire in pursuit of hemispheric domination. Both impulses coalesced around the question of U.S.-Mexican relations in particular. The outbreak of the Mexican Revolution had led to a succession of increasingly nationalist regimes bent on curtailing foreign influence in Mexico, especially U.S. economic influence.
Addams’s “human” approach to internationalism dominated U.S. women’s activism concerning Mexico and Latin America for the next twenty-five years. The women pursuing ventures in the Americas during and immediately following World War I were a disparate group, with diverse goals and expectations, but they were all practitioners—consciously or not—of Addams’s brand of internationalism. Four groups in particular were active in Mexico: the U.S. section of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, guided during this period by Addams herself and by Emily Greene Balch; the Women’s Peace Society (WPS) under the direction of executive secretary Elinor Byrns; the Foreign Division of the YWCA of the U.S.A., headed by Sarah Lyon; and the Pan American International Women’s Committee (PAIWC), led by Emma Bain Swiggett. Between 1915 and 1923, members of these organizations worked to establish contacts, to exchange information with Mexican women about their respective programs, to interact with Mexican women in various settings, and to establish branches of their organizations in Mexico City. Their motives and experiences varied, but all these women shared Addams’s belief in the power of personal interactions, the sharing of knowledge, and above all the ability of women to further cooperation among nations and reduce conflicts.
As they extended their networks in Mexico, however, U.S. women had to contend with the specter of revolutionary nationalism, not only because by the late 1910s it threatened the diplomatic relationship between the United States and Mexico but because many Mexican women activists drew strength from the ideologies of the Revolution. Some Mexican women were eager to join U.S. women’s internationalist ventures, and shared a desire to unite the world’s women to work for peace. But they also expected U.S. women to help them achieve their national goals. They were willing to partner with U.S. women, but they expected that partnership to be equal and reciprocal.
Human Internationalists
Who were these new internationalists? Like those who had been active in the transatlantic arena since the mid-nineteenth century, the majority of U.S. women who took an interest in Latin America during the late 1910s and early 1920s were college-educated, middle-class, white, and Protestant. A significant number of them were unmarried, a status not uncommon among women in political and reform movements. Internationalist organizations that required a great deal of travel often had a preponderance of single women members.10 Few of them were novices when it came to organizing, even on an international scale. They had been and remained active in organizations such as the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, the American Association of University Women, and various missionary groups. Many—though not all—were suffragists. All of them felt profoundly the impact of World War I. When the war broke out in the summer and fall of 1914, it came as a shock to many internationalists, who had assumed that the days of war on such a massive scale were long over. As the question of U.S. entry into the war loomed in early 1917, the majority of them supported Woodrow Wilson. Only a small minority maintained a pacifist stance.11
Jane Addams herself led one of the most staunchly pacifist of the women’s internationalist organizations. The group that became the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom originated in opposition to World War I. For the first few years of the war, women pacifists such as Addams, Rosika Schwimmer of Hungary, Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence of Britain, and others focused on ending it as quickly as possible. In January 1915, representatives from over seventy organizations created the Women’s Peace Party in New York City. Their plan called for U.S. mediation among the warring nations; to that end they organized demonstrations and publicity campaigns, flooding the White House with letters and telegrams urging intercession. At The Hague in May, U.S. representatives from the Women’s Peace Party helped to form the International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace. After the conference, Addams and several colleagues traveled around Europe, meeting with leaders of both belligerent and neutral nations, trying to rally support for an armistice. But by late 1916 they were growing frustrated, and U.S. intervention seemed more and more probable. Between the U.S. entry in April 1917 and November 1918, women pacifists focused their efforts on hastening a negotiated end to the war and on fending off attacks from pro-war government officials and civilians alike. In the summer of 1919, the International Committee met in Zurich at the same time as the Versailles peace conference to monitor and try to influence the postwar planning. Frustrated with the punitive nature of the Versailles Treaty and the weaknesses of the League of Nations, Addams and her colleagues
