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Chapter 1

The Best Kind of Internationalism

Though she was not the first to practice it, the author of the new internationalism in the World War I era was Jane Addams. In her closing remarks to the Women’s Auxiliary Conference of the Second Pan American Scientific Congress in January 1916, Addams commended the attendees for fostering “a new type of internationalism.” Earlier philosophers and politicians, she argued, had dreamed of “a rather formal undertaking” in which they would “pass resolutions and found a constitution, and so forth and so on.” But present circumstances demanded a different approach, one stemming “from the point of view of human experience and mutual interests.” Drawing on her experiences at Hull-House, she pointed out that immigrants from Europe and South America and elsewhere came to the cities of the United States every day and eventually learned to live together and understand each other through common interests and activities. If this could be done “by simple peasants from Germany and Italy, Slavs and Latins, Anglo-Saxons and whoever you please—if they can achieve this internationalism—then certainly it can be done by other people living in these various countries.” Advances in technology, which made travel and communication easier than ever before, opened up new possibilities for those kinds of exchanges even when the participants did not live in the same neighborhood. “We have an opportunity such as never faced the world before,” Addams announced, “to found human internationalism.”¹

Addams contrasted her new brand of internationalism with the formal, diplomatic approach that characterized the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Before 1914, the hallmark of this approach was the Hague System, which produced the first international agreements on the laws of war and war crimes, and formed the basis for the beginnings of international law in the early twentieth century. Conservative men increasingly dominated this legalistic internationalism; they pursued contacts with government leaders and eschewed input from ordinary citizens. The minutiae of diplomatic treaties and arbitration agreements were too complex, they felt, to allow for meaningful contributions from most men and women.² In 1913, Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia University and head of the Carnegie Endowment, contended, “We must face the fact that our rather scientific and intellectual program is on too high a plane to be understood and sympathized with by large numbers of persons.”³ Addams implicitly painted this approach as “inhuman”—devoid of personal interactions, producing sterile treaties rather than interpersonal understanding and broad commitments to peace.

Her internationalism centered on the activism of ordinary citizens. In the same way that she had mobilized settlement house workers and immigrant residents to transform the neighborhood around Hull House, Addams sought to galvanize peace activists to transform relations among nation-states. Informed by pragmatist philosophy, she blended her commitments to peace and social justice to pursue not just the absence of war but a lasting and just peace.⁴ She was the principal architect of the women’s peace movement that emerged during World War I and relentlessly pressured the Wilson administration and later the delegates to the Versailles conference to pursue mediation, compromise, and arbitration. Extending to the international realm her belief that “the cure for the ills of Democracy is more Democracy,” she wanted arms production, trade agreements, and “foreign politics” brought under democratic control. Addams’s 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 reconstituted themselves as a permanent organization—the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Two U.S. women, Addams and Emily Greene Balch, were named international president and executive secretary respectively.¹²

Addams and Balch were the most prominent members of a new breed of women internationalists. They belonged to the generation of Progressive women reformers born before 1880 and college educated before 1900 who frequently took an interest in social questions related to industrialization, immigration, public health, social welfare, and other related issues. Addams, for example, founded Hull House on the South Side of Chicago in 1889 as a neighborhood settlement house to coordinate community services and support among immigrant and working-class populations. Balch, an economist and professor at Wellesley College, authored a major study of Slavic immigration to the United States, and also cofounded the Women’s Trade Union League. Both women strongly supported women’s suffrage, though neither was as active in the movement as some of their contemporaries. World War I brought their pacifist impulses to the fore. They helped organized the International Congress of Women at The Hague and spent several weeks touring areas in Europe affected by the war. Both suffered for their radical pacifist tendencies; Addams was forced to search for new funding for Hull House after opposing U.S. entry into World War I, and Balch’s support of socialism got her fired from Wellesley in 1919. Their views heavily influenced WILPF’s direction in its early years.¹³

Opposition to World War I was WILPF’s raison d’être, but a vocal minority within the organization argued that women pacifists had a duty to protest all wars, not just one specific war. In the fall of 1919, these members resigned from the league to form their own organization. Based in New York City, the Women’s Peace Society objected to war on moral grounds, and followed the nonresistance philosophy of William Lloyd Garrison and Mohandas Gandhi. Its official founder and first chair was Fanny Garrison Villard, the abolitionist’s daughter, who funded the group for its first several years. But the society’s ethos and policies were largely shaped by Elinor Byrns. A practicing lawyer who had once run for local office on the Socialist ticket, Byrns established the society’s commitment to total pacifism and universal disarmament. Most of the society’s work throughout 1919 and 1920 focused on lobbying the state government in New York and the federal government in Washington, D.C., to end military appropriations and compulsory military training in public schools.¹⁴ Hampered by its small size, small budget, and internal strife between Villard and Byrns, the WPS never approached the scale of WILPF or other women’s peace organizations, but its absolute pacifism later proved appealing to Mexican women seeking support within the United States against U.S. military interventions in Mexico.

Opposing World War I was a dangerous stance to take, as Addams, Balch, Villard, and Byrns knew all too well. In the atmosphere of heightened patriotism and xenophobic nationalism that spread across the country in 1917 and 1918, pacifists, feminists, socialists, and radicals of any kind were held in contempt. Opponents of both peace and women’s suffrage increasingly linked the two causes with radicalism and socialism in attempts to discredit women like Addams and Balch. Some women activists succumbed to the pressure and pursued less controversial paths. Carrie Chapman Catt, who had been a founding member of the Women’s Peace Party in 1915, withdrew from the group and famously threw the support of the National American Woman Suffrage Association behind Wilson and the war effort. She took personal pride in the fact that by 1917, hers was a bourgeois organization, “with nothing radical about it.”¹⁵ Within the Left, the split over World War I deepened the divide between socialists, who opposed the war, and progressives, who largely supported it. That split hardened after the Bolshevik Revolution in November 1917; over the next several years, socialists and communists—and those suspected of associating or sympathizing with them—came increasingly under attack.¹⁶

Not all women internationalists opposed U.S. entry into World War I. While committed to creating a more peaceful world, the Young Women’s Christian Association supported Woodrow Wilson’s mission to “make the world safe for democracy.” This was in keeping with the association’s longstanding vision of Christian internationalism and support for missionary work overseas. The YWCA had emerged out of mid-nineteenth-century reform movements in Britain and the United States. Though the movements arose separately in the two countries, they united in 1894 to found the World Young Women’s Christian Association, which served as an umbrella organization for all national associations. Although the YWCA of the U.S.A. was not formally incorporated until 1906, members had been active locally since the 1860s—running boarding houses, employment bureaus, and community centers in cities such as New York, Boston, and Dayton, Ohio. During World War I, that kind of experience was in high demand both in Europe and on the home front. Volunteers supplied housing and recreational activities to women’s military auxiliaries in France, and opened “hostess houses” across the United States for the families of servicemen. Located near training camps, the houses offered protection to soldiers’ wives and children and provided a wholesome, moral environment for servicemen’s recreation.¹⁷ The association’s ability to provide both relief and moral guidance made it hugely popular among Progressive reformers. By the end of the war, the YWCA’s programs, profile, budget, and membership had all expanded dramatically. With over half a million members in 1920, it was the third-largest women’s organization in the country, behind only the General Federation of Women’s Clubs and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.

The YWCA’s earlier experiences overseas and its shift toward political action in the early 1920s shaped its international ethos as much as did World War I. Association “secretaries,” as workers abroad were called, had been posted to India and China since the 1890s. Their encouragement of local initiatives and local leadership, as opposed to imported programs, established a pattern that later associations in Mexico and Latin America would follow.¹⁸ The U.S. association also assumed a more politically active character after 1920. Pressured by working-class members, the YWCA began supporting workers’ rights and lobbying for labor laws. More significantly, association leaders created space for workingwomen to articulate their demands and help shape this new direction. No longer was it enough for the YWCA to reform individuals; its emphasis had broadened to include reforming society as a whole through political action for social justice.¹⁹ Not coincidentally, the National Board in the early 1920s loosened the requirement that members had to conform to strict Protestantism, asking instead that they make a “statement of faith” and “take as a model to inform their life individually and socially, the life of Christ.” This fueled the association’s dedication to pluralism.²⁰

On its establishment in 1906 as the YWCA of the U.S.A., the National Board divided its work into two divisions, home and foreign.²¹ Before 1914, the main focus of the Foreign Division was on Asia, but after World War I its members turned their attention closer to home. The work of the Foreign Division during the interwar period was steered by Sarah Lyon, who served as its director from 1920 to 1944. Originally from New Jersey, Lyon graduated from Mt. Holyoke College in 1906, and worked for several local YWCAs in various capacities before joining the national staff.²² She ran the division “with the zeal and efficiency of a general,” requiring frequent reports from secretaries abroad and closely monitoring local political situations in those countries. Lyon’s influence largely dictated which overseas projects received funding from the U.S. association. She chose her targets selectively. In the early 1920s, for example, Lyon pursued opportunities in the Philippines, because it was a U.S. protectorate, and in Mexico, because of its geographic proximity. She also based her decisions on which projects were likely to become self-sustaining in the shortest time possible.²³ Mexico City, which could boast a significant number of U.S. citizens in residence and where the Young Men’s Christian Association had flourished since 1902, seemed a promising target.

Unlike both the Women’s International League and the YWCA, the Pan American International Women’s Committee was the only internationalist organization born during World War I that did not expressly refer to the war as an impetus for its formulation. It took shape in the wake of a conference organized by the wives of representatives to the Second Pan American Scientific Congress. This Women’s Auxiliary Conference, held in Washington, D.C., from December 28, 1915, to January 7, 1916, was attended by wives and daughters of Latin American delegates to the Scientific Congress, as well as a handful of other prominent U.S. women—including Jane Addams, whose closing address on human internationalism inspired many in her audience. Emma Bain Swiggett, whose husband was the executive secretary of the Scientific Congress, took charge of the women’s conference and directed the formation of the PAIWC over the course of the following year. Very little is known about Swiggett; she graduated from Indiana University, and married her husband in 1892.²⁴ She coordinated the committee’s work throughout the first decade of its existence, and authored its mission to “stimulate and co-ordinate the work of the women of Pan America for social and civic betterment.”²⁵ Made up of women with little history of political activism (Addams did not join), the Pan American committee was very different ideologically from the Women’s International League, the Women’s Peace Society, and the YWCA, but its members did believe that greater friendship and cooperation among the women of the Americas would promote friendly relations among their governments. “Pan Americanism embodies beautiful ideals,” one member maintained, “and may it not be that after all, the intelligent work of women through favorable avenues of sympathy will be the means of creating in time the real Pan American Spirit.”²⁶ Despite the fact that World War I did not lead explicitly to the committee’s formation, the rhetoric of Pan Americanism pervaded calls for hemispheric solidarity in these years, and would have evoked anti-German patriotism among the committee’s audiences.²⁷

Thus women’s internationalism in the late 1910s and early 1920s grew out of both the existing networks of white middle-class women’s activism and the immediate crisis of World War I. The Women’s International League and the Women’s Peace Society arose in opposition to the war, while the Young Women’s Christian Association and the Pan American International Women’s Committee drew strength from wartime patriotism and mobilization. All these internationalist organizations recognized the power and importance of nationalism and patriotism. Even the peace organizations, which decried the aggressive nationalism that fueled the great power rivalry, understood its significance not only in the United States and Western Europe but also in regions such as the Balkans and the Middle East. But for these U.S. women, the time had come when internationalism had to be equally if not more important than nationalism. At The Hague in 1915, Jane Addams envisioned “a spiritual internationalism which surrounds and completes our national life.”²⁸ Ultimately all these groups sought lasting peace, and believed with Addams that women’s cooperative efforts could help secure it. In the meantime, each organization pursued its own methods of putting human internationalism into practice not just in Europe but closer to home as well.

Revolutionary Mexico

As U.S. women internationalists sought to extend their influence in the Western Hemisphere, they looked first to Mexico, not least because its proximity made it more accessible than countries further south. From the East Coast of the United States, travel to Mexico City was usually accomplished via train through Texas, though steamships also made frequent trips between New York and the port of Veracruz. A few intrepid U.S. women even traveled by car. Furthermore, the idea of promoting neighborliness lent itself nicely to broader schemes of interaction and cooperation. Long before the Good Neighbor Policy of the 1930s, U.S. women internationalists invoked the shared border between the United States and Mexico as justification for their work in that country. As Emily Greene Balch wrote to a Mexican colleague in 1921, “I cannot tell how much I feel the need of active cooperation of Mexican women and of earnest and effective efforts … between two peoples who are to be such good neighbors.”²⁹ Balch’s assertion was all the more compelling given the contentious relationship between the United States and Mexico over the previous ten years, and the fact that in 1921 the two countries did not have a diplomatic relationship.

Two factors prompted U.S. women to strengthen their ties with Mexico, even as those same factors posed significant challenges to their internationalist agendas. First, the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910 had led to increasingly tense interactions between the United States and successive revolutionary governments. Revolutionary nationalism, especially economic nationalism directed against the United States, proliferated in the early years of the war in slogans such as “Mexico for the Mexicans!” A series of U.S. military interventions and threats of interventions between 1914 and 1919 further inflamed that nationalism. As supporters of peaceful interstate relations, U.S. women wanted to promote goodwill between the two countries in order to counter diplomatic tensions, but the nationalism engendered by the Revolution and stoked by the U.S. government was at odds with their own internationalism. Second, a nascent feminist movement was brewing in Mexico, and many U.S. women used that movement to identify contacts and forge connections with Mexican women. But while not all Mexican feminists cleaved wholeheartedly to a Revolution that tended to marginalize their political roles in society, many of them echoed the political and economic nationalism that was growing in strength and popularity. Their frustrations with the United States created potential points of conflict with U.S. women internationalists over priorities and U.S. policies.

Revolutionary nationalism and U.S. interventions in Mexico escalated in a vicious cycle between 1910 and 1920. Economic nationalism had been building in Mexico during the final years of the Porfiriato, the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz. Frustrated by decades of partnerships between U.S. businesses and the Díaz regime, which modernized Mexico at the expense of democratic processes and the well-being of poor and working-class Mexicans, reformers pressured Díaz to hold free elections in 1910. After Díaz was ousted in 1911 and his democratically elected successor Francisco Madero proved unable to consolidate power, the United States grew increasingly alarmed about potential threats to U.S. businesses and landowners, not only from the general violence of the war but from campaigns to target foreigners. Repeated attempts on the part of the United States to intervene in and dictate the course of the Revolution only engendered more resentment and hostility. In 1914, citing the illegal arrest of several soldiers in Tampico, U.S. troops occupied the eastern port of Veracruz. Wilson’s goal was to land troops on the eastern shore and advance toward Mexico City to force a change in government, but U.S. troops were unable to hold Veracruz, and Wilson was forced to withdraw. In 1915, revolutionary leader Pancho Villa provoked Wilson by attacking the town of Columbus, New Mexico, and killing seventeen U.S. citizens. As a result, Wilson directed General John Pershing’s “Punitive Expedition” to invade northern Mexico to break up Villa’s army and capture the revolutionary himself. Pershing could not achieve either goal. In 1919 tensions flared again when the U.S. vice-consul in Puebla, William Jenkins, was reportedly kidnapped by Mexican rebels and then accused of having staged the incident to provoke U.S. intervention.³⁰

Wilson also feared that anti-Americanism would lead Mexico into alliances with nations at odds with the United States—first Germany, and later the Soviet Union. Between 1914 and 1917, Germany worked hard to establish ties with individuals and groups in Mexico and then to use those relationships to destabilize the Mexican government in order to distract the United States. For instance, in 1915, German agents in Mexico tried to restore deposed military leader Victoriano Huerta to power, in an effort to cause trouble for the United States. In February 1917, German foreign minister Arthur Zimmermann instructed the German ambassador to approach president Venustiano Carranza about a German-Mexican alliance against the United States. The telegram was intercepted and decoded by the British, and subsequently published in the United States, hastening U.S. entry into World War I.³¹ After November 1917, many Mexican intellectuals openly expressed admiration for the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. Two years later, the Mexican Socialist Party changed its name to the Mexican Communist Party; in 1922 the group was accepted as a formal member of the Communist International, also known as the Third International. Throughout the 1920s, U.S. policy makers worried about what they saw as a growing affinity between Mexico and the Soviet Union.³²

But by far the most contentious issue between the two nations was Article 27 of the 1917 Mexican Constitution. Promulgated by Carranza, the constitution institutionalized the anticlericalism and economic nationalism of his administration. It also elevated the status of the majority of Mexicans by promising sweeping land reforms, and by giving the government unprecedented power to intervene on behalf of workers against employers. Article 27 declared all land and subsoil resources vested in the Mexican nation. To what extent Carranza intended to implement the article is not clear, but on paper it represented a direct and significant threat to U.S. businesses and landowners. In August 1919, the U.S. Senate established a subcommittee of the Committee on Foreign Relations to investigate the Mexican situation. Senator Albert B. Fall, who strongly supported the idea of U.S. military intervention, chaired the subcommittee. The subcommittee released a report in June 1920 recommending that the United States refuse to recognize any Mexican government without an agreement protecting U.S. landowners and financial investments. When Mexican President Á lvaro Obregón refused in 1920 to exempt U.S. interests from Article 27, U.S. President Warren Harding severed diplomatic ties and refused to recognize Obregón. The two countries did not restore their formal relationship until 1923.³³

Revolutionary nationalism and patriotism also grew among ordinary Mexicans, who sought to claim the promises of the Revolution for themselves. This included feminist activists, who began to organize themselves during these years. Many of them were reacting against a late nineteenth-century traditional feminine ideal, according to which women’s lives centered on the home and the church, and remained separate from the male spheres of political and intellectual activity. Encouragement for women’s political participation first arose among opponents of the Díaz regime. Some Díaz opponents supported expanded education for women and emancipation from the yoke of tradition, particularly as part of a larger effort to attack the power of the Catholic Church. During the Revolution, the Constitutionalists, led by Venustiano Carranza, likewise saw feminists as a potential ally against the Church. None of these revolutionary factions were particularly interested in equality or advancing women’s rights. But they did offer feminists a new political language of constitutionalism and representative government to advance their cause. In the mid- to late 1910s, activist women began to co-opt revolutionary ideals of womanhood to argue for greater individual freedoms, greater access to education, and greater dignification of women’s influence within the family.³⁴

This revolutionary feminism emerged first in the Yucatán, in eastern Mexico. The same month that Jane Addams addressed the Women’s Auxiliary Conference in Washington, a very different group of women assembled in Mérida, the Yucatecan capital. In January 1916 the governor of the state, Salvador Alvarado, called two feminist congresses to raise consciousness of women’s subordination among Yucatecans and to empower working- and middle-class women to advance their own interests.³⁵ Yucatán had become a kind of laboratory for testing radical social ideas during the Revolution, thanks in part to Alvarado himself. Venustiano Carranza had appointed him governor in 1915, but his ideas concerning women’s issues were more radical than those of most of his party. Alvarado believed all women should receive a solid education, encouraged them to participate in civic life, promoted literacy, and even changed the civil code to allow unmarried women to work outside the home. But the empowerment of women Alvarado sought had its limits; he wanted to elevate women’s status in order for Mexico to be seen as a modern nation, but he still believed that a woman’s most important role was that of a wife.³⁶

The congresses revealed a range of views among Mexican women, but the majority demanded greater access to education and liberation from the “yoke of tradition,” even though most did not go so far as to reject marriage and motherhood.³⁷ Not surprisingly, since the majority of the delegates were teachers, the resolutions of the first congress in January stressed schooling and teaching as the best ways to liberate women and make their contributions to the family and to society more valuable. A few women did express more radical views. Hermila Galindo, a leading Mexican feminist and personal secretary to President Carranza, drew nationwide attention to the congress when she advocated for birth control and access to divorce. Galindo did not actually attend, but in a paper read by a colleague she argued that the new approach to women’s education should include instruction on anatomy and hygiene, since women’s sex drive was just as strong as men’s and they needed to be educated about their own bodies. She also argued forcefully against the sexual double standard, and demanded women’s right to divorce.³⁸ Taken together, these opinions were interpreted by many in the audience, not to mention the press, as promoting free love and sexual equality for women.³⁹ In fact, most of the delegates were more moderate; they supported Alvarado’s plan for expanding women’s education, and instead of the right to divorce, they demanded that Alvarado reform the civil code to allow single women to leave home at age twenty-one, as men were allowed to do.⁴⁰ Although the focus of feminist activity shifted to Mexico City shortly after Alvarado left office in 1918, these early conferences in the Yucatán marked the first organized feminist activity in Mexico and influenced later feminist conferences in the 1920s.

New feminist leaders emerged from the Yucatán congresses, some of whom would have significant interactions with U.S. women internationalists over the next decade. One of the more radical was Elena Torres Cuéllar. Torres was a schoolteacher from Guanajuato who traveled to Yucatán to attend the congresses. She was a friend of Hermila Galindo, and read Galindo’s paper at the first congress. Enamored with the feminist and revolutionary environment of the region, Torres stayed on in Mérida after the conference. Alvarado, impressed with Torres’s motivation and background in education, put her in charge of opening a Montessori school. Torres also became an active participant in the Yucatán Socialist Party.⁴¹ In 1918 she helped organize the Latin American Bureau of the Third International, which aimed to foster solidarity between Russian and Mexican workers.⁴² In 1918 or 1919, she moved to Mexico City, where she cofounded the Consejo Feminista Mexicano (Mexican Feminist Council, CFM) in August 1919.

Like Galindo, Torres was frustrated by the limitations of revolutionary rhetoric for women. She saw herself not as a “useful political instrument” for Mexico’s modernization, but as an equal citizen.⁴³ Dedicated to the economic, social, and political emancipation of women, Torres’s group became over the next few years the most important feminist organization in Mexico, and the focal point of most interactions between U.S. and Mexican women internationalists. Its goals ranged from equal pay for equal work to civic improvements such as neighborhood inspections and children’s parks to political rights and reform of the civil code. The CFM demanded enforcement of the laws protecting women workers that were spelled out in the 1917 Constitution, including overtime pay, safe working conditions, and maternity leave. It claimed equal political rights for women, including the right to vote in local and national elections and the right to run for and hold public office.⁴⁴ The CFM platform was not quite as radical as Torres’s personal beliefs; there was no mention of birth control or divorce, for instance. But the group’s demands did reflect Torres’s concern with women as workers, demanding the establishment of wages “considering woman as head of a family,” and mechanisms for establishing workplace safety and sanitation.

The Consejo Feminista drew strength and legitimacy from revolutionary rhetoric, even as its members pushed back against its limits and sought international connections to bolster their standing. The group’s platform reflected the revolutionary atmosphere in which it was created, incorporating “effective realization of the rights of citizenship granted by the present Constitution and its [enlargement]” and “equal political rights for men and women.”⁴⁵ Central to Elena Torres’s mission was to “aid in the reconstruction of our country.”⁴⁶ But there was also a clear internationalist cast to the CFM agenda. The group’s call to Mexican women included a demand for cooperation “with women around the world to abolish war, end militarism, and ensure the rights of weaker peoples to live in peace, harmony, and perfect liberty.”⁴⁷ Torres was eager to establish contacts with international women’s organizations, to “promote a feminine entente-cordiale among the women of the whole world in order to bring about permanent peace and international amity.”⁴⁸ Although it is difficult to pin down the origins of the CFM’s internationalist impulses, it is possible they grew from members’ understanding that the Yucatán congresses had drawn interest from U.S. and European women, and thus that Mexican women’s struggle for emancipation could attract international support. It is also possible that Elena Torres’s involvement with the Third International influenced her global thinking as she and her colleagues drew up their platform.

Mexican feminism was thus bound up with the Revolution in important ways, as women like Elena Torres demanded equal access to the new measures of citizenship promised by the 1917 Constitution. Despite their loyalty to the Revolution, however, some Mexican feminists, including Torres, were willing to explore and develop connections with women in other countries, including the United States. Even in the midst of a rising tide of anti-U.S. sentiment, Torres and her colleagues turned in the late 1910s and early 1920s to U.S. women for help in achieving their feminist goals. This suggests that for them, at least, nationalism and internationalism could coexist.

Practicing Human Internationalism

Most U.S. women did not fully understand the nuances of the Mexican Revolution, nor the depth of anti-U.S. sentiment in Mexico. But they did understand the contentious nature of U.S.-Mexican relations, and the potential for those relations to deteriorate as the negotiations over Article 27 dragged on. As the “old” internationalism was breaking down, when diplomacy and formal agreements were no longer sufficient to stem the tide of U.S.-Mexican animosity, U.S. women stepped into the fray to practice human internationalism.

If formal, legal internationalism was measured in treaties and conventions and assessed by examining whether or not they were observed or implemented, the efficacy of human internationalism was harder to gauge. U.S. women pursued it by establishing contacts with Mexican women, maintaining a correspondence with those contacts, sharing information about themselves and their organizations, sending U.S. representatives to Mexico, recruiting Mexican women to form groups in Mexico City, convening conferences, and implementing a host of other initiatives. That is to say, they pursued the kind of work social activists and nongovernmental organizations have always done, and they did it with limited resources and finite amounts of time and energy. In the early years of this inter-American endeavor, their efforts seemed to pay off.

Any group of U.S. women hoping to expand its work in Mexico needed first to establish contacts in the country. How different organizations sought those contacts, and what kinds of women they hoped to find, varied significantly according to who the U.S. women were and what they wanted to accomplish. Given that the Pan American International Women’s Committee had grown out of the Women’s Auxiliary Conference and that their main goal was Pan American unity, it is not surprising that Emma Bain Swiggett sought her contacts through the members of Pan American Scientific Congress and the Latin American diplomatic corps. She exchanged numerous letters with Ignacio Bonillas, Mexican ambassador to the United States, and with Henry Fletcher, U.S. ambassador to Mexico, asking for names of Mexican women to whom she could reach out, but neither was particularly helpful. In the end the woman who became her principal Mexican contact was Adelia Palacios, a teacher whose name Swiggett knew because Palacios had attended the first Pan American Scientific Congress in 1908–1909. The YWCA, by contrast, sought out U.S. contacts in Mexico, rather than Mexican women. In other countries, such as China and Japan, part of the association’s mission was to serve missionaries and other U.S. women stationed abroad. Although the YWCA’s hopes for Mexico were centered more on Mexican women, reaching out to U.S. women and men in Mexico City gave them insight on current political and religious tensions that might hinder their efforts, and on whether a Mexican association would be useful. The YWCA also leaned heavily for guidance and support on the Young Men’s Christian Association, which had been operating in Mexico City since 1902.

Both the PAIWC and the YWCA were concerned with recruiting certain types of Mexican women, and avoiding others—especially radical women like Elena Torres and Hermila Galindo. Swiggett remarked to a colleague in early 1919 that though she was frustrated with the slow growth of the Mexican branch of the PAIWC, she took comfort in the fact that “our one member”—Palacios—“is the right sort and I hope we may soon have others.”⁴⁹ Swiggett did not expand on what she meant by the “right sort,” but given the committee’s emphasis on Pan American unity and traditional ideals of womanhood, it is not difficult to imagine that Swiggett wanted members who would not be controversial within the official Pan American community, and whose personal and professional backgrounds were unobjectionable. The YWCA was more explicit. In a confidential letter to the director of the Pan American Union, one official noted that “Some of the Mexican women have become very radical. One of these is Señorita Hermila Galindo…. The work of the Y.W.C.A. is very greatly needed to counteract these too radical influences and help Mexican women to develop in a safe and natural way.”⁵⁰ The association’s desire to avoid the feminists who had spoken out about birth control and divorce at the Yucatán congresses indicates that they sought to be of service to Mexican women in more traditional ways, and wanted Mexican contacts who would fit that mold. This approach on the part of these two organizations undercut the implicit universalism of Jane Addams’s human internationalism; both groups discounted on principle the knowledge and experiences of “radical” Mexican women. At the same time, both the PAIWC and the YWCA reinforced the emphasis on “spiritual” internationalism in their efforts to avoid ideological conflicts. These groups sought politically safer roads to internationalism.

The two peace organizations, on the other hand, welcomed activist and openly feminist women. When searching for potential recruits in Mexico, WILPF targeted women who had participated in the Yucatán congresses and eventually established contact with Elena Torres. Torres expressed interest in starting a branch in Mexico, and later supported WILPF’s efforts while president of the Consejo Feminista Mexicano.⁵¹ As president of the CFM, Torres also reached out to another peace organization in the United States, the Women’s Peace Society. How Torres learned of the WPS is unclear, since they were a very small group and were not seeking to expand outside the United States. But in December 1919 Torres contacted Elinor Byrns, the society’s executive secretary, because members of the Consejo Feminista were “anxious to come in contact with the various international women’s organizations, that they may know more of Mexico and her conditions.”⁵² Neither the WPS nor the CFM had the resources to do more than exchange letters and information, but they did that with frequency and increasing affection over the next two years. Both WILPF and the WPS sought contacts in Mexico who would help them further their efforts toward peace, and both welcomed the interest of one of the leading Mexican feminists during this period.

Once these myriad contacts had been established, the next step was to implement one of the central tenets of the new women’s internationalism—sharing information about the history, experiences, and goals of women in the United States and Mexico. Correspondence was cheap and relatively easy, provided that translators or a common language could be found. Generally, U.S. women wrote in English and Mexican women in Spanish, and all relied on translators within their organizations. A few Mexican women, including Elena Torres and Elena Landázuri, a member of the Consejo Feminista Mexicano who became the principal contact for WILPF, had spent time in the United States and wrote English well. Letters were also occasionally exchanged in French, which until this period was more likely than Spanish or English to be the second language of educated women in the United States or Mexico respectively.

Sharing information about themselves and their organizations was a way for U.S. and Mexican women to discover and establish common interests. Circular letters, pamphlets, periodicals, newspaper articles, press releases, and other media allowed a group’s ethos to fit into an envelope. When Rosa Manus contacted Salvador Alvarado, she sent a brief summary of the 1915 peace conference at The Hague. When Emma Bain Swiggett reached out to Adelia Palacios, she included a pamphlet outlining the main achievements of the Women’s Auxiliary Conference. U.S. women were not the only ones to follow this pattern. With her letter of introduction to the Women’s Peace Society, Elena Torres included a flyer detailing the mission and goals of the Consejo Feminista Mexicano.⁵³

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the distances involved and the fact that Mexico was still experiencing periodic outbursts of revolutionary violence, the process of corresponding and sharing information was not as easy in practice as it was in theory. Letters got lost in the mail. Occasionally, operatives entrusted with messages of introduction or packets of information failed to deliver them for one reason or another. WILPF had a longstanding problem with a member of its California branch, who for several years represented herself as an intermediary for Jane Addams and Emily Greene Balch with the Consejo Feminista, but when Balch finally began corresponding directly with Elena Torres in 1922, they discovered their intermediary had not been fulfilling her duties.⁵⁴ Maintaining a regular correspondence was also difficult when various women were ill or absent from their posts for long periods of time. Adelia Palacios endured a long illness during the winter of 1921. Elena Landázuri was away from Mexico City for three months in 1922 during the final illness and death of her mother. Addams and Balch also struggled with ill health. Travel abroad, which was common especially among WILPF and YWCA members, only made regular communication more difficult, since letters often had to be forwarded multiple times before they reached their intended recipients.⁵⁵

Given these difficulties, many women recognized that the ideal way to share information in the pursuit of common ground was in person. Of the four organizations considered here, the YWCA and the Women’s International League sent representatives to Mexico; the Pan American International Women’s Committee and the Women’s Peace Society did not. Their different organizational structures offer some explanation. The YWCA and WILPF were constituted by sections and branches established in countries around the world. The PAIWC, by contrast, was based in Washington and operated primarily through correspondence during the periods between its major gatherings in conjunction with the scientific congresses. The WPS dedicated itself to lobbying in New York and Washington, and never intended to establish national sections in other countries.

The women who traveled to Mexico on behalf of the YWCA and WILPF had varying experiences. WILPF representative Rose Standish Nichols visited Mexico City twice over the course of 1920 to try to start a section there. She spoke with “twenty-five or thirty women” who “seemed interested and eager to form a group.”⁵⁶ Nichols did not encounter Elena Torres or Elena Landázuri, but another U.S. member, Zonia Baber, met with them both during the same period. Baber, a professor of geography and a close friend of Jane Addams, traveled extensively in Mexico during the early 1920s. She did not know Torres well, but she was well liked both by Landázuri and by Adelia Palacios, with whom she interacted frequently. Two YWCA representatives, Harriet Taylor and Caroline Smith, traveled to Mexico in May 1921 to examine the feasibility of establishing a branch of the association there. They reported that their meetings with various groups of Mexican women and men had been “warm” and “charming,” and by the end Smith was convinced that the Mexican people as a whole were “the personification of devotion and love.”⁵⁷

The best method for practicing human internationalism was also the most expensive and time-consuming. Organizing conferences, where large groups of women could meet each other in person, exchange information about issues of concern to them, and socialize informally was the most straightforward way to further cooperation. WILPF organized international meetings in 1915, 1919, and 1921, but as they were all held in Europe, it was difficult for Latin American women to attend. The Women’s Peace Society was much too small, and had no real reason to be interested in a large-scale conference of its own. But U.S. women who were drawn to Pan Americanism during this period could take advantage of a preexisting network of organizations and conferences. The Pan American Union participated in the International Conferences of American States, which were held roughly every five years except during World War I, though women did not participate significantly in those conferences until 1928. But women had participated in several previous scientific congresses, dating back to 1898. Women comprised 6 percent of the delegates to the First Pan American Scientific Congress in 1909. Most of them were teachers who gave papers and participated in discussions on education in various fields. By the time of the second congress in December 1915, a group of U.S. women—all wives of congress members or diplomats—desired more time devoted to women’s education and other issues than the scientific congress could provide. A month before the scientific congress opened, a hastily convened committee sent invitations to the wives and daughters of the men traveling to Washington to attend the Women’s Auxiliary Conference of the Second Pan American Scientific Congress. Planning for the conference rested largely in the hands of Emma Bain Swiggett, whose husband was the general secretary of the Scientific Congress.⁵⁸

The idea of human internationalism, conducted through personal exchanges and information sharing rather than treaties and formal agreements, was exactly what the organizers of the auxiliary conference had in mind. Swiggett hoped that in the process of becoming better acquainted and of exchanging views “on subjects of special interest to women as well as on those dealing with Pan Americanism” that a desire would arise “on the part of the women of the Americas for further and harmonious cooperation in the future.” The official report of the conference went further in explaining its origins: “It was the belief that such cooperation among women would furnish a powerful factor in developing the means ‘to increase the knowledge of things American,’ and ‘to disseminate and make the culture of each American country the heritage of all American Republics.’ There was a vision of all that a united American womanhood might do in creating and cherishing feelings of mutual helpfulness and friendship, and of all it might contribute to a strong spiritual union of the Americas.”⁵⁹ Such a mandate echoed Jane Addams’s visions of a “spiritual internationalism” to promote cooperation and peace, and of the special role of women within it.

The program of the conference faithfully executed this mandate, directing the attendees’ attention to “things American” that promoted traditional conceptions of “American womanhood.” Included in the program, for example, were talks on “Education for Home-Making” and “Advancing Ideals for the Home.” In a speech on “The Changing Emphasis in the Education of Women in the Southern United States,” conference attendee Elizabeth Colton praised the increasing presence of “domestic science” in southern colleges. Instead of being taught “ornamental” subjects such as music, art, and elocution, women were now being taught “practical” skills such as cooking and sewing. “Home economics,” she contended, “are better adapted for the majority of women than curricula such as at Bryn Mawr and Wellesley Colleges.” Blanche Z. de Baralt, a French painter married to a Cuban diplomat, recognized the “superior intelligence” of “the Latin American woman,” but maintained “it is our conviction that the most immediate need for the women of Latin America is training in the domestic sciences; in order to destroy the barrier between man and woman she must be prepared for usefulness as a skilled home maker as well as an intellectual worker.”⁶⁰ This emphasis on women’s domestic capacities reflected the elite makeup of the conference attendees and their distance from the more activist feminism emerging in the United States during the 1910s.

But the traditionalist slant of the conference should not obscure its significance within the context of the new internationalism. Swiggett and her colleagues believed strongly in the unique power of women to shape inter-American relations. As wives of prominent diplomatic officials, the organizers were fully aware of the myriad issues facing U.S.-Latin American relations, not least of which were the Wilson administration’s interventions in Mexico. The purpose of the conference was to facilitate diplomacy among men, first by fostering friendship among women, and second by trying to create a sense of common purpose. This was not a novel effort on the part of Swiggett and her colleagues; women had long used their positions as wives, sisters, mothers, and daughters to further their own and their male relatives’ political agendas. In a context such as this, “Washington women—both well-known and not—appear as political actors in their own right, using social events and the ‘private sphere’ to establish the national capital and to build … extraofficial structures.”⁶¹ Swiggett used her position as the wife of a prominent Pan American official to advance not only women’s interests but international interests as well.

Indeed, a closer look at the conference agenda reveals the presence of many progressive ideas about women and their potential contributions to international amity. One representative from Texas spoke on “The Solidarity of the World’s Womanhood as an International Asset.” Fannie Fern Andrews, founder of the American School Peace League and member of the Woman’s Peace Party, proposed a “Pan American Bureau of Education” that would stress topics such as “Public Education in a Democracy” and “International Education.” Another speech on “Constructive Woman, an Aid to Modern Progress” highlighted the achievements of woman educators, political reformers, and social workers, including Maria Montessori, Susan B. Anthony, and Jane Addams.⁶² Addams herself closed the conference with her address on the new internationalism. All these speeches reflected a belief in the power of 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 diplomatic relations in December 1920. Moreover, the fact that U.S. women had met with a notable amount of enthusiasm for cooperation among Mexican women meant that their internationalist efforts had at least a fighting chance to take root and grow. And as they discovered, Mexican women intended to be more than just passive partners in these endeavors.

Mexican Women’s Internationalism

Many of the Mexicans with whom U.S. women were in contact advocated for internationalism. The platform of the Consejo Feminista Mexicano demonstrated that its members believed their nationalist and internationalist ambitions could coexist. Elena Torres echoed Jane Addams in her letter to the Women’s Peace Society when she declared that the CFM sought an “entente-cordiale” among the world’s women.⁷¹ Elena Landázuri, in a speech before WILPF’s third international convention in Vienna in 1921, argued for the power of women’s organizing to effect change, both within Mexico and internationally.⁷² Adelia Palacios continuously reiterated to Emma Bain Swiggett that she was committed to realizing the ideals of the Pan American International Women’s Committee.⁷³ All these women welcomed and cooperated with U.S. visitors in Mexico, such as Zonia Baber, Caroline Smith, and Harriet Taylor. The fact that the Mexicans with whom U.S. women were in the closest touch shared their basic assumptions about the power of women’s internationalism was promising common ground on which to build.

But women such as Torres, Landázuri, and Palacios also made clear that they could and would use the methods of human internationalism to express their own views, and to articulate exactly what they wanted out of these exchanges with U.S. women. These women were prepared to embrace internationalism because they saw it as a means to help them achieve their own goals—some of which overlapped with U.S. women’s interests, and some of which did not. The principles of mutuality, cooperation, and equity that underlay human internationalism promised much for Mexican women in this regard. In these efforts, Mexican women focused on two goals. First, they sought solidarity with and guidance from U.S. women on advancing Mexican women’s civil, political, and economic status. Second, they wanted U.S. women to take a strong stance against U.S. intervention in Mexico, and to voice their opposition to policy makers in Washington, D.C. Like U.S. women, Mexican women advocated internationalism as a path to peace and a way to secure women’s rights, but they saw it as a means to further their nationalist goals, such as an end to U.S. economic exploitation, as well.

Mexican women made clear that while they sought guidance from U.S. women, they did not want to be led, and they would resist any U.S. efforts at imperialist internationalism. Elena Torres distributed copies of the detailed, extensive Consejo Feminista platform as widely as possible among women’s organizations outside Mexico. She sent copies to Elinor Byrns of the Women’s Peace Society and to the U.S. section of WILPF in late 1919. In addition to wanting to share information about Mexico, the CFM solicited advice and support: “We beg of you to communicate with us directly and to send us all your literature, suggestions, programs of action and any information that may aid us in our new organization, and in return, we shall keep you informed of our progress and development.”⁷⁴ Torres and her colleagues had put considerable thought and effort into crafting their platform, and they resisted several attempts on the part of U.S. women over the years to alter or narrow their focus. A few representatives from peace organizations wanted the CFM to focus solely on disarmament. Other U.S. women contended that the only way for the CFM to achieve its goal was by focusing on suffrage.

Elena Landázuri attempted to counter these incursions in 1921 in an address to the third international WILPF congress in Vienna, in which she emphasized the unique nature of Mexican problems and the need for Mexican solutions to fix them. Knowing she was the first Mexican woman to address a WILPF congress, Landázuri spent a considerable portion of her time outlining the history of Mexico, especially since the start of the Revolution. She explained that the reign of Porfirio Díaz had been an era of progress and development for some Mexicans, but it had cost the majority of Mexicans their land and freedoms. Some revolutionary leaders had tried to implement socialist policies in order to rectify this situation, with some benefits, but as far as Landázuri could judge, reforms that were “imported” from abroad proved largely inadaptable “to our conditions.” On behalf of her compatriots she argued that “We must seek the possibility of social betterment from our own institutions, in forms that arise from the needs of our organizations.” She was not speaking only of socialism; Landázuri implicitly rejected the wholesale imposition of any foreign ideology or system of government. The solutions to Mexican problems would originate in Mexico. “We are responsible for the current disarray of our country,” she asserted, “but I think we recognize that with shame, which is already the first step toward a better future.”

While Landázuri defended Mexican agency, she did not reject the possibility that international groups could offer assistance. She closed with a message to women and men of all nations. If foreigners wanted to “protect” Mexico, they should “take it seriously” among themselves:

Begin by knowing who we are—read our works, enjoy our art, admire our history, and when you know our soul, you can begin to teach us what we want to know. In a family, you don’t leave the children forgotten in a room and only come to realize their existence when they enter the classroom as half-savages and break all the rules. You educate them, you protect them, you guide them. So it is with nations—the young people have the right to question the thinkers, the idealists. Irrigate our virgin and fertile soil with something of the treasure of your love and your wisdom, and with your already skillful hands help us climb to the top.⁷⁵

Landázuri thus walked a careful line between asserting Mexican autonomy and accepting guidance from groups such as WILPF. Outsiders could not hope to “fix” Mexico simply by rigidly imposing their plans and ideals. If they truly wanted to be useful, they had to learn how best to be useful in Mexico, to Mexicans. At the same time, however, Landázuri’s family metaphor left intact prevalent assumptions about the inherent superiority of some groups over others—Mexicans were still the “children” in need of education. This tension between asserting autonomy and working alongside organizational leaders was common among women trying to challenge imperialist feminism during the interwar period.⁷⁶

What both Landázuri and Torres demanded from U.S. women, particularly the peace activists, more than anything else was vocal, active opposition to U.S. military interventions in and U.S. economic exploitation of Mexico. In her initial letter to the Women’s Peace Society, Elena Torres stated that the Consejo Feminista had originally been founded in August 1919 “as a spontaneous unit of protest against the constant incursions of American troops across the Mexican border,” and that they were reaching out to U.S. women’s organizations in large part because they hoped U.S. women would speak out against such incursions: “We are especially anxious to come in contact with the various international women’s organizations, that they may know more of Mexico and her conditions and perhaps throw the weight of their opinion against the possible recurrence of any international misunderstandings.”⁷⁷ Torres was careful not to paint all U.S. Americans with an imperialist brush. The CFM was eager to work with U.S. women, as long as they understood Torres’s belief that “the ongoing threat for Mexico and for all Latin American countries is the boundless greed of a few U.S. imperialists,” who would not hesitate to provoke a war “in order to control Mexican oil.”⁷⁸ Elena Landázuri made a similar distinction in her address to the WILPF convention: “I must say that if a group of U.S. capitalists is our greatest enemy, we find among the people of the United States our greatest friends.”⁷⁹

Torres saved her strongest rhetoric for lashing out against economic exploitation by U.S. businesses. In a statement she sent Elinor Byrns to read on her behalf at a conference in Toronto, Torres contended that discrimination and exploitation were common within U.S. companies based in Mexico. U.S. and Mexican workers in the same jobs were compensated differently, treated differently, and given different benefits. Torres cited the mining and petroleum industries as particularly egregious offenders. Mining companies brought technological advancements to regions such as Guanajuato that should have improved not only production but the quality of life for its workers. Instead they brought only “ruin and misery.” Petroleum workers tended to enjoy higher wages, she conceded, but their earnings were 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.