Women and the UN

A New History of Women's International Human Rights

Rebecca Adami, Dan Plesch, Rebecca Adami, Dan Plesch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000418828
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Diritto
• Subtopic: Diritto di genere

This book provides a critical history of influential women in the United Nations and seeks to inspire empowerment with role models from bygone eras.

The women whose voices this book presents helped shape UN conventions, declarations, and policies with relevance to the international human rights of women throughout the world today. From the founding of the UN up until the Latin American feminist movements that pushed for gender equality in the UN Charter, and the Security Council Resolutions on the role of women in peace and conflict, the volume reflects on how women delegates from different parts of the world have negotiated and disagreed on human rights issues related to gender within the UN throughout time. In doing so it sheds new light on how these hidden historical narratives enrich theoretical studies in international relations and global agency today. In view of contemporary feminist and postmodern critiques of the origin of human rights, uncovering women's history of the United Nations from both Southern and Western perspectives allows us to consider questions of feminism and agency in international relations afresh.

With contributions from leading scholars and practitioners of law, diplomacy, history, and development studies, and brought together by a theoretical commentary by the Editors, Women and the UN will appeal to anyone whose research covers human rights, gender equality, international development, or the history of civil society.

The Open Access version of this book, available at

http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781003036708, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

1 From women’s rights to human rights

The influence of Pan-American feminism on the United Nations

Katherine M. Marino

DOI: 10.4324/9781003036708-1

Introduction

Soon after arriving at the United Nations Conference on International Organization (UNCIO) in San Francisco in 1945, Brazilian delegate Bertha Lutz wrote to friends back home that “Latin American women” would be “the most helpful” in advancing women’s rights.¹ Although women from the U.S. and British delegations refused to promote women’s rights in the Charter, the female representatives from the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and Uruguay were self-identified feministas. For the past two decades, they had all been engaged, with Lutz, in a Pan-American feminist movement that elevated women’s rights to international treaties. At the UNCIO, these Latin American women collaborated to achieve a number of key goals: incorporating women’s rights into the purposes of the organization, asserting women’s rights as human rights, and ensuring the representation of women in all UN bodies. Bertha Lutz also proposed what became the UN’s Commission on the Status of Women. They accomplished these objectives against the objections of U.S. and British women who believed women’s rights goals too divisive or not important enough to include in the Charter, and of the U.S. and British delegations that opposed human rights demands more generally. Without the work of these Latin American women, the UN Charter would likely have contained little to nothing about women’s rights.

Their pivotal work represented a culmination of over two decades of Pan-American feminism, a transnational movement that fuelled grassroots exchange and inter-American diplomacy for women’s rights. This essay explores how and why this movement drove their UNCIO contributions. Since the mid-1920s Pan-American feminism provided a critical forum for Latin American feminist innovations in international law, starting with an international treaty they devised to advance women’s rights, the Equal Rights Treaty. The movement also pioneered the first inter-governmental organization in the world to promote women’s rights, the Inter-American Commission of Women, or Comisión Interamericana de Mujeres (CIM) that for the next two decades, launched the Equal Rights Treaty into Pan American Union and other international meetings. In the 1930s and 40s inter-American feminists connected their international defense of women’s rights to what was becoming known as international “human rights,” based on multiple and inter-connected grassroots struggles against fascism, racism, and imperialist capitalism. Latin American feminists’ insistence that after the Second World War the United Nations must enshrine rights for all regardless of race, sex, or class, and must include women in the peace deliberations compelled both the presence and actions the Latin American feminists in San Francisco. Their work also shaped Latin American feminists’ contributions to the 1948 UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Pan-American feminism not only pushed women’s rights into human rights but also helped formulate international human rights.

Pan-American feminism’s equal rights treaty

Pan-American feminism emerged from a broader moment of Pan-Americanism ushered in by the First World War that shattered the notion of European cultural superiority and opened a space for the “new” Latin American nations on the world stage. The U.S. government sought stronger ties with Latin American countries to protect its economic and political interests following the 1914 completion of the Panama Canal and resulting dramatic rise in trade with Latin America. This period saw a flourishing of new Pan-American organizations, congresses, publications, and institutions around culture, hygiene and medicine, child welfare, and feminism. Changes in transportation, communications, and industrialization sped these collaborations. Though a thin cover for U.S. imperialism, this new Pan-Americanism represented an opportunity that many Latin-American diplomats and lawyers seized to advance a new inter-American system promoting multilateralism as well as their own countries’ political sovereignty and cultural advancement.²

The Great War and the 1917 Mexican Revolution raised the stakes around national self-determination and women’s rights in the Americas. Having organized in regional gatherings since the 1910 International Women’s Congress in Buenos Aires, Latin American feminists found in new Pan-American collaborations with U.S. women ways to gain legitimacy for their demands for women’s political, civil, social, and economic rights. After the First World War, when many European countries had passed women’s suffrage legislation, a number of Latin American male political leaders equated women’s rights with cultural and civilizational advancement. At the 1923 Pan-American conference in Santiago, Chile, male diplomats from Guatemala and Chile made such arguments when they passed resolutions to charge the Pan American Union with the study and promotion of women’s rights, responding as well to feminist pressure.³

Although Latin American feminists looked with high expectations to the Pan-American realm, they were often dismayed by interactions with U.S. counterparts who deemed themselves and their approaches to feminism as superior. Anglo-American women took on the role of “teachers” at the 1922 Pan American Women’s Congress in Baltimore, Maryland, organized by U.S. feminist Carrie Chapman Catt and the U.S. League of Women Voters. Latin American activists were even more disturbed by Catt’s subsequent disparaging comments about Latin American women lagging “forty years behind” those in the U.S. and her doubts that they were ready for the franchise.⁴ Catt and other U.S. feminist leaders also routinely failed to grasp that political and civil equality under the law did not represent the highest priority of many Latin American feminists who also sought women’s economic and social welfare and anti-imperialism. At a time when U.S. military interventions in Central America and ...