Transnational Connections among Right-Wing Women in Brazil, Chile, and the United States

This paper examines the impact that right-wing movements of South American women had on women in the United States between 1960 and 1990.  The U.S. government, Reader’s Digest, and the Catholic Church congratulated South American women for their “courageous efforts against communism” and brought them to the U.S. so that American women could learn from them and replicate their activism.  Newspapers across the United States reported on their efforts to defeat communism in their own countries and Phyllis Schlafly held them up as examples for women in the United States to follow.  The author will discuss what conservative U.S. women thought about, learned from, and took from their South American counterparts, thus highlighting these transnational connections.