Popular-Front Pan-American Feminism and the Development of International Women's Rights

In the mid-1930s, a Popular-Front feminist movement grew in the Americas, focusing on democracy, anti-fascism, and women’s equal economic opportunities and social welfare.  The movement encouraged greater collaboration between the U.S.-National Woman’s Party-led Inter-American Commission of Women (IACW) and a number of Latin American feminists.  Leftist activists and groups in Latin America that formerly opposed collaboration with U.S. liberal feminists and the IACW began to welcome a broad alliance in the name of “equal rights” for women.  “Popular-front Pan-American feminism” is the term I use to describe this coalition.  My paper examines this movement, in which feminists from Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Panama, the U.S., and other countries in the Americas, worked together under the banner of the Commission and its "Equal Rights" treaties to push a new international agenda: women's suffrage, “equal pay for equal work” and state-sponsored maternity legislation for working women.  At the 1936 International Labor Organization Conference in Santiago, Chilean IACW member Marta Vergara and her recently formed Popular-Front feminist organization, the Movimiento pro Emancipación de la Mujer Chilena (MEMCh or Movement for the Emancipation of Chilean Women), utilized the Commission to demand equal rights and maternity legislation throughout the Americas.  Because of Vergara's and other Latin American feminists’ efforts, social welfare for working women became a demand of the otherwise individual-rights-focused IACW.  These Popular-Front Pan-American feminist collaborations reveal how Latin American activists, in particular, helped shift an inter-American agenda for "women's rights," toward one that included not only equal political and civil rights, but also social welfare and economic equity for men and women.