Beyond Suffrage: Transnational Cooperation and Contestation in Women’s Activism in Latin America

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

Fighting in the war, working in tobacco factories, teaching in schools, building their own business companies, and protesting in the streets, Latin American women have changed the rules of interactions between the State and civil society. This panel seeks to call attention to the intricate relation between war, colonialism, and national emancipation vis-à-vis the emergence of transnational feminism, to draw a panoramic portrait of social practices that contributed to strengthening the way of thinking of women as political subjects. The history of women’s suffrage in Latin America has been traditionally studied through the framework of the nation-state, which foregrounds suffrage as an incremental process that initially emerges at the municipal level and gradually expands to the national. Approaching women’s suffrage and political activism in Latin America through a transnational lens, this panel aims to highlight the connections, friendships, and international collaboration as well as contestation to colonialism and to racism that pervaded women’s international organizations. By focusing in the international dimensions of the demand for women’s rights to work, to vote, and to be political representatives of their countries, this panel explores the dynamic tension created for the interaction between organizations and individuals, as well as between national and transnational discourses. The transnational framework of the panel allows us to highlight women’s activism not only through the notion of citizenship but through networks of alliance and association that underscore women’s agency on a host of issues including anti-war activism.

Sub Track

• Gender and Feminisms

Session Organizer

• María Alejandra Aguilar Dornelles, University at Albany-SUNY

Chair

• María Alejandra Aguilar Dornelles, University at Albany-SUNY

Discussant

• Claudia Montero, Universidad de Valparaíso

Individual Presentations

• Transnational Suffrage Movements and Methodist Girls’ Schools in Mexico - Katie M McIntyre, University of Rhode Island

• ‘A Symbol and an Inspiration’: Unpacking the Relationship Between Carrie Chapman Catt and Bertha Lutz - Susan Goodier, SUNY Oneonta

• Relaciones político-biográficas transnacionales, en la historia de la obtención del sufragio femenino en Chile - María Vera

• The Origins of Peruvian Feminism - Gregory S Hammond, Austin Peay State University