It was, in part, this contraction of the meaning of “feminism” and lack of support for the ERA in the United States that made National Woman’s Party leaders like Doris Stevens eager to engage in the inter-American realm in the late 1920s. The single-issue focus on legal equality that they deemed so successful in the U.S. suffrage movement defined their approach to inter-American feminism. Their Equal Rights Treaty, an internationalization of the ERA, provoked concerted resistance from the network of U.S. women’s groups opposed to the ERA. From the 1920s to the 1940s, the inter-American realm became a significant new battleground for U.S. women to play out their domestic ERA debate. Each side, however, believed that it represented the rightful leadership over the Americas, where, aside from the United States and Canada, women still did not have national suffrage rights.
In these years, however, more flexible meanings of feminismo flourished in Latin America, where the ERA debate did not exist and where activists of multiple commitments took up the term with far greater ease than their North American counterparts. While Latin American feminisms were heterogeneous, large groups of feministas in the Americas cohered around some common goals for feminismo americano.
First, feminismo americano demanded not only women’s individual rights under the law—for the vote and for civil rights—but also economic and social rights. These rights included equal pay for equal work, extension of labor legislation to rural and domestic workers, and rights of children born out of wedlock and of the mothers of those children. Activists also called for paid maternity leave, day-care facilities, and in some cases health care as “social rights.”
Second, feminismo americano assertively promoted Latin American leadership and opposition to U.S. imperialism. Many Latin Americans feminists identified U.S. counterparts’ presumptions of superiority as imperialist, especially since the United States had long used its perceived preeminence in women’s rights as justification for its political and economic ambitions in the region. [9] In inter-American feminism, the questions of who had the authority to speak and to assert common “American” principles became paramount. Feministas actively pushed back against a U.S. imperial feminism that often sought to squelch their goals. Their clashes with U.S. leaders helped produce a robust feminismo americano that pushed for liberation from multiple and overlapping forms of oppression—against patriarchy, U.S. imperialism, fascism, and often racism.