Katherine M. Marino

Harvard Book Store welcomes UCLA assistant professor of history KATHERINE M. MARINO for a discussion of her new book, Feminism for the Americas: The Making of an International Human Rights Movement.

About Feminism for the Americas

This book chronicles the dawn of the global movement for women's rights in the first decades of the twentieth century. The founding mothers of this movement were not based primarily in the United States, however, or in Europe. Instead, Katherine M. Marino introduces readers to a cast of remarkable Latin American and Caribbean women whose deep friendships and intense rivalries forged global feminism out of an era of imperialism, racism, and fascism. Six dynamic activists form the heart of this story: from Brazil, Bertha Lutz; from Cuba, Ofelia Domingez Navarro; from Uruguay, Paulina Luisi; from Panama, Clara Gonzalez; from Chile, Marta Vergara; and from the United States, Doris Stevens. This Pan-American network drove a transnational movement that advocated women's suffrage, equal pay for equal work, maternity rights, and broader self-determination. Their painstaking efforts led to the enshrinement of women's rights in the United Nations Charter and the development of a framework for international human rights. But their work also revealed deep divides, with Latin American activists overcoming U.S. presumptions to feminist superiority. As Marino shows, these early fractures continue to influence divisions among today's activists along class, racial, and national lines.

Marino's multinational and multilingual research yields a new narrative for the creation of global feminism. The leading women introduced here were forerunners in understanding the power relations at the heart of international affairs. Their drive to enshrine fundamental rights for women, children, and all people of the world stands as a testament to what can be accomplished when global thinking meets local action.

Praise

"In this compelling and impressively researched book, Marino makes a considerable contribution to our understanding of international feminism and transnational movements and does an excellent job portraying U.S. women's complicated participation in—and effort to dominate—the Pan-American women's movement." —Lynn Dumenil, author of The Second Line of Defense: American Women and World War I

"Katherine Marino's brilliant history of feminismo americano gives Latin American women their rightful place in the history of the transnational women's movement. Crafting an engrossing narrative of individual lives and collective action based on exhaustive multinational research, Marino details the ways Latin American feminists fought on the global stage for economic and social, as well as legal, equality throughout the first half of the twentieth century, and made women's rights human rights long before Hillary Rodham Clinton was born." —Leila Rupp, author of Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women's Movement

"Marino has produced an extraordinary book. Her deep and wide-ranging research brings to life some of the key figures and organizations that defined hemispheric women's activism in the first half of the twentieth century." —Jocelyn Olcott, author of International Women's Year: The Greatest Consciousness-Raising Event in History