Transnational Pan-American Feminism: The Friendship of Bertha Lutz and Mary

Wilhelmine Williams, 19261944

Katherine M. Marino

Journal of Women's History, Volume 26, Number 2, Summer 2014, pp. 63-87
(Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jowh.2014.0034

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/547037

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2014
Transnational Pan-American
Feminism
The Friendship of Bertha Lutz and Mary Wilhelmine
Williams, 19261944

Katherine M. Marino

This paper explores Bertha Lutz and Mary Wilhelmine Williamss trans-
national, Pan-American friendship in the interwar years. Lutz was the
leader of Brazils suffrage movement and Williams was a U.S. historian
and member of the National Womans Party and Womens International
League for Peace and Freedom. They collaborated together to advance
Pan-American feminism, a belief that the Western Hemisphere shared a
common history and that, through unity, women of the Western Hemi-
sphere could bring about greater equality for women and world peace,
which they saw as two inextricably linked goals. The womens influence
over each others feminist activism was mutual; in turn, each utilized
ideas forged through their friendship to shape the feminist movement in
her respective country. The case revealed in this paper thus prompts a
reconsideration of interwar international and Pan-American feminism,
so often described as a hegemonic, one-way ideological project of North
American and European women.

I n 1925 Bertha Lutz, leader of Brazils suffrage movement, gave a rous-

ing speech at the Engineers Club in Rio de Janeiro about the promise of
Pan-American feminism. She described it as the union of two movements
gaining momentum in the Americasinternational feminism and inter-
national peace. Both championed equality and sovereignty irrespective
of sex or national status, and both, she said, could flourish in the Western
Hemisphere. After World War I, Pax Romana and Pax Brittanica were
gone; it was time now for Pax Americana. This era could be ushered in
only with womens equal political and civil rights. Believing women to be
naturally more pacifistic than men, Lutz saw womens full inclusion in their
polities as a step toward international peace. She sought women throughout
the Americas with whom to organize in support and friendship, trusting
that such links of intimacy and of enthusiasm for the same ideal would
help make these goals a reality.1
Meanwhile, several thousand miles away in Baltimore, Maryland,
Mary Wilhelmine Williams, professor of history at all-female Goucher Col-
lege, articulated a similar Pan-American feminist sensibility. Her course,
History of the Woman Movement in the U.S., one of the first college

2014 Journal of Womens History, Vol. 26 No. 2, 6387.

64 Journal of Womens History Summer

classes on womens history in the United States, depicted a forward-moving

and international effort in which politically and socially engaged women
battled together, not only for equality with men, but also for a more demo-
cratic and pacifistic world.2 Williams, a longtime member of the Womens
International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) and recent member
of the National Womans Party (NWP), was an expert in Latin American
history. Viewing the Western Hemisphere as moving together toward what
she called true democratic republicanism, she believed the time ripe for
womens international organizing in the Americas.3
The following year, Williams traveled to Rio de Janeiro on a research
trip and met Bertha Lutz. The two women would remain friends for the
rest of Williamss life. Their friendship and politics provide a window into a
particular type of Pan-American feminismthe belief that, through solidar-
ity, women of the Western Hemisphere could bring about two inextricably
linked goals: equality for women and world peace. Williams and Lutz
were both white, middle-class, and highly-educated professional women
connected to the Western liberal worlds of European-North American
international feminism, and though their liberal feminism spoke mainly
to women like themselves, they believed their ideals and activism could
be globally transformative. Arriving at similar ideological conclusions for
different reasons, they reinforced each others ideas and political strategy,
which shifted over the decades of their friendship. Their relationship af-
fords a close look at the workings of Pan-American feminism, its sometimes
surprising ideological power, and its influence on inter-war feminism in
the United States and Brazil.
Williams and Lutzs inter-American feminism grew out of the broader
international Pan-American movement that followed World War I. The war
had shattered the ideal of European cultural superiority, opening a space for
the new nations of the Americas to shape themselves into the nations of
the future. Williams and Lutz saw commonalities between the United States
and Brazil in their histories of European colonialism and current embrace
of democracy, and they believed the two nations could carry the torch of
feminism in the Western Hemisphere. Their beliefs reflected an influential
strain of thought in the early 1920s. Many major U.S. womens groups, from
the American Association of University Women (AAUW) to the YWCA,
WILPF, and NWP, created inter-American committees in attempts to in-
ternationalize their goals. The Brazilian Federation for Womens Progress
(FBPF), led by Lutz, also upheld Pan-Americanism as one of its central aims.
Despite its prevalence, Pan-American feminism of the inter-war years
has received relatively little historical attention. Pan-Americanism of the
1920s through the 1940s has been described both as a non-violent form of
U.S. economic imperialism and as a series of private and governmental
2014 Katherine M. Marino 65

interventions in the cultural field[that] served to redefine the nature

ofNorth American engagement in Latin America.4 Although some
scholarship has examined how statesmen in Latin America utilized Pan-
Americanism to their own ends, little work has been done on ways in
which feminists negotiated such relationships.5 Literature on transnational
feminism has explored the lively transatlantic exchange of predominantly
Euro-U.S. organizations that also flourished during the post-World War I
period, but it has paid minimal attention to womens inter-American work.6
The few scholars who have examined the inter-American feminism of the
League of Women Voters (LWV) 1922 Pan American Conference of Women
and of the Inter-American Commission of Women (IACW) between the
1920s and 1940s, have shed important light on inter-American womens
organizing. These works, however, have viewed such conferences as work-
ing in the same one-sided interests as the Pan-Americanism that forwarded
U.S. economic and cultural imperialism, revealing hegemonic, rather than
transnational, relations.7
In these works, two-way collaboration was made elusive not only be-
cause of U.S. feminists dominance and assumptions of superiority but also
because of what are often portrayed as differences between North and Latin
American feminism. North American feminism, viewed as individualist
and concerned with suffrage and an equal rights amendment, could not
speak to a more relational Latin American feminism that, especially
in the context of unstable political climates that would have rendered the
vote moot, perceived women as wives, mothers, and workers but not as
mens equals.8 While apt characterizations of some feminist views, such
stark contrasts between North and Latin American ideologies can also be
overly schematic. They elide the complexity and diversity of both North
and Latin American feminists, many of whom, including Bertha Lutz and
Mary Wilhelmine Williams, upheld simultaneous commitments to equal
rights, social justice, and world peace. Portrayals of one-sided exchange also
fail to acknowledge that Latin American feminists might have influenced
their North American counterparts who were suffering from a dearth of
national feminist support, or challenged some North American feminists
to expand their beliefs about womens rights as mothers and community
builders. They also underestimate the power of the belief that womens
interpersonal collaboration would help speed international peace.
This article shows how the friendship of Williams and Lutz, forged
through personal contact rather than institutional conferences, created a
transnational fellowship of equals who mutually exchanged ideas. Their
relationship prompts a reconsideration of Pan-American feminisms trans-
national potential. It contributes to the project of the historians Ellen DuBois
and Katie Oliviero to contest what we regard as a misrepresentation of
66 Journal of Womens History Summer

the dynamic of first wave feminist internationalism, as a simple one way

move from imperial center to periphery and colony.9 Lutz and Williamss
friendship also begs reevaluation of interwar Brazilian and U.S. feminisms.
The historians Susan Besse, June Hahner, and Rachel Soihet each shed light
on Lutzs feminist work in Brazil; however, they do not explore the full
influence that Pan-Americanism had on Brazils national movement.10 In
addition, while scholars have credited Lutz for inspiring the creation of the
United Nations Commission on the Status of Women in 1945, few have rec-
ognized the Pan-American feminism that made her UN activism possible.11
In the United States, historians have not yet closely examined Wil-
liamss Pan-American activism or utilized it to reevaluate the interwar years
of feminism as the doldrums between the first and second waves.12 U.S.
womens rights activists in these years have been presented as fractured
into two campsthose who favored sex-based labor legislation because
of broader social justice goals or because of a belief in womens essential
differences, versus those, usually members of the NWP, who favored equal
rights legislation and emphasized womens equality, or sameness, with men.
Leila Rupps work has helped shed light on this often false dichotomy
between equality and difference, and some historians have explored
NWPs pacifist rhetoric prior to World War II.13 Little scholarship, how-
ever, has examined how an embrace of international anti-fascism, which
was connected to a broader movement of Pan-American feminism, may
have led NWP members in the 1930s and 1940s to strategically emphasize
gender difference, stressing womens greater pacifism, for example, even
as they advocated equal rights. Williams offers a valuable window into
this paradoxical stance. Similar to her friend Lutz, she fused her beliefs in
womens equality and womens difference, utilizing the idea that women
had a predilection for peace as justification for the ERA. By understanding
one significant strain of Pan-American feminism revealed by the friendship
of Williams and Lutz, this article argues that Pan-American feminism exerted
an important influence on the Brazilian and U.S. womens movements in
the early twentieth century.

Mary Wilhelmine Williams

Born in 1878 to Scandinavian immigrant farmers in Northern Califor-
nia, Mary Wilhelmine Williams came of age after a period of expanding
higher education in the mid-nineteenth century and growing acceptance of
such opportunities for women. She attended college and graduate school at
Stanford University, where she became one of only 80 women in the United
States to receive a PhD in history by 1920.14 As a professor at Goucher Col-
lege from 1921 to 1940, Williams focused on Latin American history soon
2014 Katherine M. Marino 67

after it emerged as a field of study. She attained international renown as

a scholar and served as a consultant for cultural programs in Roosevelts
Good Neighbor Policy in the late 1930s. Despite her accomplishments, the
marginalization of women in academia limited her career.15
Williamss keen awareness of the constraints on female profession-
als galvanized her early feminist beliefs. She poured her energies into the
suffrage movements in California and Maryland, later explaining that she
was born a suffragist.16 As her scholarly career developed, she became
increasingly outspoken about the exclusion of women in academia and as
subjects of historical scholarship. Encouraging her students to excel aca-
demically, she sought to further womens higher education in both North
and Latin America.17
Williamss feminist activism developed in tandem with her concerns
for social justice and peace. Jane Addams and Florence Kelley served as
her inspirational role models for their efforts to inculcate social welfare
and reform through legislation that would offer women special protection
in the workforce. In 1919, Williams joined WILPF and served as Baltimore
branch president from 1933 to 1939. The organization grew out of the in-
ternational suffrage movement and the International Committee of Women
for Permanent Peace, founded in 1915 by Jane Addams. It connected sexual
inequality with international, class, and racial inequality. WILPF called for
the creation of democracy based on justice and opposition to force.18 In its
founding, the league voiced the idea that had long given power to the early
U.S. womens rights and late-nineteenth-century maternalist movements:
that womens inherent instincts as mothers necessitated expansion of their
public roles so that they could effect changes in social welfare.19 WILPFs
maternalist and feminist rhetoric declined in the 1920s and 1930s, when the
organization sought to strengthen relations with pacifist men.20
While Williams had long self-identified as a suffragist and feminist,
she was ambivalent about the new brand of feminism that came to be iden-
tified with NWP members who promoted the Equal Rights Amendment,
introduced in 1923. Although attracted to the ERAs bold constitutional
guarantee of equal rights under the law, regardless of sex, Williams, like
most social reformers, feared losing protective legislation for women work-
ers.21 Her thoughts shifted in 1925 when she read an article by M. Carey
Thomas, educator and former president of Bryn Mawr College, arguing that
protective legislation robbed women of well-paying jobs and furthered their
dependency on men, who, in turn, continued to control womens hours and
conditions of work. Williams joined the NWP as an outspoken supporter of
the equal-rights cause shortly thereafter.22 Egalitarianism became her model
for male-female relations. She promoted the idea that the gender-neutral
term humanliness should replace womanliness or manliness since,
68 Journal of Womens History Summer

as she told a group of NWP members, both ideally meant the same thing
gentleness and courage, energy and devotion, patience and strength.23
Williamss feminist and pacifist commitments combined with the emer-
gent, progressive Pan-American movement that would result in, as she put
it in 1916, more satisfactory relations between the United States and her
southern neighbors.24 In her historical work and teaching, she emphasized
commonalities between the histories of North and Latin America in their ab-
original communities, colonial origins, European migrations, exploitation of
indigenous peoples and slaves, and shared struggle for political stability and
economic progress.25 She also believed people in the United States should learn
about Latin American history as a practical way to promote a friendly Pan-
Americanism that would eliminate prejudiced and patronizing attitude[s].26
Williamss Pan-Americanism championed international cooperation
and equality but also drew distinctions between civilized and backward
countries and connected feminism to civilization. In 1923, Williams wrote
about democracy expanding in the Americas and reserved particular praise
for Brazil, which, due to its economic growth and consequent bourgeois
revolution, was becoming a dominant power in Latin America in the 1920s.
She saw the ground there ripe for feminism to flourish and singled out the
efforts of one woman, Bertha Lutz, who was earning international renown
as the brains of the Brazilian woman movement. Lutz had recently intro-
duced a womens suffrage bill into the Brazilian legislature, and Williams
predicted that the enfranchisement of the women of Brazilwill be ac-
complished in the near future.27

Bertha Lutz
Born twelve years after Williams in 1894 in So Paulo to an English
mother and a Swiss-Brazilian father, Bertha Maria Julia Lutz also came of
age during a time when economic growth and industrialization advanced
opportunities for womens education and employment. She was educated
first in Brazil and then from 1911 to 1918 in Europe, where she graduated
from the Sorbonne, specializing in biology, and later became an expert on
tree frogs. Lutz also earned a law degree at Rio de Janeiro, writing her thesis
in support of equal citizenship rights for women internationally.28
The impact of the feminist movement Lutz witnessed in Britain, at
the height of suffrage militancy, led to her activism for the female vote in
Brazil when she returned. In 1918, Lutz published an article that sparked
the development of a formal womans suffrage movement. Championing
economic independence for women, she called on her Brazilian sisters not
to live parasitically based on their sex, but rather to engage in the nations
political life and become valuable instruments in the progress of Brazil. 29
2014 Katherine M. Marino 69

Pan-Americanism was central to Lutzs national feminist activism. In

1922, she served as the Brazilian delegate to the Pan American Conference of
Women in Baltimore, Maryland, led by Carrie Chapman Catt, U.S. veteran
suffrage leader and Honorary President of the League of Women Voters and
the International Alliance of Women. Just months after returning from the
conference Lutz transformed her small study group for womens rights
into a national organization, the Federao Brasileira pelo Progresso Feminino
(FBPF). She often cited the Baltimore conference as responsible for the FBPFs
creation. That year Lutz was named Vice-President of a new organization,
the Pan American Association for the Advancement of Women (PAAAW),
with Catt as Honorary President. In 1923, Catt traveled to Brazil and col-
laborated with Lutz and others in drawing up the FBPFs constitution.30
Its principles, in line with the PAAAW, included securing the right to vote,
advancing womens education, obtaining protective legislative measures
for women workers, and, finally, improving relations among women of
all American countries, as Lutz explained, to obtain lasting peace in the
Western Hemisphere.31
In the spring of 1925, when Lutz returned to the United States for the
Second Conference of the PAAAW, the group elected her President of the
newly organized Inter-American Union of Women (IAUW). For Lutz, the
IAUWs purpose boiled down to two essential goals: removing legislative
discrimination against women and advocating continental solidarity
throughout the Americas. Promoting the removal of discrimination under
the law, however, did not prevent the IAUW from also promoting protective
labor legislation for women workers. Like many, Lutz believed that womens
ability to be mothers necessitated special protections at work, and, like the
LWV, the IAUW and FBPF supported the conventions of the newly-created
International Labor Organization (ILO) that restricted womens night work
and promoted maternity legislation.32
Part of Lutzs enthusiasm for Pan-American feminism stemmed from
her beliefs that a special alliance existed between Brazil and the United
States and that women from these two countries were uniquely suited
to promoting womens rights. This perceived affinity informed the close
bonds she forged with U.S. feminists, especially Carrie Chapman Catt, to
whom she lovingly referred as Mother, calling herself Catts Brazilian
daughter.33 The special relationship between the United States and Brazil
stemmed from the opinion held by many Brazilian elites of the time, that,
as a former Portuguese colony and monarchy until the nineteenth century,
Brazil was separate from and superior to Spanish-speaking Latin America.
As the historian Leslie Bethell explains, For Brazilians, there were two
giantsthough unequal giants, no doubtin the western hemisphere:
the United States and Brazil. Both were continental in size; both had huge
70 Journal of Womens History Summer

natural resources and economic potential; both were stable democracies.

The belief in Brazilian and U.S. exceptionalism helped underwrite Brazils
willingness to engage in Pan-American relations with the United States.34
Lutz embraced these ideas. Addressing a group of Californian women
in 1922, she described Brazilians as turning away from Europe for ideas
and ideals and realizing now that we can learn far more from those in
the United States, who got their independence from conditions very similar
to ours.35 In Brazil, Lutz similarly distinguished her country from others in
South and Central America, describing it as youngfree of preconceptions
and the dead weight of traditions. It could, consequently, adapt more
quickly toprogressive ideas like feminism.36 Most revealingly, perhaps,
in correspondence with the LWV in 1926, she outlined the distinctions she
saw between the English-, Portuguese-, and Spanish-speaking nations. Lutz
attributed the IAUWs lack of success in organizing women from Spanish-
speaking nations to the historical failure of Spanish-American nations to
federate: The Portuguese are all grouped in one federation of states: The
United States of Brasil [sic]. The Spanish being more scattered have not
succeeded in federatingWhile we are very lucky in having the English
group of women strongly represented in our Inter-American Union and
while Brasil [sic] is also in it, we have not been quite so successful with the
Spanish...37 Lutz herself spoke, read, and wrote in English, French, Spanish,
and Portuguese and made a point of noting she preferred her name Bertha
in the English spelling (rather than Berta).38 Thus, while Lutz was fond
of saying, There are no Americas: America is only one, her view of the
Americas was in fact divided along hierarchical lines with the United
States and Brazil on top.39
Lutzs view of a natural affinity between women in the United States
and in Brazil and her analogizing of the two countries feminist movements
ignored salient political differences. The small size of Brazils middle class,
compared to that of the United States, made for a different type of feminist
mobilizationone that was smaller-scale, not cross-class, and more depen-
dent on personal connections to powerful men in government. Although
Brazilian women would win the right to vote in 1934, suffrage would be
restricted by literacy, and the percent of literate Brazilian women was far
less than in the United States.40
National differences notwithstanding, Lutz, like many other interna-
tional feminists, believed that educated women of the middle- to upper-
classes could easily transcend such disparities to promote democracy and
peace and to uplift their less fortunate sisters. While she thought men and
women should have the same rights, she also believed that womens capac-
ity to be mothers made them naturally more nurturing and concerned with
social welfare. Although women can be seen as equivalent to men they are
2014 Katherine M. Marino 71

not the same, she said, it is neither accurate nor valid to declare that upon
acquiring electoral rights, a woman abdicates the situation which nature
has bestowed on her. The dominion of women, all of us feminists agree,
is the home. But, as has been said by a notable American writer, today the
responsibilities of the home are no longer understood as being confined
within the space of four walls.41 Here Lutz expressed both her admiration
of U.S. progressive-era institutions that had integrated womens social
reform into government policies as well as her belief that women could
help pacify the world.

Williams and Lutzs Pan-American Friendship

A Pan-American feminism rooted in Brazilian-U.S. exceptionalism
provided the backdrop to Williams and Lutzs first meeting in 1926 in Rio
de Janeiro at the U.S. Ambassadors Fourth of July celebration. Embarking
on a tour of Latin America to survey educational opportunities for women,
Williams made her first stop in Brazil.42 Upon arriving in Rio de Janeiro,
Williams visited the U.S. Ambassador Edwin V. Morgan, who directed her to
Lutz for advise [sic]in connection with [her] educational work. Several
days later, on July 4, Ambassador Morgan introduced the two women at
his reception, an event including over eight hundred diplomats, prominent
Brazilians, and North Americans.43
Theirs was a fast friendship; the next day, Williams met Lutz for a more
intimate visit at Lutzs home. That evening, Williams recorded in her diary
that Lutz was pleasant and anxious to help, and that she had offered to
give Williams a tour of the Museu Nacional.44 Williams and Lutz likely bonded
over the fact that both were single and childless (each described herself as
a bachelor) and had professional careers, still unusual for women in the
United States and in Brazil.45 Williams celebrated the fact that in 1919 Lutz
had been awarded a civil service appointment to become an officer at the
National Museum, becoming the second woman in the history of Brazil to
get a public job. Miss Lutz is sec of the Museum, she wrote, Took com-
petitive examination with the men and won appt. One man refused to take
the final oral because a woman was admitted to the exams.46
Over the next month the two spent much time together, talking over
their shared interests in pacifism, feminism, education, Brazilian history,
and Pan-Americanism. Lutz provided Williams with important information
and contacts, and translated for her when she spoke at an event on Pan-
American pacifism and education. 47 As Williams explained in her diary, Lutz
was very anxious to have closer relationship bet[ween] Brazil and the US
for feels that Braz[il] can profit more by US than by Fr[ench] influence.48
Lutz brought Williams as her guest to a number of talks, meetings, teas,
72 Journal of Womens History Summer

and dinners, providing Williams with an understanding of the countrys

educational and womens organizations.49
While the two women broadly shared similar views on history, femi-
nism, and pacifism, they differed on one thorny feminist issue: protective
legislation for women, which Lutz supported. Williams sought to convince
Lutz that women needed complete equality in work as well as in suffrage. It
is likely that, in addition to Lutzs own views that womens maternal differ-
ences necessitated protective legislation, the politics of inter-American femi-
nist organizing reinforced her resistance to equal rights. She was aware of
the NWPs equalitarian stance and its proposed ERA in the United States.
In a letter to LWV president Belle Sherwin earlier that year, Lutz explained
that although the NWP had contacted her to endorse their equal-rights
position, she could not see [her] way clear to accept [their offer], citing
her loyalty to the LWV and to Catt as the chief reason; We [the FBPF] are
heart and soul with the National League of Women Voters and understand that as
a branch of the Inter American Union of Women we are incorporated therewith.
Besides, my attachment to Mrs. Catt is sincere and unswervable [sic].50
By the time Williams and Lutz met again six years later, this time for a
days visit at Williamss home in Baltimore during Lutzs museum lecture
tour throughout the United States, a number of events had changed the
face of Brazilian and Pan-American feminism.51 Brazils new president,
Getulio Vargas, had swept into power with the 1930 Revolution. In 1932,
he agreed to electoral reform in the constitutional drafts, including woman
suffrage. Vargas did this to promote liberal democratic nationalism rather
than feminism, but his concession nonetheless clinched the suffragists vic-
tory. Brazil became the fourth country in the Western Hemisphere to enact
womens suffrage. Lutz was chosen to be the womens representative to
the committee drafting the new constitution.52
At the same time, however, Lutz lost her position as titular head of
organized Pan-American feminism when the IAUW officially dissolved in
early 1932 because of organizational and financial problems.53 In its place
emerged a new organization, the IACW, an inter-governmental group found-
ed by the NWP and a group of Cuban feminists at the Fifth International
Conference of American States in Havana in 1928. The IACW was pushing
the Womans Party strategy into the international realm by championing a
Western-Hemisphere-wide Equal Rights Treaty. Lutz attempted to establish
friendly relations with the new group, visiting IACW president Doris Stevens
while in the United States in 1932 and speaking about Brazils recent suf-
frage victory at NWP headquarters.54 She never collaborated with the IACW,
though, and years later deemed it a misbegotten obstacle in the road to
womens progress.55 Personal jealousy mingled with her strong dislike of
Doris Stevens, whom she viewed as flashy, manipulative, and described in
2014 Katherine M. Marino 73

correspondence with Catt as a sex-mad psychopath and nymphomaniac.

Lutz also thought the IACWs single-minded approach to Equal Rights
was too narrow. She believed a true Pan-American feminism needed to at-
tend not only to juridical equality but also to maternity legislation, world
peace, and explicit inclusion of women in positions of political power.56
Lutzs loss of both the organizational support of the IAUW and personal
support from Catt threw into relief the importance of her friendship with
Williams. Although Lutz maintained close ties with Catt until the American
leaders death in 1947, Catt had turned her efforts away from Pan-American-
ism and away from womens rights more generally. Lutz found a crucial ally
in Williams, who, more than anyone else at that time in the United States,
publicly positioned Lutz as a leader of Pan-American feminism.
Williams had begun promoting Lutzs important role in womens rights
in the Western Hemisphere in her 1930 book, The People and Politics of Latin
America, one of the first college textbooks on Latin American history in the
United States. Reviewers called her book the best texton the subject in the
English language, one that would go far to remedythe present dearth
of information.57 People and Politics became the most widely used textbook
on Latin American history in the United States for twenty-five years, out-
living its author. 58 In it Williams narrated a history of Latin America from
colonial rule to the establishment of democratic institutions. She described
feminisms advance, giving particular attention to Lutz as founder of the
FBPF, which she called the most energetic of the Latin-American organi-
zations of its type.59 Williams likewise advocated Lutzs leadership in the
NWPs weekly journal Equal Rights. In 1932, she published a reading list
illustrating the history of womens long struggle for justice, in which
she included an essay Lutz had written in 1931 about feminism in Brazil.60
Lutzs gradually changing view regarding equal rights also cemented
their close friendship in these years. Although Lutz had written to Williams
in 1930 stating that she was still not sure on the subject, by 1933 her politics
had evolved.61 That year, Williams visited Lutz for a month in Rio de Janeiro
while researching a book on the nineteenth-century Brazilian monarch Dom
Pedro II. After the two friends attended a meeting on discrimination against
women workers, Lutz revealed to Williams that she no longer favored
protective labor legislation, leading Williams to record triumphantly in her
diary, Bertha has come out for Equal Rights.62 Williams listed things she
should do for Lutz, including sending her a copy of the syllabus for her
class History of the Woman Movement. She also advised Lutz to start an
FBPF organ similar to the NWPs Equal Rights. Several months later, Lutz
published the first issue of the Boletim da FBPF, which she used as a pulpit
for outlining the organizations bold new priority: equal labor opportuni-
ties for women in Brazil. 63
74 Journal of Womens History Summer

While Williamss own advocacy for equal rights may have had an
effect on her friend, perhaps more significant to Lutzs changing view was
increasing utilization of protective labor legislation to restrict Brazilian
womens work.64 The Great Depression turned many women out of their
jobs in Brazil. In 1932, Vargas instituted Decree-Law 21.417, which curtailed
womens work in many occupations between ten at night and five in the
morning, in keeping with ILO conventions on night work. The president
did this as part of a broader effort to demonstrate Brazils commitment to
progressive politics; between 1930 and 1937 he also instituted social secu-
rity, the eight-hour workday, and retirement pensions for a broad range
of occupations. While Lutz had initially been a vocal supporter of the ILO
conventions, she and a growing number of other feminists now objected
to such laws. In the context of the Great Depression these protections were
designed, she argued, to reduce competition from women for male jobs,
and fostered unequal work opportunities and pay.65
As a member of the committee drafting the new constitution, Lutz
deemed it imperative at this critical juncture to squarely oppose measures
defining women in supportive roles to their husbands and children. Elimi-
nating protective legislation, she believed, was necessary to establish greater
egalitarianism and to turn the important, but largely symbolic, guarantee of
suffrage into concrete gains. Lutz shared with Williams her suggestions for
the 1934 Constitution, fusing pacifism and her new commitment to equal
rights. Williams found them excellent.66 These 13 Principios Basicos
included broad ideals such as humanization of work, universalization
of social security, equality of sexes, and prohibition of violence. They
reinforced Lutzs goal of womens equality with men in all arenas of national
life and also supported Brazils role as a peacemaker in inter-American
politics.67 Many of Lutzs thirteen points made it into the 1934 Constitu-
tion, guaranteeing for women the rights to vote, participate in Government
Committees, and hold office in all departments of the Civil Service as well
as rights of equal nationality, citizenship, labor access, and remuneration.
The Constitution also guaranteed to men and women a minimum salary,
an eight-hour day, and health insurance.68
Despite these egalitarian measures, Lutz and the FBPF still maintained
a notion of feminine citizenship, concerning womens role as pacifists.
When the Brazilian Minister of War suggested that if women were to be equal
to men socially, politically, and economically, they should also be included
in military service, Lutz and the FBPF objected. They deemed equality in
labor participation and civil engagementtwo cornerstones of masculine
citizenshipto be necessary, but military service, the third cornerstone,
was anathema to the FBPFs support of international peace and of women
as peacemakers. As the FBPF Bulletin proudly explained, They held out
for pacifist reasons, and won.69
2014 Katherine M. Marino 75

Elected federal deputy representative to Congress in 1934, Lutz further

pushed egalitarian measures while simultaneously describing womens
potential to transform male institutions. In early 1937 she and the FBPF
championed a Statute on Women to be appended to the constitution.
Similar to the ERA in the United States, though not a blanket amendment,
it advocated the elimination of all restrictions based on sex, including dis-
crimination in hiring and firing due to marriage and pregnancy, the banning
of womens segregation in low-status jobs, and such false protectionism
as curtailing female labor after ten p.m.70 The Statute also called to change
the language of maternity privileges, to maternity rights.71
Williams immediately began spreading news among the NWP of the
1934 Brazilian womens rights victory so that U.S. feminists might learn
from Brazils example. That year she joined the editorial staff of Equal Rights,
which devoted significant space to Brazils accomplishments, and she ad-
dressed the NWP Maryland branch about Brazils success. The NWP pro-
moted Brazil as the one country in the Western Hemisphere where women
enjoyed Equal Rights with men, thus superseding the United States in
terms of womens equality.72 What a commentary is this new constitution
of Brazil on the New Deal in this country with its smug discriminations
against women in NRA codes, read one Equal Rights article. It continued:
Brazil has felt the effects of the economic upheaval like the rest of the world
but, instead of making women the victims, it proposes that each citizen
shall bear her or his share of the burden. Instead of dismissing married
women teachers and government employees, it provides for all citizens a
maximum working week of six days and a maximum day of eight hours. It
says no workers wages shall be less because of age, sex or marriage. The
article explained that Brazil could lead the continent, including the United
States, in womens rights: In areait is larger than the United Statesand
in population, but also in every other respect, Brazil is one of the leading
countries not only of South America but of the world.73
While Williams promoted Brazil as leading the way in equal rights,
she also used what she learned from the Brazilian suffrage movements
successful combination of equal rights with pacifism to try to bring together
her feminist group, the NWP, and her pacifist organization, WILPF. She
began writing to WILPFs national president Dorothy Detzer and lobbied
at WILPF meetings on behalf of the ERA.74 While WILPF always supported
womens equality, many of its members had long refused to endorse the
ERA out of a belief in protective labor legislation for women. In the 1930s,
however, the international rise of fascist governments that denied women
civil liberties and sought to reinstate their roles in the home caused many
in WILPF to draw more explicit connections between womens equal
rights and world peace. In 1934, the U.S. section of WILPF endorsed the
IACWs Equal Rights Treaty, though WILPF International president Em-
76 Journal of Womens History Summer

ily Greene Balch made clear that supporting equal rights did not translate
into advocating identical labor legislation.75 The same year, with Williamss
help, WILPF formed their Inter-American Committee to promote friendly
relations among womens peace groups in the Americas.76
In 1937, to capitalize on WILPFs growing support, NWP leadership
asked Williams, in her role as WILPF Chairman, to sign a letter to accom-
pany packets of pro-ERA literature sent to WILPF board members. The
draft of the cover letter read: It is an admitted fact that women constitute
the peace-loving sex. Male dominant nations, such as Germany, Italy and
Japan, are predominantly militarist and constantly threaten the peace of the
worldMilitarism and Feminism are natural enemies, and for that reason
we are calling your attention to the Equal Rights Amendment, which is of
primary importance in the Feminist and Peace programsIt is our earnest
hope that the WILPF at its approaching convention will endorse the Equal
Rights Amendment and align itself with the forcesworking to establish
international peace, thus augmenting the power of women.77 Later that
year, Williams presented this argument to the WILPF Board, whose members
still found the ERA too divisive and voted it down.78 Nevertheless, the letter
is a striking example of how the NWP drew on an anti-fascist and pacifist
rhetoric that differentiated between women and men in order to further
their equal rights goals in the late 1930s.
While WILPF resisted the ERA, Williams found the NWP a more con-
genial place to integrate her dual commitments. Between 1934 and 1941,
articles in Equal Rights increasingly spoke simultaneously about feminism
and pacifism. The feminist and the peace movements are two sides of the
same question, one article proclaimed. Both were movements against the
arbitrary control of the individual by outside force, whose advocates take
their stand on the conviction of the worth of the individual and the need of
individual freedom and responsibility if there is to be human progress.79
Lutzs FBPF bulletin similarly reflected a simultaneous embrace of
equal rights, peace, and anti-fascism, especially in a Pan-American context.
In January 1937, describing womens efforts at the 1936 Pan-American Peace
Conference in Buenos Aires, the bulletin emphasized the link between
the rights of women and peace and the need to use the maternal instinct
of women for peace and to organize feminine elements against Europes
retroactive tendencies.80 One revealing article in June 1936 conveyed an
interview between Lutz and Nazi German journalist and anti-feminist
Louise Diohl. Lutz instructed Diohl on the Brazilian constitution, arguing
that it demonstrated that the Americas were establishing greater freedoms
for women than in Nazi Germany and fascist Italy.81
Dreams of a Brazilian feminist and pacifist utopia were short lived,
however. In November 1937, Vargas led a military coup and established
2014 Katherine M. Marino 77

a corporatist authoritarian regime, the Estado Novo (193745), reminiscent

of fascist dictatorships in Europe. Most of the feminist constitutional guar-
antees were eliminated before they had even been enacted. The FBPFs
proposed equality amendment, the Statute of Women, would never be
implemented. Although women retained the right to vote, under Vargas,
the state reinforced womens subordination to men, regarding women as
wives and mothers rather than as political allies. It also reinstated pro-
tective legislation for women workers to curtail womens employment
outside the home.82
These developments radicalized Lutz and deepened her belief in a rift
between men and women. Lutz wrote to Williams early in 1938, angrily
outlining the situation in Brazil and decrying Vargass fiercely nationalist
and masculinist actions: I come more and more to the conclusion that no
civilization is possible without women very decisively in public affairs. I
am for a matriarchal form of government, the male of the speciesshould
not be allowed to govern [as] he has an incurable passion for fighting,
power, and self-deception as to his uselessness83 Brazils turmoil also
influenced Williams, who had begun to embrace a more essentialist view of
female pacifism and male aggressiveness. In a 1938 summary of feminism
in Latin America, she cited masculine self-conceit as a significant factor
contributing to womens lack of rights there.84 In the 1938 revision of her
textbook, in which she expanded her section on Lutz and severely critiqued
Vargas, Williams called the womans movement in Latin America an ef-
fort not just for womens rights but also for a greater spirit of altruism.
By 1937, she explained, much [that] had been achieved, in the direction
of conserving and improvingsocial and moral assets had been accom-
plished by women.85
As entry into World War II became likely for the United States, Wil-
liams and Lutz reenergized their demands for womens equal rights as
the only way to fight fascism. Peace was not possible, but womens Pan-
American solidarity could still work to defend democracy and womens
rights. In 1940, Lutz reached out to the LWV in a last-ditch effort to present
a united front of women in the new world. She wrote that: The fate of
women in Europe may not directly affect the women of the United States,
as their position is the most secure and the most privileged, but it will,
without any doubt, affect women in all the sister republics. We feel that
Latin-American women alone could not influence events, but a united ef-
fort of all American women for the rights of women will certainly have a
repercussion far and wide.86 She ended by saying that although the past
years had been difficult for the FBPF, it continued to exist and remain
true to its old ideals and friendships. The LWV offered a tepid response
of sympathy but no concrete support.87 In a New York Times interview, Lutz
78 Journal of Womens History Summer

tried to urge women in the United States to get back some of the energy
and power they had in the early Nineteen Twenties. As she said: I cant
help but feel that Pan-Americanism, as a weapon against totalitarianism,
is on a very flimsy basis right now...88
Williams, meanwhile, continued speaking out on the inter-dependence
of the Americas and redoubled her efforts in support of the ERA as part
of the fight against fascism. In various parts of the world women are be-
ing deprived of the limited rights which they have slowly and painfully
won, she wrote in a petition for Goucher professors to sign, it is highly
important that the United States establish a bulwark against reactionary
forces througha guarantee of Equal Justice under Law.89 After retiring
later that year, Williams co-founded in Palo Alto, California an NWP branch
known for having speakers who urged the importance of women working
for peace as well as for equal rights.90
In 1942, shortly after the United States entered World War II, Williams
wrote an article in Equal Rights vigorously calling for womens involvement
in government as the only way to rid the world of both totalitarianism and
war. Her language of gender essentialism and belief in an inherent female
moral authority hearken back to Lutzs earlier letter to her. This andro-
centric, man-ruled world which is now destroying itself is a disgrace to
all humanity, Williams wrote, Women shouldsecure a partnership in
world management on a fifty-fifty basis Williams specifically wanted
to see women in positions of political power exercise strong influence at
the peace table through their votes in Congress and help negotiate the
peace settlement at the end of the war. We can hardly expect the brethren
to start a crusade for this needed reform! she wrote, It must be initiated
and carried out largely by women themselves!91
Lutz had these goals in mind when, as Brazilian delegate, she at-
tended the UN Conference on International Organization in San Francisco
in 1945 to organize the post-war world. She was one of only four female
signatories of a UN charter that included equal rights of men and women
in its preamble statement. Williams would have lauded this accomplish-
ment had she lived to see it, but she died of a heart attack in March, 1944.
Her gravestone inscription reflected her lifelong commitments: Pacifist,
Feminist, Historian, Teacher.92
At the UN conference Lutz proceeded in the spirit of Pan-American
feminism that the two friends had envisioned. The committee she proposed
to study and remove legal discriminations against women internationally
ultimately became the UNs Commission on the Status of Women. Although
several other Latin American feminists supported its creation, women from
the United States, including a cohort from the LWV, opposed it. The Cold War
and internecine conflicts were shifting the goals of European and American
2014 Katherine M. Marino 79

activists away from global womens rights.93 Disappointed, Lutz wrote to Catt
that the mantle is falling off the shoulders of the Anglo-Saxons andwe
[Latin American women] shall have to do the next stage of battle for women.
The next stage would be to extend equal rights and womens moral authority
into a growing field of international human rights.94 Lutz asserted in a clos-
ing UN meeting that the inclusion of the principle of womens equality in
the charter was not a mereindication of the rights of womenthere will
never be unbreakable peace in the world until the women help to make it.95
In 1975, four years before her death, Bertha Lutz attended the UNs
International Womens Year conference in Mexico City. There she saw the
realization of her efforts, started so many years earlier, and the embodiment
of the dream she and Williams had shared. This meeting, including six
thousand participants from all over the world, launched the UN Decade of
Women and what scholars have described as a new and truly global feminist
praxis, in which activists from Latin America, Asia, and Africa directed the
agendas as much as those from Western Europe and the United States.96
The Pan-American feminism and the personal bond between Bertha
Lutz and Mary Wilhelmine Williams reveal that global feminism had
much earlier antecedents. Working together in a commitment to both equal
rights and international peace, the example of Lutz and Williams opens
new understandings of Pan-American feminism in the interwar years and
suggests new possibilities for transnational venues of interwar feminism.
It also hints at broader implications for understanding how both domestic
and international politics shaped feminist understandings of equal rights,
protective legislation, and pacifism.
The Pan-American feminist politics that Lutz and Williams jointly
embraced also challenge long-held historiographical distinctions between
equal rights and social justice feminism. Through their relationship, the
two women forged a transnational foundation for their beliefs in womens
equality with and difference from men. In so doing they sharpened their
respective ideals of feminism as living and changing beliefs. These views,
in turn, influenced their approaches to equal rights, labor legislation for
women, and pacifism in their respective countries. Lutz promoted a more
egalitarian rights ideology in Brazil, while still believing women were more
pacifistic than men. Williams sought to merge her pacifist and feminist
commitments in her organizational work. Responding to the losses women
experienced in Brazil and worldwide under fascism in World War II, Lutz
ultimately adopted a more essentialist view of womens pacifism. The
window Williams provides into the NWP reveals that the organizations
gender ideology may have been more nuanced than historians have typi-
cally recognized; indeed, some NWP members believed in an essentialized
femininity and utilized this idea to further their equal rights goals.
80 Journal of Womens History Summer

Understanding that international peace was essential to their work for

womens rights and democratic progress, Lutz and Williams believed that
friendship among women of the Americas could be the key to shaping this
peace and to sharing a common, more egalitarian future. They lived this
ideal in their own relationship, which helped to inspire the now powerful
idea that womens rights are human rights.

Notes
I am grateful to Estelle Freedman, Susan Besse, Sueann Caulfield, Gordon
Chang, Nancy Cott, Zephyr Frank, Annelise Heinz, Natalie Marine-Street, Mary
Alice Marino, Jocelyn Olcott, Andrew Robichaud, Leila Rupp, Leigh Ann Wheeler,
and Kari Zimmerman for their extremely useful comments on earlier versions of
this article. I would also like to thank Isadora Fernandes, Naomi Walzebuck, and
Andre Zollinger for their translation help; Jacqueline Goggin for sending me her
research on Mary Wilhelmine Williams; and Ruth Smith for sharing memories,
family photographs, and newspaper clippings about her aunt.
1
Bertha Lutz, D. Bertha Lutz: Homenagem das senhoras brasileiras a illustre presi-
dente da Unio interamericana de mulheres (Rio de Janeiro: Typ. do Jornal do Commercio,
de Rodrigues & C., 1925), 7, 9, 1920.
2
World News About Women: Something New in Colleges, Woman Citizen 7,
no. 5 (July 29, 1922): 20; Syllabus, History of the Woman Movement in the United
States, undated, Mary Wilhelmine Williams Papers, Dept. of Special Collections,
Stanford University, Stanford, California (WP).

Mary Wilhelmine Williams, Democracy in Hispanic America, North Ameri-

3

can Review 218 (July/Dec 1923): 346352, quoted on 352.

4
Ricardo Salvatore, The Enterprise of Knowledge: Representational Ma-
chines of Informal Empire, Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History
of U.S.Latin American Relations, ed., Gilbert Joseph, Catherine LeGrand, and Ricardo
Salvatore (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 69104, quoted on 81. See also
Mark Berger, Under Northern Eyes: Latin American Studies and U.S. Hegemony in the
Americas, 18981990 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).

See Millery Polyn, From Douglass to Duvalier: U.S. African Americans, Haiti,
5

and Pan Americanism, 18701964 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010).

6
Ellen DuBois, Woman Suffrage: The View from the Pacific, Pacific Histori-
cal Review 69 (2000): 539551 calls on historians to shift perspective of the woman
suffrage movement away from American-European models and consider Latin
American and Asian struggles in an international framework. Transatlantic feminist
scholarship includes Leila Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International
Womens Movement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); Leila Rupp Con-
structing Internationalism: The Case of Transnational Womens Organizations,
18881945, The American Historical Review 99 (1994): 15711600; Harriet Hyman
Alonso, Peace as a Womans Issue: A History of the U.S. Movement for World Peace and
2014 Katherine M. Marino 81

Womens Rights (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1993); Carrie Ann Foster, The
Women and the Warriors: The U.S. Section of the Womens International League for Peace
and Freedom, 19151946 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1995); Linda K. Schott,
Reconstructing Womens Thoughts: The Womens International League for Peace and Free-
dom Before World War II (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).
7
Megan Threlkeld, The Pan American Conference of Women, 1922: Successful
Suffragists Turn to International Relations, Diplomatic History 31 (2007): 801828;
Threlkeld, Womans Challenge to the World: U.S. Womens Internationalism and
U.S.-Mexican Relations, 19161939 (PhD diss, University of Iowa, 2008); Christine
Ehrick, Madrinas and Missionaries: Uruguay and the Pan-American Womens
Movement, Gender & History 10 (1998): 406424. Exceptions, which examine mutual
collaboration of North and Latin American women in the IACW, are: Ellen DuBois,
Internationalizing Married Womens Nationality: The Hague Campaign of 1930,
in Globalizing Feminisms, 17891945, ed. Karen Offen (London: Routledge, 2010),
204216; Ellen DuBois and Lauren Derby, The Strange Case of Minerva Bernardino:
Pan American and United Nations Womens Right Activist, Womens Studies In-
ternational Forum 32 (2009): 4350; Esther Sue Wamsley, A Hemisphere of Women:
Latin American and U.S. Feminists in the IACW, 19151939 (PhD diss, Ohio State
University, 1998). Donna J. Guy expands notions of Pan-American feminism through
the child rights movement in The Pan-American Child Congresses, 1916 to 1942:
Pan-Americanism, Child Reform, and the Welfare State in Latin America, Journal
of Family History 23 (1998): 272291 and The Politics of Pan-American Cooperation:
Maternalist Feminism and the Child Rights Movement, 19131960, Gender & History
10 (1998): 449469. Other illuminating work on inter-American womens activism
includes Francesca Miller, The International Relations of Women of the Americas
18901928, The Americas 43 (1986): 171182; Francesca Miller, Latin American Women
and The Search for Social Justice (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1991);
Francesca Miller, Feminisms and Transnationalism, Gender & History 10 (1998):
569580; Asuncin Lavrin, International Feminisms: Latin American Alternatives,
Gender & History 10 (1998): 519534.
8
K. Lynn Stoner, In Four Languages But with One Voice: Division and
Solidarity within Pan American Feminism, 19231933 in Beyond the Ideal: Pan
Americanism in Inter-American Affairs, ed. David Sheinin (Westport: Praeger, 2000);
Asuncin Lavrin, Women, Feminism, and Social Change in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay,
18901940 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995); Christine Ehrick, The Shield
of the Weak: Feminism and the State in Uruguay, 19031933 (Albuquerque: University
of New Mexico Press, 2005): 10; and Karen Offen, European Feminisms, 17001950:
A Political History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 2122.
9
Ellen DuBois and Katie Oliviero, Circling the Globe: International Femi-
nism Reconsidered, 1920 to 1975, Womens Studies International Forum 32 (2009):
13, quoted on page 2.
10
See Rachel Soihet, O feminismo tctico de Bertha Lutz (Florianpolis: Editora
Mulheres, 2006); Susan K. Besse, Restructuring Patriarchy: The Modernization of Gen-
der Inequality in Brazil, 19141940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1996); June Hahner, Emancipating the Female Sex: The Struggle for Womens Rights in
Brazil, 18501940 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1990); June Hahner, The Begin-
nings of the Womens Suffrage Movement in Brazil, Signs 5 (1979): 200204; Morris
82 Journal of Womens History Summer

J. Blachman, Eve in Adomacracy: The Politics of Women in Brazil (B.A. Thesis,

Department of Politics, Brandeis University, 1976).
11
Lutzs international activism is discussed in Miller, Latin American Women,
and Rupp, Worlds of Women.
12
Leila Rupp and Verta Taylor, Survival in the Doldrums: The American Womens
Rights Movement, 1945 to the 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); works
that have reassessed this period include Estelle B. Freedman, Separatism Revisited:
Womens Institutions, Social Reform, and the Career of Miriam Van Waters, in U.S.
History as Womens History: New Feminist Essays, eds. Linda Kerber , Alice Kessler-
Harris, Kathryn Kish Sklar (University of North Carolina Press, 1995) 170188; and
Nancy Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1987).Brief appraisals of Williams are found in Kathryn Kish Sklar, American Fe-
male Historians in Context, 17701930, Feminist Studies 3 (1975): 171184; Miller,
Latin American Women, 253; and Miller, Precedent and Pedagogy: Teaching the His-
tory of Women in Latin America, Womens Studies Quarterly 42, (1988): 110117. On
Williamss efforts to challenge sexual discrimination in the historical profession see
Jacqueline Goggin, Challenging Sexual Discrimination in the Historical Profession:
Women Historians and the American Historical Association, 18901940, American
Historical Review 97 (1992): 769802.
13
Rupp, Worlds of Women, 140; Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism, 243;
Cott, Feminist Politics in the 1920s: The National Womans Party, Journal of Ameri-
can History 71 (1984): 4368.
14
Untitled obituary of Charles Williams, Mary Wilhelmine Williamss father,
undated newspaper clipping given to me by Ruth Smith, Williamss niece; Williams,
Supplementary Record, October 6, 1930, Faculty Records, Goucher College, Bal-
timore, Maryland; Goggin, Challenging Sexual Discrimination in the Historical
Profession, 771.
15
Williams sought an academic position with at least one coeducational institu-
tion but was denied. In these early years of womens professionalization in academia
(18701930), coeducational and traditionally male institutions rarely hired women.
Referring to the discrimination female historians also faced from the American
Historical Association, Williams wrote, All that any twentieth century woman of
sense asks is a fair field and no favorsbut the woman who is so unfortunate to as
to have specialized in history largely asks in vain. Goggin, Challenging Sexual
Discrimination in the Historical Profession, 775. See also Sklar, American Female
Historians, 179.
16
Mary W. Williams, Cousinhunting in Scandinavia (Boston: Gorham Press,
1916), 99; Mary W. Williams, Dr. Williams on Equal Rights Staff, Equal Rights
(November 1934): 325.
17
Mary W. Williams, Education of Women in Latin America, Journal of the
AAUW 21 (October 1927): 15; Goggin, Challenging Sexual Discrimination in the
Historical Profession.
18
Rupp, Worlds of Women, 2832; Schott, Reconstructing Womens Thoughts, 54.
2014 Katherine M. Marino 83

19
Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, Womanly Duties: Maternalist Politics and
the Origins of Welfare States in France, Germany, Great Britain, and the United
States, 18801920, American Historical Review 95 (1990): 1076.

Rupp, Worlds of Women, 856; Schott, Reconstructing Womens Thoughts, 535.

20

21
Kathryn Kish Sklar, Why Were Most Politically Active Women Opposed to
the ERA in the 1920s? in Women and Power in American History, Third Edition, ed.
Sklar and Thomas Dublin (Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2009), 2667.
22
Williams to Dorothy Detzer, April 3, 1937, NWP Papers (NWP), Library of
Congress, Washington, D.C. (LofC); M. Carey Thomas, Argument for the Equal
Rights Amendment to the United States Constitution, Journal of the AAUW 18
(1925): 2228.
23
Feminist Notes, Equal Rights (August 1932): 215.
24
Mary W. Williams, Anglo-American Isthmian Diplomacy (Washington: Ameri-
can Historical Association, 1916), 329.
25
Mary W. Williams, Outline for the Incidental Study of Latin-American
History in Secondary Schools, The History Teachers Magazine 9 (1918): 335; Williams
to James A. Robertson, July 29, 1918, Robertson Papers, LofC.
26
Mary W. Williams, The College Course in Hispanic American History,
Hispanic American Historical Review 2 (1919): 415418, quoted on 415.
27
Williams, Democracy in Hispanic America, 346, 3501.
28
Bertha Lutz, Nationality of Married Women in the American Republics (Wash-
ington, D.C.: Pan American Union, 1926).
29
Bertha Lutz, Seo Cartas de Mulher, Revista da Semana, December 28,
1918; Hahner, Emancipating the Female Sex, 134.
30
Lutz to Maud Wood Park, March 21, 1923, Series II, Box 17, League of
Women Voters Papers, LofC (LWVP); Lutz, Homenagem das senhoras brasilieras, 10;
Bertha Lutz, The Feminist Movement in Brazil, Baltimore Sun (June 21, 1931): 3;
Hahner, Emancipating the Female Sex, 141.
31
Hahner, Emancipating the Female Sex, 1367; Mary W. Williams, The People
and Politics of Latin America (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1930), 741; Bertha Lutz,
Austregesilio, in Blachman, Eve in Adamocracy, 127.
32
Lutz, Homenagem das senhoras brasileiras, 15; Summary of Questionarres
Concerning Women in Industry Presented to InterAmerican Union of Women,
April 29May 2, 1925, II:50, LWVP.
33
Lutz to Catt, May 21, 1945, National American Woman Suffrage Association
Papers (NAWSAP), Reel 12.
84 Journal of Womens History Summer

34
Leslie Bethell, Brazil and Latin America, Journal of Latin American Stud-
ies 42 (2010): 457485, see especially 465; Joseph Smith, Unequal Giants: Diplomatic
Relations Between the United States and Brazil, 18891930 (Pittsburg: University of
Pittsburg Press, 1991).
35
Lutz quoted in The Latin Point of View, National Business Women 5, no.
4 (October 1922): 21.
36
Lutz, A Noite, October 11, 1921, in Blachman, Eve in Adamocracy, 122.
37
Lutz to Belle Sherwin, May 27, 1926, II:156, LWVP.
38
Amanda Finch to Mary Anderson, August 5, 1936, Records of the Womens
Bureau, RG86, Records of the International Division, 19191952, Box 8, National
Archives II, College Park, Maryland.
39
Lutz quoted in Proceedings and Report of the Columbus Day Conferences Held
in Twelve American Countries on October 12, 1923 (New York: Inter-America Press,
1926), 29.
40
Besse, Restructuring Patriarchy, 9, 24.
41
Lutz, Rio Jornal, December 13, 1921, in Blachman, Eve in Adamocracy, 122;
Lutz paraphrased from Rheta Childe Dorr, What Eight Million Women Want (1910):
Womans place is in the homeBut Home is not contained within the four walls
of an individual home. Home is the community.
42
Williams, Copy of Supplementary Report to the Fellowships Committee of
the AAUW, August 7, 1927, WP.
43
Williams, Diary entries, June 29, June 30, and July 4, 1926, WP.
44
Williams, Diary entry, July 5, 1926, WP.
45
Williams, Cousin-Hunting, 99; To Be a Bachelor Is an Art, Brazilian Feminist
Explains, New York Times (January 1, 1939): 16.
46
Williams, Diary entry, July 7, 1926, WP.
47
Williams to Florence Lewis, June 2, 1926; Williams, Diary entries, June 29,
June 30, July 6, 1926, WP.
48
Williams, Diary entry, July 13, 1926, WP.
49
Williams, Education of Women in Latin America, 15.
50
Lutz to Sherwin, May 27, 1926, LWVP. Emphasis in original quote.
51
Itinerary for Miss Bertha Lutz, Box 20, Records of the Society of Women
Geographers, LofC.

Hahner, The Beginnings of the Womens Suffrage Movement in Brazil, 200.

52
2014 Katherine M. Marino 85

53
Sherwin to Lutz, February 11, 1930, II:226; Catt to Lutz, June 9, 1932, II:293,
LWVP.
54
News from the field: Bertha Lutz visits headquarters, Equal Rights 18, no.
13 (April 30, 1932): 103.
55
Lutz to Catt, June 3, 1945, NAWSAP, Reel 12.
56
Lutz to Catt, February 12, 1934; July 7, 1936; and July 15, 1936, NAWSAP,
Reel 12; Rupp, Worlds of Women, 956.
57
J. Fred Rippy, Review, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social
Science 154 (1931): 182; Graham H. Stuart, Review The American Political Science
Review 25 (1931): 205206.
58
Charles Gibson and Benjamin Keen, Trends of United States Studies in
Latin American History, The American Historical Review 62 (1957): 855877, see
especially 870; Howard Cline, ed., Latin American History: Essays on its Study and
Teaching, 18981965 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1967).
59
Williams, The People and Politics of Latin America: A History (Boston: Ginn,
1930), 741.
60
Williams, The Womans Movement: A Bibliography, Equal Rights (May
1932): 116119.
61
Williams to Doris Stevens, 25 September 1933, Box 92, Folder 17, Doris
Stevens Papers (DSP), Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Cambridge, Mas-
sachusetts.
62
Williams, Diary entry, September 2, 1933, WP. Emphasis in original quote.
63
Williams, Diary entry, September 9, 1933, WP; Besse, Restructuring Patri-
archy, 171.
64
Williams to Stevens, September 25 1933, DSP.
65
Besse, Restructuring Patriarchy, 1408, 168, 1701.
66
Williams to Stevens, 25 September 1933, DSP.
67
Bertha Lutz, 13 Principios Basicos: Suggestes ao Ante-Projecto da Constituio
(Rio de Janeiro, Publio da Federao Brasileira Pelo Progresso Feminino, 1933),
24, 31, 38, 49, 51.
68
Victory in Brazil, A Short Report on Fifteen Years of Work, Boletim da FBPF
1 (February, 1935) 3; Besse, Restructuring Patriarchy, 170.
69
For definition of masculine citizenship see Jocelyn Olcott, Revolutionary
Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 20; Vic-
tory in Brazil, Boletim da FBPF 1 (February 1935) 3.
86 Journal of Womens History Summer

70
Ilan Rachum, Feminism, Woman Suffrage, and National Politics in Brazil:
19221937, Luso-Brazilian Review Vol 14 (1977): 129.
71
Novo plano de aco, Boletim da FBPF 1 (AugustSeptember 1935): 910;
and Bertha Lutz, Idealistas e garimpeiros, Boletim da FBPF 2 (February 1936): 7;
as quoted in Besse, Restructuring Patriarchy, 171172.
72
Dr. Williams to Address Baltimore Branch Equal Rights (December 1934):
384; Brazilian Women Win Notable Victory, Equal Rights (July 1934): 206.
73
The Brazilian Triumph, Equal Rights (July 1934): 202.
74
Williams to Detzer, April 3, 1937, NWP; Foster, The Women and the Warriors,
1534.
75
Rupp, Worlds of Women, 145.
76
Heloise Brainerd, Committee on the Americas of the Womens International
League for Peace and Freedom, May 18, 1940, WP.
77
Hooker to Martha Souder, January 16, 1937; Williams to Souder, March 26,
1937, NWP.
78
Foster, The Women and the Warriors, 150.
79
Florence Brewer Boeckel, Womens Power for Peace Or War, Equal Rights
(October 1937): 140. See also Equality, Freedom and Peace, Equal Rights (September
1934); Notes from the Field: Women and World Peace, Equal Rights (December
1934); Equal Rights a Power for the Peace of the World, Equal Rights (December
1936); Jeannette Marks, Biologic Peace, Equal Rights (March 1941).
80
Conferencia Feminina de Paz de Buenos Aires, Boletim da FBPF (January
1937): 3.
81
Entrevista: Visita cultural nazista: Bertha Lutz entrevista Louise Diehl,
jornalista alem nazista Boletim da FBPF (June 1936): 3; see also A Mulher e o
trabalho, and Paz!, Boletim da FBPF (February 1937): 4.
82
Thomas Skidmore, Politics in Brazil, 19301964: An Experiment in Democracy
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967, 2000): 2932; Besse, Restructuring Patriarchy,
174; Sueann Caulfield, In Defense of Honor: Sexual Morality, Modernity, and Nation in
Early Twentieth-Century Brazil (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 189.
83
Lutz to Williams, March 1, 1938, WP.
84
Mary W. Williams, Untitled Summary of Feminism, 1938, WP.
85
Mary W. Williams, People and Politics, revised edition (Boston: Ginn and
Company, 1938), 756, 778.
86
Lutz to [Marguerite Wells], January 13, 1940, III:120, LWVP.
87
Wells to Lutz, February 9, 1940, III:120, LWVP.
2014 Katherine M. Marino 87

88
Bertha Lutz quoted in Await Suffrage in Latin America, New York Times
(March 23, 1941): D4.
89
Untitled Statement by Williams, March 28, 1940, NWP.
90
Palo Alto Branch, Equal Rights (November 1940): 31; Palo Alto, California,
Branch Equal Rights (March 1941): 26.
91
Mary W. Williams, More Women in Public Office!, Equal Rights (June
1942): 47.
92
Dr. M. W. Williams, Goucher Professor, New York Times (March 13, 1944):
15.
93
DuBois, Woman Suffrage, 550.
94
Lutz to Catt, May 21, 1945, NAWSAP, Reel 12.
95
Bertha Lutz, NBC Sound recording of the proceedings of the second session
of commission 1 on 19 June 1945, Box 4, UNCIO Proceedings, Hoover Institution,
Stanford University.
96
Estelle B. Freedman, No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of
Women (New York: Ballantine Books, 2002), 108117; Christine Stansell, The Feminist
Promise: 1792 to the Present (New York: Modern Library, 2010): 355394.