Transnational Pan-American Feminism: The Friendship of Bertha Lutz and Mary Wilhelmine Williams, 1926–1944

This paper explores Bertha Lutz and Mary Wilhelmine Williams’s trans-national, Pan-American friendship in the interwar years. Lutz was the leader of Brazil’s suffrage movement and Williams was a U.S. historian and member of the National Woman’s Party and Women’s 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 Hemisphere could bring about greater equality for women and world peace, which they saw as two inextricably linked goals. The women’s influence over each other’s 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.