Pan American Women: U.S. Internationalists and Revolutionary Mexico by Megan Threlkeld (review)

Book Reviews PAN AMERICAN WOMEN: U.S. INTERNATIONALISTS AND REVOLUTIONARY MEXICO . By Megan Threlkeld. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014, p. 246 Megan Threlkeld’s Pan American Women: U.S. Internationalists and Revolutionary Mexico examines the varied and frustrated attempts of U.S. women’s internationalist organizations to export their brand of human internationalism to Mexico in the Interwar period. As Threlkeld explains, the story of U.S. feminist organizing in revolutionary Mexico is laden with more failure than success. Threlkeld clearly demonstrates that these failures owed to a fundamental underestimation of Mexican women’s sense of revolutionary nationalism. A dogged feminist imperialism was always present in U.S. feminists’ broader message of human internationalism and tainted their interactions with Mexican women’s groups. Mexican perceptions of feminist imperialism, and the chasm separating the gendered political and social objectives of activists from the United States and Mexico , simply could not be bridged utilizing the narrowly focused objectives of U.S. women’s groups. Various organizations, such as the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), the League of Women Voters (LWV), and the Inter-American Commission of Women (IACW), faltered in their missions and were all but forgotten after WWII. Most importantly, Threlkeld traces the changing face of women’s internationalism and movements for hemispheric peace over the course of a decade and a half of quite turbulent relations between the United States and Mexico. Threlkeld adeptly illustrates that there were very clear attempts on the part of US women’s organizations to adapt their strategies to meet the needs of women’s organizations in Mexico. Some organizations, like the YWCA, enjoyed much more success at integration than others, like WILPF, who insisted on seeing their position as superior, culturally, socially, and racially, to their Mexican counterparts. The YWCA owed its success, by contrast, to a culturally softened approach, focusing on a social platform that met the needs of Mexican women regarding their place in the family and their civil rights in domestic matters. Scholars of Latin American history have been interrogating the imperialist nature of the relationship between the United States and Latin America for some time. The imperialist gaze on Latin America has permeated the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge, the culture industry, economics, and gender, to name a few. Threlkeld’s contribution to the extant literature is to illuminate the personal motivations and failings of these women from the U.S. perspective. While we know that the various Pan American Conferences of the early twentieth century, for example, were always imperialist endeavors, dominated by women’s organizations from the United States, Threlkeld offers a glimpse of the construction of those endeavors from the perspective of the organizers. “The ways U.S. women internationalists tried to organize Mexican women,” Threlkeld insists, “reveal how they thought about themselves as citizens of the world” (201). 87 The Latin Americanist, June 2015 Among the more significant strengths of the work is the author’s contextualization of each failure of U.S. women’s organizational attempts to reach out to their Mexican counterparts. The author focuses on several key political ruptures in U.S.-Mexican diplomatic relations, such as the crisis of diplomatic recognition under President Alvaro Obregón, the oil controversy of 1926–27, President Plutarco Elı́as Calles’ stance on Nicaragua, the “Good Neighbor” Policy, and President Lázaro Cárdenas’ famed expropriation of the Mexican oil industry of 1938. These ruptures had profound effects on U.S. women’s potency in their relations with Mexican women’s organizations. In each case, the failings of U.S. women’s human internationalism was the result of a surge of revolutionary nationalism and the reaction of the U.S. government to the actions of Mexico. Pan-American Women is incredibly well written and accessible, and the author demonstrates a clear engagement with significant portions of the historiography of the Mexican Revolution, the history of feminism in Mexico, and U.S.-Mexican international relations. A wonderful addition to undergraduate or graduate seminar reading lists focusing on transnational women’s rights movements, Pan American Women would also pair with readings dealing with Chicana activism in the United States and transnational/translocal interactions...