The Guatemala Conference
Legal rights and the appointment of women to the diplomatic tables were only a part of the Latin American and North American feminists' agenda in the pre-World War II period. The women's concerns and those of their like-minded male colleagues on issues of social welfare, education, and the need for economic change were incorporated in the Chapultepec Charter, the Charter of the United Nations, and the newly organized Organization of American States. Women themselves were now part of governmental delegations, and much of their agenda was incorporated into the international agenda.
A number of questions arise. Did women as the counter-voice at the international conferences vanish after 1945, only to reemerge during the United Nations International Year of the Woman in 1975? Did women, once they were the official representatives of their governments, cease to function as a pressure group for change? Did the historical antinationalist position of the first generation of Latin American feminists disappear in the 1940s? Or is there evidence of the continuation of a separatist, explicitly feminist, political strategy within the context of inter-American relations?
By 1947 the attention of the inter-American diplomatic community had shifted from social and economic reform to a focus on opposition to communism, a position embraced by governments throughout the hemisphere. An extraordinary meeting of American foreign ministers and heads of state was convened at the Inter-American Conference for the Maintenance of Continental Peace and Security, in Petropolis, near Rio de Janeiro, from August 15 to September 2, 1947, at the instigation of the Latin American states.[38] The delegates drew up the Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance, known as the Rio Pact, which put into effect the principle that an attack upon one American state would be considered an attack upon all. The emphasis on arming the nation-states of the Western Hemisphere, which has formed the bulk of inter-American assistance in postwar history, dates from this agreement.[39]
Between August 21 and August 27, 1947, the Primer Congreso Inter-americano de Mujeres convened in Guatemala City.[40] Women from fifteen American nations attended. They came not as representatives of their governments but as delegates from women's clubs throughout the hemisphere: Zonta International, Sociedade Civica Feminina de Santos, Brasil; Unión Femenina de Colombia; Movimiento Pro Emancipación de las Mujeres de Chile; Asociación Puertorriqueña de Esposas de Masones; La Cruz Blanca de la Paz (Cuba); Federación Argentina de Mujeres Universitarias; Ateneo Femenino (Bolivia); Asociación de Mujeres Tituladas del Uruguay; Alianza Femenina Colombiana; Comités Populares Femeninos de Guayaquil; Sociedad Unión de Costureras (El Salvador); Ligue Feminine d'Action
Sociale (Haiti); Unión Democrática Femenina Hondureña; Ateneo Mexicano de Mujeres; Sección Femenil del Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación (Mexico); Cruzada de Mujeres Nicaragüenses; and Asociación Continental de Intelectuales de América (Panama). Most of the representatives from the United States—who hailed from cities from Minneapolis to San Francisco to Boston to Brooklyn—were members of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, as were the Canadian women.[41]
These women were not politically radical within their national communities, but they believed strongly in the need for women to speak out on issues of social and political equality, human welfare, and peace. Their first press release stated:
The First Inter-American Congress of Women meeting in Guatemala, representing mothers, wives, daughters of our Continent, has resolved in plenary session to denounce the hemispheric armament plan under discussion at the Rio Conference, asking that the cost of the arms program be used to support industry, agriculture, health and education for our people.
The women declared their right to speak on international issues: "We consider that interamerican political problems deserve particular attention on the part of women of the Continent. . . . We resolve to ask the Pan American Union and all Pan American associations to enact the following resolutions in the inter-American conferences." Their first concern was that the "American governments meeting in conference in Rio de Janeiro comply in good faith with the Final Act of Chapultepec, which is an instrument of peace, and not give it a militaristic interpretation."[42]
In those weeks of August 1947, the proceedings of the Rio conference were headlined in the world press; The New York Times carried daily page-one coverage. The Primer Congreso Interamericano de Mujeres was also noted in the press. In a number of Latin American papers, including the opposition press in Guatemala, it was accused of communist sympathies. On August 19, The New York Times carried a story—on page 21, in the Food Section of the Women's Pages.
The women were not successful in staying the arming of the Americas, but it is apparent that in the immediate postwar period the women of the Americas continued to look beyond the nation-state to the transnational arena for community, for empowerment, for the opportunity to articulate their ideas and to be heard. The women who met at Guatemala City in 1947 to counter the Rio Pact came together not to buttress the position of their respective nation-states but to protest the aggrandizement of national power through arms at the expense of the citizenry, an issue they saw as within their traditional purview. Nor was their petition based upon an imagined equation
between dollars for arms and dollars for aid; the Latin American women, especially, clearly perceived the probability of arms' being used not in defense of the hemisphere but against the populace by the state.[43]
The women were acting within the historical context of a half century of a feminist, pacifist tradition, established by the women of the Americas from the Latin American Scientific Congresses of the 1890s to the Primer Congreso Femenino in 1910 to the creation of the IACW in 1928. In the immediate postwar period, when the formal inter-American community refused to respond to the women's historical commitment to peace and disarmament, the women again looked to a separatist transnational strategy.