Feminism for the Americas

“Would make a welcome addition to courses on feminist theory and women’s roles in the Americas, and it should encourage scholars to dig deeper into the lives and works of feminists who were on the frontlines without necessarily publishing books or articles about feminism.”—Library Journal

“In this valuable contribution to the historiography of social movements in the Americas, Marino chronicles the impact of the women’s movement of leaders from six countries—Uruguay, Brazil, Panama, Cuba, the US, and Chile—in the interwar years. . . . Marino successfully demonstrates that this was a vital period in Pan-American relations.”—CHOICE

“A brilliant and ambitious new account of the origins of global feminism . . . . Feminism for the Americas reconstructs a radical, transnational, and influential movement for women’s equality and social justice.”—International Feminist Journal of Politics

“As Marino exposes her subjects' passionate advocacy and agonizing decisions over political strategy from their personal correspondence and conference minutes, the threads from this extraordinary breadth of primary sources are woven into a seamless story. . . . Feminism for the Americas creates a road map for decades of future research.”—H-Net Reviews

“Marino’s historical analysis is timely and necessary, for it renders accessible this neglected arena of the complex struggle for women’s rights in the Western Hemisphere.”—Latino Book Review

“The best book on Western Hemispheric feminism in at least two decades. . . . A necessary starting point for anyone contemplating research on inter-American feminism. . . . Marino has given us a masterpiece.”—Hispanic American Historical Review

“[An] often thrilling account. . . . Marino’s book is an important work for any scholar or student interested in Latin American feminisms, Pan-American movements, the history of human rights, or even histories of how whiteness has operated in Latin American politics.”—The Americas

“Beautifully researched with a cross-section of primary sources—newspapers, photos, letters drawn from archives in six different countries. The magnitude of the research is never lost on this reader; the book should be assigned to all doctoral students pursuing transnational historical research, feminist or not, as a model for what the final product should look like.”—Pacific Historical Review

“Marino’s excellent study is a necessary contribution to the history of feminist organizing in the early twentieth century. . . . This timely book extends trends in the fields of U.S. history and U.S. feminist history that seek to employ a more hemispheric orientation, but it also foregrounds how Latin American feminists, with their U.S. counterparts following, took the lead in establishing a global feminist movement.”—Journal of American History

“Charts the rise of pan-American feminisms that promoted social justice, human rights and anti-fascism. . . . When Anglophone arrogance became intolerable, the compañeras created their own version of pan-Americanism, sometimes recast as pan-Hispanism. Marino makes the case that this collective political effort had an impact on mid-20th-century international politics. The compañeras made feminism part of Popular Front movements to resist fascism in the 1930s, and influenced the work of the League of Nations and the early United Nations.”—London Review of Books