HISTORY
OF
CIM
Women's
Emancipation Through Education
The
end of the century experienced an explosive population growth of the
principal urban centers in Latin America. This, along with the creation of
normal schools, increased educational opportunities for women and their
employment as teachers, contributed to the emergence of journals
advocating women's rights and a female critique of discriminatory
practices based on gender. Teachers were the first generation of educated
women in Latin America. Female school teachers formed the nucleus of the
first women's groups to articulate a feminist critique of society,
protesting the unequal legal status of women and their limited access to
education, as well as political and economic power.
Women
who were already organizing on the national level had come to understand
that the gender inequality they confronted was not confined to their own
countries, but was pervasive throughout the hemisphere. They hoped that by
raising issues in the international arena they would have more leverage
with their governments at home. By the 1920s, it was the view of feminist
activists that their best "opportunity to effect reform [was] through
the passage of resolutions that would oblige signatory governments to
raise the issue within their domestic arena."
The
last decades of the nineteenth century saw a blossoming of public interest
in and governmental support for the education of women in the Americas.
While the nature and purpose of that education was much debated, in
several countries numbers of women succeeded in acquiring primary and
secondary education.
A
Call for Recognition - Santiago de Chile, 1923
Frustrated
at being excluded from participation in the Second Pan American Scientific
Conference (Washington, D.C., 1915-1916), a group of prominent women
formed a parallel Pan American Women's Auxiliary Conference, which after
meeting for several months concluded that, in order to advance the cause
of women's rights in the Americas, a Pan American Union of Women was
necessary. Theirs was a support of Pan Americanism and through it, a
support of women in the Americas.
The
International Feminist Congress, which met in Buenos Aires in 1910, had
put forward a program which, while it included female suffrage, stressed
access to education and need for a wide range of social legislation to
protect and support working women. By the time the first Pan American
Conference of Women met in Baltimore in 1922, the legal status of women
and their right to the franchise became the priority. For this purpose,
the Pan American Association for the Advancement of Women was founded, and
its focus was directed toward influencing the outcome of the Fifth
International Conference of American States, held in Santiago, Chile, in
1923. To that end, a number of "unofficial" female delegates
came to the Conference and engaged in an active lobbying campaign.
A
resolution, proposed by Máximo Soto Hall of Guatemala, was eventually
adopted unanimously by the Conference, mandating that future conferences
study ways to eliminate constitutional and other legal discrimination of
women so that the women of the Americas would enjoy the same civil and
political rights as men. The Conference also adopted a resolution calling
for the inclusion of women in the delegations to future conferences.
From
this point on, gradually but irreversibly, feminist discourse was to
affect inter-American conferences. When the Sixth International Conference
of American States met in Havana in 1928, however, there were no official
women delegates. The stage was then set for a historic confrontation, when
women from throughout the Americas, through their persistence and
presence, forced the inclusion of women and their concerns on the agendas
of inter-American meetings, thus modifying the context of inter-American
relations.
