The Potential and Pitfalls of Pan-American Feminism

Chapter 8 follows Breckinridge to the Seventh Pan-American Conference in Montevideo, Uruguay, where she and other women activists in both the United States and Latin America vigorously debated the meaning of women’s equality. Breckinridge’s clashes with Doris Stevens, the U.S. leader of the Inter-American Commission of Women, over the proposed Equal Nationality Treaty and Equal Rights Treaty laid bare the conflicts inherent in Pan-American feminism. At the same time, U.S. and Latin American women’s activists’ diverse understandings of feminism helped to lay the groundwork for the idea that “women’s rights are human rights.”