Books by Katherine Marino
This book chronicles the dawn of the global movement for women's rights in the first decades of t... more This book chronicles the dawn of the global movement for women's rights in the first decades of the twentieth century. The founding mothers of this movement were not based primarily in the United States, however, or in Europe. Instead, Katherine M. Marino introduces readers to a cast of remarkable Latin American and Caribbean women whose deep friendships and intense rivalries forged global feminism out of an era of imperialism, racism, and fascism. Six dynamic activists form the heart of this story: from Brazil, Bertha Lutz; from Cuba, Ofelia Domingez Navarro; from Uruguay, Paulina Luisi; from Panama, Clara Gonzalez; from Chile, Marta Vergara; and from the United States, Doris Stevens. This Pan-American network drove a transnational movement that advocated women's suffrage, equal pay for equal work, maternity rights, and broader self-determination. Their painstaking efforts led to the enshrinement of women's rights in the United Nations Charter and the development of a framework for international human rights. But their work also revealed deep divides, with Latin American activists overcoming U.S. presumptions to feminist superiority. As Marino shows, these early fractures continue to influence divisions among today's activists along class, racial, and national lines.
Marino's multinational and multilingual research yields a new narrative for the creation of global feminism. The leading women introduced here were forerunners in understanding the power relations at the heart of international affairs. Their drive to enshrine fundamental rights for women, children, and all people of the world stands as a testament to what can be accomplished when global thinking meets local action.
Articles by Katherine Marino
Pioneras de la ciencia en Panamá, edited by Eugenia Rodríguez Blanco, Yolanda Marco Serra, Vannie Arrocha Morán, Patricia Rogers Marciaga, 2022
Todos los derechos reservados. Ni la totalidad ni parte de esta obra puede reproducirse por ningú... more Todos los derechos reservados. Ni la totalidad ni parte de esta obra puede reproducirse por ningún procedimiento electrónico o mecánico, incluyendo fotocopia, grabación magnética o cualquier almacenamiento de información o sistema de recuperación, sin autorización expresa de sus autoras, de acuerdo a lo que establecen las leyes de la República de Panamá. Fotografía de la portada: Carmen Miró en una foto del archivo familiar. Diseño, diagramación e ilustración: Phoenix Design Aid A/S, una empresa CO2 neutral acreditada en los campos de calidad (ISO 9001), medio ambiente (ISO 14001) y responsabilidad social corporativa (DS490001); proveedora aprobada de productos certificados FSCTM.
civilizations often had complementary rather than subordinate roles with men. Many West African I... more civilizations often had complementary rather than subordinate roles with men. Many West African Indigenous women held positions of power and higher status than their counterparts in European society. Fighting for the freedom of Indigenous people in present-day Bolivia, Peru, Chile, and Argentina, Aymaran woman Bartolina Sisa Vargas helped lead the rebellion against Spanish forces in the Alto. She was killed on September 5, 1782, a date remembered throughout Latin America as the International Day of Indigenous Women. The bravery of Baraúnda, wife of Garifuna leader Satuyé, who fought British colonists in the Caribbean island of St. Vincent, is remembered today in Garifuna songs that keep her memory alive in Honduras, Belize, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. 2 These rebellions led to the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), the first of the "Atlantic revolutions," that was also the largest slave rebellion in history. Here women like Cécile Fatiman played key roles as mambos (priestesses) in the Vodou societies and maroonage groups that had fled enslavers and were critical to the resistance leading to revolution. 3 In nineteenth-century revolutions that followed in the Americas, women served as fighters and military leaders. In Cuba, mambisas supported the cause as nurses, arms smugglers, and journalists. These revolutions that dismantled colonialism and established the "new nations" of the Americas generated questions about women's citizenship. Although some nations abolished slavery in the mid nineteenth century, slavery persisted in Cuba until 1886 and in Brazil until 1888. The republican civil codes Latin American countries adopted between the early to late nineteenth century subsumed married woman's legal status into that of her husband. Some of the first writers to assert women's rights sought women's education, property, and guardianship of their children, often alongside calls for the abolition of slavery and rights of Indigenous people. Inspired by Mary Wollstonecraft's 1792 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Nísia Floresta Brasileira Augusta in Brazil published Direitos das mulheres e injustiça dos homens (Rights of Women and Injustices of Men, 1832), arguing for women's rights and education. After 1850, she wrote a book defending the rights of women and Indigenous and enslaved people. 4 In Argentina, the novelist, poet, schoolteacher, and midwife Juana Manso founded the first periodical dedicated to women in Latin America, O Jornal das Senhoras (1852) in Brazil, and after moving to Argentina founded Álbum de Señoritas in 1854, in which she promoted women's rights and education, civil equality in marriage, divorce, and the abolition of slavery. 5 Similar publications followed in other parts of the Americas. In 1869, Ana Betancourt, addressing the First Constitutional Assembly of Cuban patriots at Guáimaro, connected anti-colonial, anti-slavery, and women's emancipation struggles: "Everything was enslaved in Cuba: cradle, color, and sex." She hoped the revolution would "destroy the enslavement of the cradle. .. [and] the slavery of color" and "free. .. women" as well. 6 Connections between patriarchy, class, and race were also central to the thought of Frenchborn Flora Tristán. After the death of her Peruvian father and escape from an abusive marriage, she traveled to Peru to claim her father's inheritance. Exposure to the socially and racially stratified Peruvian society-its extreme gaps between wealthy criollo Spanish-descended Peruvians and Indigenous and Afro-Peruvians-as well as the difficulty she had claiming her father's inheritance because of her "illegitimate" status heightened her understanding of the interconnectedness of social oppressions. These insights, combined with her engagement with British Chartists and French utopian socialism, led to her book The Workers' Union in 1843. Before Marx and Engels, she called for the creation of a global working class and compared the status of women to that of the proletariat. Tristán argued that male domination in the family was the linchpin of the capitalist system. 7 Those who made the most powerful links between class, patriarchy, and race were the thousands of enslaved women who fought for their and their children's freedom. After the passage of
Engendering Transnational Transgressions: From the Intimate to the Global, edited by Eileen Boris, Sandra Trudgen Dawson, Barbara Molony, 2020
This article explores the radical, interracial, and transnational history of the Panamanian suffr... more This article explores the radical, interracial, and transnational history of the Panamanian suffrage movement in the 1930s and 1940s. It foregrounds several salient leaders, mestiza Clara González and Afro-Panamanian Felicia Santizo. González and Santizo drew in part on a growing Pan-American feminist movement, utilizing connections with the Inter-American Commission of Women (IACW), an intergovernmental group that promoted women’s rights throughout the hemisphere, to forge some surprising alliances with Anglo-American women in the US-controlled Canal Zone. Together, Panamanian and US Canal Zone feminists rallied around the IACW Equal Rights Treaty and women’s suffrage. This interracial group of Panamanian feminists, however, endowed feminismo with broader meanings and organized with a growing national anti-fascist frente popular (popular front) movement. Panama’s popular front promoted the rights of women and labor, and opposed the country’s growing right-wing executive power and its xenophobic and racist policies. Although the Panamanian suffrage movement faced reprisals, its anti-fascist coalition building and broad definition of feminismo helped keep their goals alive. These strategies, and their sustained commitment to rights for all, regardless of race, class, or sex, ultimately resulted in universal suffrage and a firmer commitment to democracy, enshrined in Panama’s 1946 constitution.
El Presente del Pasado, 2019
En 1934, Consuelo Uranga, feminista y cofundadora del Partido Comunista Mexicano, pronunció un po... more En 1934, Consuelo Uranga, feminista y cofundadora del Partido Comunista Mexicano, pronunció un potente discurso frente a más de mil activistas en el Congreso Mundial de las Mujeres contra la Guerra y el Fascismo celebrado en París. En un tiempo en el que el fascismo acechaba Europa, su discurso hacía notar el imperialismo estadounidense en México, Cuba y Centroamérica, lugares en los que-proclamaba Uranga-"el espíritu revolucionario crece". Las mujeres se unían "para su liberación y la de toda su gente". El congreso convocaba a las mujeres alrededor de una nueva agenda para el feminismo y para terminar con el fascismo, el racismo y el imperialismo; por los derechos políticos, civiles, sociales y económicos de las mujeres, y por el patrocinio estatal a las licencias de maternidad y el cuidado infantil. Uranga llevó estos anhelos consigo de regreso a Cuba y México, en donde contribuyeron a inspirar nuevas organizaciones feministas de masas, incluyendo el Frente Único Pro Derechos de la Mujer-el cual pronto contaría con más de 60 mil afiliadas en México. Para el final de la década de 1930, las organizaciones feministas antifascistas se habían multiplicado y la dirigente española Dolores Ibárruri aplaudía el espectacular aumento del "movimiento de las mujeres" en América Latina. (https://elpresentedelpasado.files.wordpress.com/2019/06/uranga-1.jpg) Consuelo Uranga. (Foto proporcionada por Santiago Álvarez Campa.) Mi libro Feminism for the Americas: The Making of an International Human Rights Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019) cuenta la historia del feminismo americano, un muy poco conocido pero sumamente importante movimiento de agrupaciones y dirigentes latinoamericanas unidas alrededor de los derechos de las mujeres y la justicia global. Por lo regular, se nos dice que fueron mujeres europeas y estadounidenses quienes inventaron el feminismo. Sin embargo, mi libro sostiene que fueron mujeres de América Latina quienes de hecho estuvieron a la vanguardia del feminismo global y los derechos humanos internacionales.
El Presente del Pasado, 2019
In 1934, feminist and Partido Comunista Mexicano co-founder Consuelo Uranga gave a powerful speec... more In 1934, feminist and Partido Comunista Mexicano co-founder Consuelo Uranga gave a powerful speech before more than 1 000 activists at the World Congress of Women against War and Fascism in Paris. As fascism loomed over Europe, she drew attention to U.S. imperialism in Mexico, Cuba, and Central America where, she announced, "the revolutionary spirit grows." Women were uniting "for their liberation and that of all their people." The congress convened women around a new agenda for feminism: one that opposed fascism, racism, colonialism, and imperialism, and that promoted women's political, civil, economic, and social rights, including state-sponsored maternity leave and child care. Uranga brought these goals back to Cuba and Mexico where they helped inspire new mass women's groups, including the Frente Único Pro Derechos de la Mujer that would soon count over 60 000 members in Mexico. By the end of the decade, anti-fascist feminist organizations had multiplied, and
The history of the US woman suffrage movement is usually told as a national one. It begins with t... more The history of the US woman suffrage movement is usually told as a national one. It begins with the 1848 Seneca Falls convention (https://www.nps.gov/wori/index.htm); follows numerous state campaigns, court battles, and petitions to Congress; and culminates in the marches and protests that led to the Nineteenth Amendment. This narrative, however, overlooks how profoundly international the struggle was from the start. Suffragists from the United States and other parts of the world collaborated across national borders. They wrote to each other; shared strategies and encouragement; and spearheaded international organizations, conferences, and publications that in turn spread information and ideas. Many were internationalist, understanding the right to vote as a global goal. Enlightenment concepts, socialism, and the abolitionist movement helped US suffragists 4/16/2019
Pan-American feminism, a belief that the Western Hemisphere shared a common history and that, thr... more Pan-American feminism, a belief that the Western Hemisphere shared a common history and that, through unity, women of the Western Hemisphere could bring about greater equality for women and world peace, which they saw as two inextricably linked goals. The women's influence over each other's feminist activism was mutual; in turn, each utilized ideas forged through their friendship to shape the feminist movement in her respective country. The case revealed in this paper thus prompts a reconsideration of interwar international and Pan-American feminism, so often described as a hegemonic, one-way ideological project of North American and European women.
Book Reviews by Katherine Marino
Interviews by Katherine Marino
New Books in Gender Studies, 2019
Papers by Katherine Marino
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society
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Books by Katherine Marino
Marino's multinational and multilingual research yields a new narrative for the creation of global feminism. The leading women introduced here were forerunners in understanding the power relations at the heart of international affairs. Their drive to enshrine fundamental rights for women, children, and all people of the world stands as a testament to what can be accomplished when global thinking meets local action.
Articles by Katherine Marino
Book Reviews by Katherine Marino
Interviews by Katherine Marino
Papers by Katherine Marino
Marino's multinational and multilingual research yields a new narrative for the creation of global feminism. The leading women introduced here were forerunners in understanding the power relations at the heart of international affairs. Their drive to enshrine fundamental rights for women, children, and all people of the world stands as a testament to what can be accomplished when global thinking meets local action.