The Pan American Child Congresses provided a catalyst for child-focused welfare policies in Latin America. Originally organized by Argentine feminists in 1916, the congresses soon attracted many physicians and legal specialists concerned with topics such as infant mortality, child abandonment, and juvenile delinquency. Although feminists insisted more than their male counterparts that Latin American governments solve all the problems of children, both groups agreed in principle on many issues. Furthermore, women's views became evident when Latin American male physicians met with their U.S. counterparts at a 1927 eugenics conference in Cuba and refused to endorse highly racist and authoritarian measures. Instead, they worked through the child congresses and with women from the U.S. Chil dren's Bureau. This led to protective legislation for children as well as a hemi spheric Children's Code in 1948, indicating a shift in focus from the obligations of the state to the rights of children.
We arrived at the theme for this special issue on 'Feminisms and Internationalism' from a desire to think together, on the one hand, the wide range of different feminisms and women's movements as they have emerged in historically specific sociopolitical contexts, 1 and, on the other, the universalist ideals that have been claimed historically on behalf of feminism. 2 These ideals appear in some contexts as mere ideology and in others as valuable utopian goads to a better political practice. In either case, moreover, such ideals have had international and transnational implications. The choice of Feminisms and Internationalism, therefore, reflects our own attempt to acknowledge, and to work through, the productive tension between the centrifugal force of discrepant feminist histories and the promising potential of political organising across cultural boundaries. Our approach to the special-issue topic has been informed by the contribution of some recent feminist scholarship that has raised new questions about the relation between the local and the global contexts of women's movements and feminisms world-wide.We identify several strands of this scholarship as pertinent to our project. Our thinking has been informed, for example, by the valuable critiques that several feminist scholars have made of the use, as if they were self-evident, of such concepts as 'universal sisterhood' and 'global feminism', positing thereby either a bodily identity or a common experience of oppression supposedly shared by women all over the world. 3 These claims of universalism on behalf of an international feminist solidarity have been shown, in fact, to rest on an unreflective equation of the 'provincial' 4 or parochial experience of certain dominant versions of feminism in Western Europe and North America as the paradigmatic form of feminism per se. Thus such paradigms of 'universal sisterhood' inevitably run afoul of the many divisions between women along the lines of class, race, sexuality, ethnicity, nationality, First World/Third World, and so on. At the same time, however, we have also learned from a feminist scholarship that has warned against the easy alternative of merely positing a plurality of feminisms organised around some absolute conception of national and/or cultural difference over and against the universalist project of feminism. For, as Rey Chow cautions:The attempt to deconstruct the hegemony of patriarchal discourses through feminism is itself foreclosed by the emphasis on 'Chinese' as a mark of absolute difference. To my mind, it is when the West's 'other women' are prescribed their 'own' national and ethnic identity in this way that they are most excluded from having a claim to the reality of their existence. 5What is becoming clear is that 'woman' needs to be disarticulated from its function as the designated embodiment of culture and that cultures themselves need to be recognised not as fixed products but in terms of historical processes. 6 The retreat into discrete national or cultural feminisms, moreover, for...
Feminist cooperation is often difficult to arrange and even more frustrating to implement. According to Leila Rupp, the imposition of European and US approaches has been a critical obstacle to world feminist unity:We can see the ways in which the limits to universalism that were embedded in the functioning of the international women's movement helped shape collective identity. Euro-American assumptions, based upon a specific history of gender differentiation in industrialised societies, underlay both the conceptualisation of difference between women and men and the tradition of separatist organising. The notion of transcending nationalism assumed an independent, secure, and perhaps even powerful national existence. 1
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