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International Campaigns for Equal Citizenship Between the World Wars
Megan Threlkeld Denison University
During the interwar period, women lobbied international governmental organizations to advance national citizenship rights. Most notably, perhaps, members of the Inter-American Commission of Women and the Women’s Consultative Committee on Nationality pressured the Pan American Union and the League of Nations, respectively, to protect the nationality rights of married women. There was significant overlap between the two campaigns, in terms of rhetoric, strategy, and personnel. The former effort met with some success, the latter with less, but the women did generate considerable publicity for their cause.
Less well known, however, is the concurrent battle for equal rights more generally that women waged on various fronts in the international arena. Throughout the 1930s, for instance, the IACW crafted an Equal Rights Treaty that guaranteed equal status to all women throughout the hemisphere. It was originally the brainchild of Alice Paul, leader of the U.S. National Woman’s Party, who consciously sought to use international pressure to advance women’s rights in the United States. But it was also a goal of many Latin American feminists, who wanted the legal and economic protections the treaty would provide. Working together, U.S. and Latin American women sought to harness the power of international organizations in order to raise awareness of and advance their campaigns for full and equal citizenship.