I am thinking of the year I tried to teach the history of Western feminism on a North-South axis-U.S., Latin American and Caribbean feminism, not U.S… - Aurora Levins Morales

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I am thinking of the year I tried to teach the history of Western feminism on a North-South axis-U.S., Latin American and Caribbean feminism, not U.S. and European-and first heard the names of these women you rubbed shoulders with, Bertha Lutz, Clara Gonzalez, Elena Torres, Minerva Bernardino, Amalia de Castilla Ledón, Paca Navas, Irma de Alvarado. No one in my class had ever heard of any of them, not a single one. Not the Latin American delegates who put women into the U.N. Charter and saw to the creation of the Commission on the Status of Women; not the women who openly balked at the militarization of the continent in 1947; not any of the writers, thinkers, and agitators who had struggled not only for suffrage (which came far later to them than to women in the United States and kept them militant through the lull between our first and second waves) but also for divorce and child custody, nationality independent of a husband's, national self-determination, and living wages, and against dictatorships and fascism and the arming of the Americas.