Raising Pan Americans: Early Women Activists of Hemispheric Cooperation, 1916–1944

This article examines the early years of the Pan American Round Table (PART), a women’s group founded in Texas in 1916 that internationalized to Latin America by 1928. While men built bridges and highways that connected the United States and Latin America, women of the PART built metaphorical ones of friendship and understanding. They acted as agents of “soft” diplomacy reshaping Pan Americanism, a U.S. foreign policy goal intended to foster commercial and political ties and to spread democracy in Latin America. Their activist work on behalf of Pan Americanism became a vehicle for personal and community enrichment: through education of self and public, they believed they could change attitudes toward Latin America and its people, yielding a common ground of mutual respect as their motto “liking comes from knowing” suggested. The PART is thus a model study for the interplay of gender, diplomacy, and foreign relations in the twentieth century

The California Plan: California\u27s Suffrage Strategy and Its Effects in Other States and the National Suffrage Campaign

The women’s suffrage movement was one of the longest civil rights movements in American history. Its influence spread throughout the country, yet the most scholarship today focuses on suffragettes’ efforts from the East Coast even though suffragettes from Western states, specifically California, also participated in the campaign. During their campaign, Californian activists developed a new strategy that united women of different social classes who worked together to achieve their common goal of obtaining the vote. Their strategy won them state suffrage rights in 1911 and reinvigorated the stagnant national suffrage movement

“Making The World A Better Place To Live In”: Hattiesburg Women’s Literary Organizations and the Formation of a Progressive Southern City, 1884-1945

This study examines the activity and impact of white women’s literary clubs in Hattiesburg, Mississippi between 1884 and the end of World War II in 1945. This project examines to what extent women adhered to or broke away from societal norms of the time by involving themselves in intellectually stimulating groups with other women, especially in response to rapidly changing standards of femininity and womanhood during the Progressive era. Women’s literary clubs reveal patterns of women moving out of the home and into a public role, in addition to signifying the new ways in which women fit themselves into a society during a period of rapidly changing ideas about femininity and womanhood. Club activity records show how organized Hattiesburg women fit into larger models of progressive womanhood while maintaining the decorum expected of them. These activities can also demonstrate if these clubs allowed southern women to participate in a larger feminist movement that may not have been widely accepted in the Deep South. The cultural and structural contributions of women’s organizations in Hattiesburg are largely unrecognized in the literature, but the impact they had on the city has been long lasting. Women’s literary clubs in Hattiesburg organized women and allowed them to have a deeply rooted, progressive influence on a growing city in a traditionally conservative state. This thesis argues that literary clubs empowered Hattiesburg women to better themselves and their communities, while putting pressure upon prescribed gender roles without breaking apart societal rules