Born: 1893, Cuba
Died: 1992
Country most active: Cuba, International
Also known as: NA
The following is republished from the National Park Service. This piece falls under under public domain, as copyright does not apply to “any work of the U.S. Government” where “a work prepared by an officer or employee of the U.S. Government as part of that person’s official duties” (See, 17 U.S.C. §§ 101, 105).
For United States suffragist and lawyer Doris Stevens and National Woman’s Party (NWP) leader Dr. Alice Paul, women’s suffrage was just one step towards equality. After the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, their new goal was to pass a constitutional Equal Rights Amendment in the US to end legal discrimination against women.
Cuban lawyer Dr. Flora Díaz Parrado had similar goals to secure women’s equality in Cuba. In early 1928, the Sixth Pan-American Conference was hosted in Havana. Although the conference included women’s issues, there were no women delegates and men’s support ranged from undecided to fully opposed. Cuban leaders, including Díaz Parrado and social reformer and pharmacologist Dr. Elena Mederos de Gonzales, gathered women in Havana to protest their exclusion. Díaz Parrado also invited women from the NWP. Alice Paul sent Doris Stevens and Jane Norman Smith as representatives.
Díaz Parrado’s invitation helped Stevens realize that transnational support for an international Equal Rights Treaty could pressure US lawmakers to change domestic policy. She and Paul had previously displayed little interest in Pan-American feminism and now realized they could establish the NWP as an international leader. But they falsely believed that Latin American feminists were inexperienced and they did not take them seriously.
Despite these tensions, women from the US, Cuba, and other Latin American countries cooperated to achieve their shared goal. They successfully pressured the Pan-American Union (PAU) into allowing them to speak at the conference. Stevens and Smith joined representatives from Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic to propose the Inter-American Commission of Women (IACW). It was the first all-female intergovernmental organization dedicated to women’s political and civil rights in the Americas. For over a decade, Stevens served as the Commission’s first chair.
Some of the IACW’s early accomplishments include a resolution to encourage the appointment of more women as delegates, an all-female committee dedicated to women’s citizenship status, and rallying support for Equal Nationality and Equal Rights treaties. In 1938, the IACW became an official, permanent part of the PAU. When the PAU was rechartered as the Organization of American States in 1948, the IACW started to be known by the acronym CIM. This represented the organization’s name in Spanish, La Comisión Interamericana de Mujeres.
Pan-American Union Headquarters was added to the National Register of Historic Places on June 4, 1969. It was designated a National Historic Landmark on January 13, 2021.