ABSTRACT
This chapter explores Uruguayan feminist and pacifist Paulina Luisi's significance to national and global anti-fascist networks in the 1930s and 1940s. Luisi was an influential activist whose work in the League of Nations starting in the early 1920s facilitated her close connections with pacifist feminists from around the world, including with the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). Events of the early-to-mid 1930s—the rise of Gabriel Terra's dictatorship in Uruguay, the failure of the League of Nations’ Disarmament conference, the rise of Hitler, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, and the Spanish Civil War—radicalized Luisi away from liberal pacifism toward an anti-fascist feminism. In 1934 she allied with the Comintern-linked and Paris-based Comité mondial des femmes contre la guerre et le fascisme (CMF, World Committee of Women against War and Fascism), and helped galvanize women's anti-fascist organizing in Uruguay where she founded a CMF branch. Her shifting politics and relationships with WILPF and CMF shed light on the importance of anti-fascism in Uruguay as well as the significance of Uruguayan activism to these transnational networks. Luisi's organizing demonstrates the vitality of women's anti-fascist activism nationally, regionally, and globally in the 1930s.
