Gendering Anti-Facism: Women Activism in Argentina and the World, 1918-1947

Winner of the 2024 Thomas McGann Award for Outstanding Monograph on Latin American History

A History of the Women’s Antifascism Movement in Argentina that Contains Lessons for Opposing Fascism Today
Argentine women’s long resistance to extreme rightists, tyranny, and militarism culminated in the Junta de la Victoria, or Victory Board, a group that organized in the aftermath of the German invasion of the Soviet Union in defiance of the neutralist and Axis-leaning government in Argentina. A sewing and knitting group that provided garments and supplies for the Allied armies in World War II, the Junta de la Victoria was a politically minded association that mobilized women in the fight against fascism. Without explicitly characterizing itself as feminist, the organization promoted women’s political rights and visibility and attracted forty-five thousand members. The Junta ushered diverse constituencies of Argentine women into political involvement in an unprecedented experiment in pluralism, coalition-building, and political struggle. Sandra McGee Deutsch uses this internationally minded but local group to examine larger questions surrounding the global conflict between democracy and fascism.

Sandra McGee Deutsch is professor emerita of history at the University of Texas at El Paso. She is the author of Counterrevolution in Argentina, 1900-1932: The Argentine Patriotic League; Las derechas: The Extreme Right in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, 1890-1939; and Crossing Borders, Claiming a Nation: A History of Argentine Jewish Women, 1880-1955, which won a Latin American Jewish Studies Association Book Award. She is also coeditor of Women of the Right: Comparisons and Interplay across Borders and The Argentine Right: Its History and Intellectual Origins, 1910 to the Present.