As female attorneys celebrated their newly acquired right to argue cases before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1879, contemporaneously, the War of the Pacific was unfolding in the Southern Hemisphere. The War of the Pacific—a territorial conflict between Bolivia, Peru, and Chile— hindered the United States’ ability to conduct foreign commerce as well as threatened the territorial integrity of the Americas (Bastert 1959: 379). These two seemingly unrelated events would eventually provide the strategic access points by which women across the Western Hemisphere would coalesce publicly to petition their respective American governments for equal rights under the law.
In the aftermath of the War of the Pacific, in 1889 the United States hosted delegates from seventeen Latin American countries in Washington, DC at the First International Conference of American States (also known as the first Pan-American Conference), ostensibly as part of an effort to cultivate peace and foster amicable...
