Sandra McGee Deutsch

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.

Gendering Antifascism

Women's Activism in Argentina and the World, 1918-1947

By Sandra McGee Deutsch

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.