Feminism,Pacifism and Political Violence in Europe and China in the Era of the World Wars

This article examines international collaboration between Western and Chinese feminists in the interwar decades. Focusing on the 1927–28 ‘mission to Asia’ sponsored by the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), the article shows that, contrary to what existing historiography would lead us to suspect, neither feminist Orientalism nor colonial nationalism stood as a serious impediment to the formation of a truly international feminist alliance. Instead, European and Chinese women's varying experiences and memories of international conflict, and their varying understandings of the relationship between feminism, pacifism, militarism and political violence, defined the limits of global feminist collaboration in the late 1920s. The WILPF delegates, like many European women in the 1920s, were living in the shadow of the First World War, a conflict they condemned as futile and barbaric; their Chinese ‘sisters’ were living in the midst of a battle to determine the political future of their nation. For both sets of women, the question of women's emancipation was fundamentally entwined with broader national and international struggles. This article incorporates reports, personal letters and diaries of WILPF delegates as well as articles, speeches and letters by Chinese women to offer new insights into one of the earliest efforts to build a truly international women's movement and draw our attention to the centrality of warfare in defining the limits of global feminist collaboration in the twentieth century.     

For Mothers,Peace and Family: International (Non)‐Cooperation among Italian Catholic and Communist Women's Organisations during the Early Cold War

In July 1955, women from around the globe gathered in Lausanne, Switzerland for the World Congress of Mothers organised by the social‐communist Women's International Democratic Federation (WIDF). On the third day of four days of proceedings, an Italian housewife named Clotilde Cassigoli delivered an impassioned speech calling on women to unite across the divides of the Cold War, and cooperate to ensure that their children and grandchildren would not have to know the horrors of war she had witnessed in Florence at the end of the Second World War. Her plea ultimately went unheeded. This article analyses the national and international activities of Catholic and communist women's organisations between 1945 and 1956 to expand understandings of women's political involvement during the Cold War. My examination of the Italian case will show that during this era cooperation between the politically opposed women's groups was only possible in a limited framework. By interpreting the associations’ discourse of motherhood and peace through a Cold War lens, I show that the Italian women's leaders were successful at advancing their own objectives and making inroads into the homes of more Italian women while they simultaneously constructed a divisive Cold War international women's movement.     

Embracing the Language of Human Rights: International Women's Organisations,Feminism and Campaigns Against the Marriage Bar,c.1919–1960

This article considers four international women's organisations – the International Council of Women, the International Alliance of Women for Suffrage and Equal Citizenship, the International Federation of University Women and the Open Door International – and their campaigns for the right of married women to undertake paid work. It examines how each organisation adopted and engaged with the language of human rights in the late 1920s and 1930s. It is argued that after 1948, precisely because of its formal adoption by the UN, the language of human rights became less usable as a way to make the point that women still faced inequalities, and so other framings became more significant. This article contributes to historiographies on international women's organisations, offers a detailed discussion of their activism against the marriage bar, and challenges the conventional chronology of the concept and language of human rights.     

Contesting ‘Global Sisterhood’: The Global Women's Health Movement,the United Nations and the Different Meanings of Reproductive Rights (1970s–80s)

The article contributes to a genealogy of the global articulation of reproductive rights principles, as established at the 1994 United Nations (UN) Conference on Population and Development held in Cairo and the UN Women's Conference held in Beijing the following year. It highlights the key role played by an emerging global women's health movement in the 1970s–80s, in shaping UN debates on family planning, women's rights in procreative choice and women's roles in socio-economic development. The article focuses on the International Campaign for Abortion, Sterilisation and Contraception (est. London 1978) and the Women's Global Network for Reproductive Rights (Amsterdam and Manila 1984; ECOSOC consultative status in 1992). Adopting an intersectional perspective, the paper highlights the local embeddedness of feminist positions, the shortcomings of Western feminism and the ways in which conflicts between women's organisations allowed for an original and evolving concept of reproductive rights to emerge. It is based on UN papers and the archives of the above organisations and family planning movements.     

Promoting Women's Rights,Hiding the Empire: Marie-Hélène Lefaucheux,an Imperialist Woman at the United Nations

This contribution examines the role of Marie-Hélène Lefaucheux, the French representative in the UN Commission on the Status of Women between 1948 and 1953. By focusing on Lefaucheux's activism and connection with the French government, this article intends to analyse how French post-imperial policy carried out by reformist women's organisations pursued the expansion of women's and human rights whilst supporting the empire. Using a range of archival sources and the Commission's reports, this work argues that the role of reformist imperial women and organisations was crucial in influencing the Commission which was both a place of contestation and protection of the gendered and colonial order.     

East Timorese Women Challenge Domestic Violence

Timor-Leste's struggle for independence has won it high international profile. Yet there is little known internationally about the role women played in the resistance movement and how independence has affected them. Has democratisation brought women greater freedom and rights? This article argues that some East Timorese women benefited from the construction of a new democratic state by mobilising and unifying in the political space created post-1999. East Timorese women's NGOs allied with international organisations and NGOs to form a campaign against domestic violence. This article takes a constructivist approach, analysing how international norms of women's rights and gender equality have: (1) emerged, (2) reached a tipping point, (3) cascaded and (4) been internalised in a post-conflict, democratising context.     

Expanding Women's Co-operatives in China through Institutional Linkages

This article examines the institutional linkages between three women workers' co-operatives, the first women's credit co-operative in China, and the co-operative support organization, the International Committee for the Promotion of Chinese Industrial Co-operatives (ICCIC). The study shows that Chinese women in rural areas have increasingly adopted co-operatives as a form of organization in their efforts to address the problem of their lack of access to resources, including land, credit, jobs, training and information, and to participate in the mainstream economy as an organized force. This article demonstrates that stronger institutional linkages between local offices of the All-China Women's Federation and the ICCIC encourage the growth of women's co-operative activities. It raises two sets of policy issues that are central to the development of co-operatives and women's banking: the continued growth of these activities will depend upon the government adopting legislation to define the legal framework governing co-operative relations and management systems, and establishing gender-inclusive policies to increase credit to women's income-generating activities.     

Women's Rights as Human Rights after the End of History

This article is based on the 2022 Gender & History annual lecture. It reconsiders the recent history of women's rights as human rights. The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union brought to an end a twentieth-century discourse of women's rights, understood not only as legal norms, but as a political language harnessed to a narrative of women as a collective subject progressing towards emancipation and equality. This was enabled by an international order in which human rights were tied to visions of self-determination, social rights and strong states, creating spaces for new subjects to make their voices heard in international law, albeit in particular and circumscribed ways. After 1989, women were again written into international law primarily as victims of violence, while the emergence of gender as a category of analysis challenged the notion of ‘women’ as a collective subject of rights. The story of women's rights, the article concludes, suggests that recent revisionist histories of human rights as a neoliberal utopia are only one part of a more complex human rights history.     

Constructing a Historiography of Mexican Women and Gender

This article outlines the historiographical importance of the International Colloquium of Women's and Gender History in Mexico, particularly in the context of the author's own scholarship, especially her dissertation. It argues for the need for women's and gender history, and for a dialogue, by means of which these separate but related bodies of scholarship can inform the other. It includes a summary of the author's dissertation and its theoretical influences, a review of historical topics discussed at the first two conferences of the International Colloquium of Women's and Gender History, and a discussion of the historiographical implications of such developments.     

Gendered Structures of Local Politics in Turkey

Indicators offered by available international statistical data and observations of many researchers point out that women's formal political involvement at the local level is stronger than that at the national level for the majority of states. However, gendered political patterns in Turkey have been following a rather different path. One and the most significant contradictory aspect is that women's representation at local elected organs is weaker than the national parliament. This article, first, investigates the reasons for this relatively weak existence in formal local politics. The references of this relativity are both national formal politics of Turkey, and the dominant worldwide model. Secondly, the article tries to establish country‐specific links between formal and informal local politics concerning women's participation. The experience in Turkey has proven that women's local engagement does not necessarily propel decision‐making power and women's empowerment. Women's local mobilization in Turkey has been mostly limited to socio‐cultural and charity activities instead of central decisions on the settlement, and of efforts for establishing women's local political agendas. Moreover, as a very prominent factor concerning the maintenance of asymmetric gendered structures of local politics, women's movement at the national level has been lacking in systematic political interest in the issue until very recently. In this article, these pretensions and future prospects are discussed in terms of the actual global‐national circumstances affecting local politics as well as women's local conditions. To these ends, existing quantitative‐qualitative research, data and analysis, and relevant findings of the author's recent (2000–2003) original research, as well as her observations through participation in recent feminist activism targeting local politics are being evaluated.     

‘Once and For All’: The Fourth UN World Conference on Women and the Institutionalisation of Women's Human Rights in American Foreign Policy

Though the slogan predates the Fourth UN World Conference on Women, ‘women's rights are human rights’ has become inextricably linked to US First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton's keynote address at the 1995 Conference in Beijing. The speech turned a line socialised by transnational feminist organisers into a State Department mantra with long-lasting policy ripples still felt today. This article uses new sources from the Office of the First Lady to examine the intra-departmental dynamics, policy architecture and domestic political considerations that shaped the content of the speech and the Clinton Administration's conception of women's rights as human rights. Early documents show that a focus on human rights was not inevitable, as other policy areas were better developed with more public support. But fear of rollback from previous international standards, external pressures from civil society, a desire to link foreign policy with domestic political aims and ultimately a strong backlash to American participation at the Conference on the basis of China's human rights record all elevated women's human rights as a US delegation priority.     

Women,Nation and Decolonisation in Papua New Guinea

This paper explores the question of women, decolonisation and nation-building. It argues that the inclusion of women within the nation of Papua New Guinea (PNG) was problematic partly because women had rarely experienced mainstream colonial rule — an experience that elsewhere provided a basis for participation in the post-colonial state. The paper also investigates how women were perceived and represented by male writers at independence. While the Pangu Pati attempted to include women in state-building, these efforts were not adequately supported. PNG's achievement of independence coincided with the globalisation of second-wave feminism, and this was to prove critical for PNG's female citizens in their efforts to be included in the new state, for PNG's membership in the United Nations provided an external push to raise women's participation in the nation. Nevertheless, the government's dependence on international organisations to push the women's agenda also hampered the development of an autonomous women's movement in the country. The paper argues that, for PNG's female citizens, colonisation, independence and decolonisation occurred simultaneously after 1975.     

Stigma,stereotypes and Brazilian soap operas: road-blocks to ending human trafficking in Vietnam,Ghana and Ukraine

During the last 15 years, we have witnessed a significant and increasing focus on human trafficking in the work and research of international organisations, local and international non-governmental organisations, governments, researchers and academics from a range of disciplines. However, the focus remains on presumed structural causes of trafficking, including assumptions regarding victims' levels of education and sex. Other socio-cultural factors are frequently ignored in trafficking discourse. Based on fieldwork carried out in Vietnam, Ghana and Ukraine from July 2009 to November 2010, including 50 interviews with key informants, this article directs attention to some of these oft-ignored factors that continue to act as a barrier to ending human trafficking. Attention is paid to three socio-cultural factors that act as road-blocks to efforts to counter trafficking in all three countries: first, the stigmatisation of both sex work and trafficking; second, a narrow understanding of who constitutes a victim of trafficking and third, lack of attention by researchers and activists to the role of images of successful migration abroad as an influential pull factor. These research findings indicate the importance of understanding the intersections between race, culture, gender, sexuality and class to relation to women's and men's involvement in unsafe and/or exploitative migration abroad.     

‘A rancour and a passion would be introduced into politics’: Perceptions of the Woman MP in Late 19th and Early 20th Century Britain*

On 21 November 1918, the Parliament (Qualification of Women) Act was passed, which enabled women over the age of 21 to stand for parliamentary election. Unlike women's suffrage, there was no sustained campaign to allow women to sit in parliament. However, this does not mean that the issue was ignored in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This article traces perceptions of the woman MP in the pre-1918 period and offers the first detailed exploration of the topic. It argues that although discussions on the matter were not widespread like women's suffrage, there is value in examining these lesser-known debates. This article studies the parliamentary candidacy of Helen Taylor in the 1885 General Election, in addition to how male politicians, the press, suffrage, and anti-suffrage organisations engaged with the idea of women sitting in parliament. Women's supposedly emotional nature played an integral role in how contemporaries approached the subject of women MPs. Indeed, women's emotions, and more specifically their passionate temperament, were often used to discredit their political capabilities and portray women as emotionally, intellectually and physically inferior to men.     

Feminism,Gender, and Women's Peace Activism

United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 on ‘Women, peace and security’, passed in 2000, reflects a recent growth in women's peace activism. Women's resistance to violence is widely believed to be a mobilizing factor in both local and international peace movements. This provokes questions around essentialism and violence of concern to feminists: are men inherently territorial and aggressive, and women naturally nurturing and peaceable? Or is the behaviour of both conditioned by particular local configurations of social relations of power? This contribution reviews these questions in the light of the experiences of women's peace organizations. It concludes that essentializing women's roles as wives, mothers and nurses discourages their inclusion as active decision makers in political arenas, as well as overshadowing the needs of other disadvantaged groups. Rather than seeing war as the violation of women by men, we should recognize that men and women are each differently violated by war.     

Transnational militancy in Cold-War Europe: gender,human rights,and the WIDF during the Greek Civil War

This paper examines the involvement of the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) in the politics of the Greek Civil War (1946–1949). The article’s specific focus is on the organisation’s international campaigns for the end of state-sanctioned persecution of leftists, especially women, and the re-instatement of democracy in Greece, utilising the expanding human-rights system at the United Nations. It draws on selected WIDF and United Nations (UN) documents, in addition to primary and secondary materials relating to the cold war and the Greek Civil War.     

The Transmigration of Rights: Women,Movement and the Grassroots in Latin American and Caribbean Communities

In order to better understand both the global and local contours and impact of transnationalism as a political and cultural force, this article suggests the need for an exploration of shifting gender roles and expectations as they are becoming manifest in situated arenas. The awkwardness of transposing an international rights discourse into local communities and settings deeply infused with tradition, or onto grassroots nationalist movements that work to resist foreign impositions is a widely recognized concern. At the same time, the influence of diaspora populations is seen to leaven and situate global discourse for local movements in a sending country and translates more local interests into global concerns in important and effective ways. Transnational feminist discourse now often concerns itself with the different strategies employed by diasporas, the strategic uses of global discourse, and the meaningful efforts to resist it. Through illustrations drawn from a study of women refugees in El Salvador, the Haitian democracy movement, and a rural Brazilian women's organization, this article links the experience of transmigration to women's mobilizing efforts and the proliferation of rights discourses.     

The nationalisation of the human rights debate in Egypt

ABSTRACT. The study of nationalism in Egypt has often focused on Arab nationalism and its relevance to the post‐colonial state building process. The current article shifts the focus to the Egyptian state's strategic use of nationalism as a mechanism for survival and for shoring up its failing legitimacy. In particular, the case of the human rights debate is chosen to show the regime's most recent attempt to ‘nationalise’ a rising movement which promotes universalism and poses a threat to the notion of the nation's homogeneity. By misrepresenting human rights organisations as mouthpieces of Western imperialist powers, the regime has managed to create an image of these organisations as posing a threat to Egypt's national security and undermining its international ‘reputation’. More recently, however, the state has refined its discourse on human rights by promoting an image whereby it is the ‘official agent’ of a more nationalistically defined human rights movement.     

Competition,cooperation and resistance: women in the political field in Iraq

After the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime in April 2003 many women supported the process of transition and became active in political parties and coalitions. A wide range of groups were also formed which pursued women's rights agendas and, in many cases, included a call for peace and reconciliation and charity activities for women and children. However, female political action and the field of women's rights remain divided by the same multiple boundaries of belonging which affect Iraqi society itself; women operate in specific ethnic and denominational, local and regional settings, and they support nationalist, secularist, left‐wing or Islamist agendas. Women's rights—whatever the direction—can be of major or minor concern. This article outlines female political action and draws attention to the key issues which are discussed, in particular, by secular feminists in Iraq. In so doing, the article highlights how women in Iraq have not only lost, as a wide range of observers argue, but have also benefited from the restructure of the political landscape. Female political activists are still faced with old and new social, cultural, legal and political obstacles. The article argues that when women support narratives that leave men's superiority untouched, they are not simply victims of men or ‘false consciousness'; women either compete and cooperate, or they reject ideological narratives and power relations, while pursuing agendas of individual interest. Yet, despite competition among women and women's groups, and women's loyalty to agendas controlled by men, radical overtones that resist male domination can be heard— and should be supported.