ACTA UNIVERSITATIS UPSALIENSIS Uppsala Studies in Economic History, 80
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ACTA UNIVERSITATIS UPSALIENSIS Uppsala Studies in Economic History, 80 Cover: “Weltmächte einigt Euch! Internationaler Sozialistischer Frauentag 1949,” published by SPÖ Frauenzentralkomitee, Vienna 1949. (Courtesy of the Labour Movement Archives and Library, Stockholm) Crossing Boundaries Women’s Organizing in Europe and the Americas, 1880s–1940s Edited by Pernilla Jonsson, Silke Neunsinger, Joan Sangster Abstract Jonsson, P., Neusinger, S., Sangster, J. (editors) Crossing Boundaries: Women’s Organizing in Europe and the Americas, 1880s–1940s. Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis. Uppsala Studies in Economic History 80. 210 pp. Uppsala. ISBN 978-91-554-6926-9 What is the history of feminist internationalism? This volume contributes a series of essays to this important question, examining the attempts of feminists and socialists in Western Europe and the Americas to establish meaningful connections with fellow activists across national boundaries, whether through travel, written communication, or face-to-face meetings. Their attempts to communicate transnationally reflected diverse intellectual and political goals, as well as different organizational forms, ranging from the establishment of solid institutions to the most personal and passionate alliances of political friendship. In order to understand the history of feminist internationalism, we must analyze the motives, means, successes, and limitations of women’s past efforts to cross the boundaries of nation, situating women’ orga- nizing within the historical contexts that shaped their political activism. Keywords: internationalism, feminism, socialism, political organisations © The authors 2007 ISSN 0346-6493 ISBN 978-91-554-6926-9 urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-8149 (http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn= urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-8149) Department of Economic History, Box513, UppsalaUniversity, SE-751 20 Uppsala, Sweden Printed in Sweden by Elanders Gotab, Stockholm 2007 Contents Acknowledgements.........................................................................................7 Crossing Boundaries: Women’s Organizing in Europe and the Americas, 1880s–1940s Joan Sangster ........................................................9 Suffrage and the Labour Market: European Women at International Congresses in London and Berlin, 1899 and 1904 Ulla Wikander.............21 Constructing Feminism Across Borders: The Pan American Women’s Movement and the Founding of the Inter-American Commission of Women E. Sue Wamsley .............................................................................51 Transnationalism in Practice: The Effect of Dora Montefiore’s International Travel on Women’s Politics in Britain before World War I Karen Hunt ...................................................................................................73 Political Tourism, Writing, and Communication: Transnational Connections of Women on the Left, 1920s–1940s Joan Sangster..............95 Creating the International Spirit of Socialist Women: Women in the Labour and Socialist International 1923–1939 Silke Neunsinger.............117 On Women’s Account: The Finances of “Bourgeois” Women’s Organizations in Sweden, England, Germany, and Canada, 1885–1924 Pernilla Jonsson .........................................................................................157 Selected Bibliography.................................................................................187 Contributors ................................................................................................198 Index ...........................................................................................................200 Acknowledgements “Crossing Boundaries” not only describes the efforts of female activists to organize across many borders in the past; it also characterizes the work that made this anthology possible. This edited collection is the product of coop- eration between the Department of Economic History in Uppsala, the Labour Movement Archives and Library in Stockholm, and Trent University, Can- ada. Encouraged by the lively discussions many of us had during a workshop held at the Department of Economic History, Uppsala University, in June 2006, a group of researchers from Europe and America decided to turn their contributions into a publication. Among those scholars present in Uppsala was Lisa Tetrault, from Carnegie Melon University, whose valuable com- ments during the workshop added to the contributions here. The editors have been based in three different countries while putting the manuscript together. Unlike earlier activists who relied on letters and the post, we have relied heavily on the internet to bridge the geographical spaces separating us. We have, however, many to thank for helping us put the col- lection together. The contributions would never have turned into printed pages without the excellent work of our copy editor based in Canada, Maggie Quirt, and our layout-woman in Sweden, Lynn Karlsson. Lynn has also helped the non-Anglophones turn their texts into readable English. Without the archival nose of “fantastic Lucy”, Lucy Viedma at the Labour Movement Archives and Library, who provided us with illustrations, we would not know what many women we had discussed during these two days looked like. Without the financial support from the Swedish Bank of Ter- centenary Foundation we had never been able to meet for the initial work- shop at Uppsala University. We have been able to publish this book due to generous financial support from the Swedish Bank Tercentenary Foundation and the Karl Staff Foundation. April 2007 Pernilla Jonsson, Syracuse, USA Silke Neunsinger, Stockholm, Sweden Joan Sangster, Peterborough, Canada 7 Crossing Boundaries: Women’s Organizing in Europe and the Americas, 1880s–1940s Joan Sangster Since the early 19th century, European and North American feminists have been engaged in attempts to make meaningful connections with fellow activists across national borders, whether through travel, written communica- tion, or face-to-face meetings. These attempts to communicate and collaborate transnationally, often building international organizations, have reflected diverse intellectual and political goals, as well as different organizational forms, from the establishment of hierarchical and well-funded institutions to the most personal and passionate alliances of friendship. Feminists concerned with international organizing have also looked to the past for insight and inspiration, attempting to understand the antecedents, flaws, and successes of women’s past transnational political connections, even while recognizing the very different historical contexts that spawned these organizational efforts. Second-wave feminism in North America, for instance, resulted in the proliferation of new international links between women, both highly institu- tional and more informal ones, as well as research that probed women’s pre- vious alliances, institutions and lobby groups, whether they were liberal, socialist, feminist, pacifist, or hybrid versions of those politics.1 More recent concerns with globalization and its discontents have also led to renewed feminist attempts to explore the global historical connections shaping wom- en’s lives, particularly the unequal colonial relations of power that character- ized the 19th and 20th century worlds.2 Feminist intentions to move research 1Marilyn Boxer and Jean Quataert, eds., Socialist Women: European Socialist Feminism in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (New York 1978); Karen Hansen and Ilene Phillipson, eds., Women, Class and the Socialist Imagination (New York 1990); Ellen Carol DuBois, “Woman Suffrage and the Left: An International Socialist-Feminist Perspective,” New Left Review, 186 (March/April 1991), 20–45. For more theoretical explorations, see Zillah Eisenstein, ed., Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case of Socialist Feminism (New York 1979) and Rosemary Hennessy and Chrys Ingraham, eds., Materialist Feminism: A Reader in Class, Difference, and Women’s Lives (New York 1997). 2 For example, Peter Waterman, Globalization, Social Movements and the New Internationa- lism (London 2001), chapter 6; Daiva Stasiulis and Nira Yuval-Davis, eds., Unsettling Settler Societies: Articulations of Gender, Race, Ethnicity and Class (London 1995); Mrinalini 9 away from the confines of the nation-state, and to move beyond the dominating intellectual and economic hegemony of the West, have led to innovative attempts to “internationalize” women’s studies research and writ- ing: these have taken the form of new writing on diverse areas of the globe, as well as more integrative studies that try to connect different areas of the world through the thematics of women’s and gender history.3 Some efforts to “internationalize” women’s studies have been criticized for being partial or inadequate, or for failing to jettison a dominating and domineering western perspective on modernity;4 however they still look very different than women’s studies research of thirty years ago, when feminists were more likely to use terms such as “universal sisterhood”5 rather uncritically. More- over, other feminist voices also remind us that, however important global studies are, the local and national contours of women’s lives matter as sub- jects of study, and that for some women in marginalized groups or nations, simply bringing their own specific experiences to historical view is still an important endeavour.6 Indeed, internationalization has also become a keyword of significance in North American academic