H-Diplo ROUNDTABLE XXII-12

H-Diplo ROUNDTABLE XXII-12 Mona L. Siegel. Peace on Our Terms: The Global Battle for Women’s Rights after the First World War. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020. ISBN: 9780231195102 (hardcover, $35.00); 9780231195119 (paperback, April 2021, $26.00). 16 November 2020 | https://hdiplo.org/to/RT22-12 Editor: Diane Labrosse | Production Editor: George Fujii Contents Introduction by Katherine M. Marino, University of California, Los Angeles ................................................................................. 2 Review by Susan Pedersen, Columbia University ................................................................................................................................... 6 Review by Katharina Rietzler, University of Sussex ................................................................................................................................. 9 Review by Leila J. Rupp, University of California, Santa Barbara ...................................................................................................... 13 Response by Mona L. Siegel, California State University, Sacramento .......................................................................................... 16 H-Diplo Roundtable XXII-12 Introduction by Katherine M. Marino, University of California, Los Angeles ince Mona Siegel’s first prize-winning book The Moral Disarmament of France: Education, Pacifism, and Patriotism (1914-1940) (Cambridge University Press, 2004), she has continued to advance our historical understandings of S women’s pacifism while expanding her geographic scope.1 Her latest book, Peace on Our Terms: The Global Battle for Women’s Rights after the First World War, is a tour de force. It argues that women influenced the 1919 Paris Peace conference that, in turn, itself catalyzed global feminism. In Peace on Our Terms we understand 1919 not only as the “Wilsonian moment” but also as “the global feminist moment.”2 Spanning multiple continents and drawing on transnational research, including in archives that have not been utilized by other scholars, Siegel demonstrates how feminist pacifists from the U.S., France, Egypt, and China shaped national and international politics. She argues that the patriarchal world order the Paris Peace Conference established was itself a reaction against feminists’ forceful insistence on including women’s social, economic, and political rights. While rejecting many demands, world leaders incorporated other of their ideas in documents and treaties— in their approaches to peace and mediation of disputes that appeared in Wilson’s 1918 Fourteen Points, the inclusion of women in League of Nations bodies in its Covenant, and the promotion of social justice for working women in the founding of the International Labor Organzation (ILO), among other examples. Siegel shines a spotlight on dynamic women, including U.S. Pan-Africanist Ida Gibbs Hunt, China’s first female lawyer and judge Soumay Tcheng, and Egyptian anti-colonial feminist Huda Shaarawi, who played pivotal roles in diplomacy and national politics. For these women and others, national self-determination was not just a metaphor for women’s self-determination; they were mutually constitutive. The reverberations of this concept sparked women’s mobilizations around the world. Thanks to Siegel’s book, the first multi-national history of these events, we understand why. The reviewers here highlight the book’s accessible, narrative-driven writing and innovative structure. Katharina Rietzler notes that its “six compact and well-organized chapters provide an elegant narrative of key gatherings of a mobilizing and globalizing international women’s movement.” They also praise Siegel’s prosopographical approach that brings its protagonists to life with often moving personal stories. Susan Pedersen argues that by focusing on “distinct individuals with pasts, personalities, and commitments,” as well as their connections and conflicts with each other, Siegel highlights “the value of personal encounters, even across divides of race, nation, politics, and class” to global feminism. The reviewers explore the benefits and challenges of a tight chronological focus on the 1919 conference and global events surrounding it. Leila Rupp finds that this structure ultimately reinforces Siegel’s argument about the diversity of global feminism. The strategy allows Siegel to take up, in different chapters, “women’s activism at the peace conference, Black women’s fight for racial justice, Egyptian feminist nationalism, [the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom’s] WILPF’s radical pacifism, Chinese feminist nationalism, and labor feminist struggles for social justice,” while also showing how these events were inter-connected. In so doing, Siegel weaves together different “threads in the tapestry of what we now call global feminism.” One consequence of what Siegel calls her “snapshot” (10) approach to women’s activism in 1919, as Pedersen notes, is that the frame excludes women galvanized by another global feminist moment, the 1917 Russian Revolution. Siegel explains in her response that focusing on the Paris Peace conference precluded inclusion of feminists from Russia which was not invited to that conference. Socialism, however, clearly influenced many of her activists, especially the labor feminists, and catalyzed 1 Mona Siegel, The Moral Disarmament of France: Education, Pacifism, and Patriotism (1914-1940) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 2 Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). © 2020 The Authors | CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 US 2 | Page H-Diplo Roundtable XXII-12 global feminisms as well.3 Like any generative history, Siegel’s book opens new avenues for research. (Pedersen’s own lively description of Russian-born anarchist Emma Goldman who was deported from the United States, British suffragette and anti-colonial socialist Sylvia Pankhurst, and Polish socialist and pacifist Rosa Luxemburg makes me eager for a global history that includes these and other socialist feminists.4) The reviewers all discuss Siegel’s definition of “global feminism” and some question its lasting historical significance. Pedersen asks “whether a global feminism defined this capaciously had much historical force—or rather, whether the category ‘woman’ really proved able to reach across the many divisions forcing women apart.” In a similar vein, Rietzler questions the book’s inherent optimism regarding global feminist unity, especially in light of more contemporary forms of it that revolve around diplomatic and neoliberal state power. In her response to Pedersen, Siegel emphasizes that in spite of their differences, the women in her book indeed made common cause. She also explains that “beyond their differences, women’s rights activists shared an underlying belief in both the right and the necessity of full female participation in national and international political life.” Finally, she explains that the tapestry of disparate but overlapping threads Rupp describes was exactly what made global feminism so powerful at this moment. To this point, I would add that although Siegel’s book places great weight on feminists at the peace table and in diplomacy, its Rashomon-like approach around 1919 roots all of these women in their own local contexts. Thus, one of its take-aways is that global feminism is not just made by international congresses/documents, but by the meaningful synergy between them and the national and often grassroots struggles in various contexts. For the Egyptian women whose 1919 confrontation of armed British soldiers in Cairo’s streets propelled the country’s nationalist rebellion, anti-colonialism was a global feminist as well as a national issue. For African American women, fighting global white supremacy was a women’s issue as well as one concerning their communities more broadly. These women understood connections between various forms of oppression— patriarchy, colonialism, imperialism, and racism—while they sought transnational feminist alliances to confront them. This is what Siegel means by global feminism being “intersectional from its moment of inception” (247). This intersectionality was certainly not embraced by all women. Siegel’s book shows that racism and colonialism were alive and well among the Western European and Anglo-American feminists who led major international feminist organizations. As Pedersen emphasizes in her review, African American suffragist and civil rights activist Mary Church Terrell called out Anglo-American pacifist and settlement reformer Jane Addams and other WILPF leaders for propagating racist stereotypes of African and African American men as rapists. That, and other work Terrell did, pushed WILPF to embrace anti-racism. Other times, these women’s demands fell on deaf ears. In those cases, women of color and from the Global South sometimes still maintained alliances with Euro-American groups for instrumental reasons, in order to legitimize demands and pressure their governments, while also organizing on their own. Other times, they broke from these groups. As Siegel explains, the years after the First World War saw new activism around Pan-Arab, Pan-Asian, Pan-African, and Pan-American feminisms. These instantiations were in no small part galvanized by a rejection of exclusively Anglo-American and Western European feminism. For example, in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Huda Shaarawi’s frustration

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