The Challenge of Multinational Empire for the International Women's Movement: The Habsburg Monarchy and the Development of Feminist Inter/National Politics

This article analyzes strategies of transnational organizing as developed in the international women's movement prior to 1918, comparing the International Council of Women (ICW) and the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA). These organizations developed divergent schemes of dealing with political entities that did not conform to the western notion of the nation state, and with women's movements from these regions. In this context, neither the ICW nor the IWSA overtly challenged constitutional arrangements characterizing the pre-existing, deeply hierarchical international order. Yet in collaborating with organized women from the multinational Habsburg Monarchy, as well as from other dominated nations and regions in European and non-European contexts, the IWSA developed a cautious partisanship for national emancipation and self-determination. The study analyses how ICW and IWSA engaged in constructing the feminist inter/national through a complex set of policies relating women's international representation to state, nation, citizenship, and territory.