Metaphors of the Schoolroom: Women Working the Mandates System of the League of Nations

Fig. 1.

Valentine Dannevig, Member of the Permanent Mandates Commission of the League of Nations Office, 1928-39.

Fig. 2.

Dustjacket, Winifred Holtby, Mandoa, Mandoa!, London, 1933.

Of the millions of people who welcomed Woodrow Wilson's promise of a new 'League of Nations' in 1919 with relief and gratitude, few were more in earnest than the leaders of the great international women's organizations. International feminist solidarity had been hit hard by the war, with organized women across Europe mostly rallying to the cause of their respective nations. Yet the war had also midwifed new women's groups devoted to peace and international conciliation, and in its wake the great international women's organizations also tried to regroup. Believing the need for transnational co-operation to be greater than ever, the International Council of Women and the International Women's Suffrage Alliance swiftly mobilized to stake their claim to a role in the postwar order. The international women's organizations, like nationalist movements and humanitarian campaigns, sent their delegates to Paris for the Peace Conference. The IWSA was eager to devote all of its energies to building up the League, IWSA president Lady Aberdeen assured the members of the Conference's Commission charged with working out the new League's structure; other members of her deputation urged that women be represented in all bodies and bureaucracies of the League, and that the League take up those key humanitarian causes and campaigns – including combating the traffic in women and children, promoting equal political rights, and developing health and education services – which women's organizations had long supported.¹ When the League Covenant not only stipulated that all positions in the League be open equally to men and women but also pledged the institution to combat sexual trafficking and to promote international collaboration over issues of health and welfare, women's organizations both rejoiced and girded their metaphorical loins. There was a natural affinity, the Covenant implied, between the work of international government and 'women's work' of social uplift and social reform.

As an arena for women's endeavour, the League only partly fulfilled the hopes of these international feminists. Women were appointed to the League Secretariat, but they were clustered in the less politically-sensitive sections and the lower ranks. The only woman in the League's history to head a section was Dame Rachel Crowdy, and even she did so without the 'Director' title and generous salary enjoyed by many male section heads.² Women served on the League's various commissions and committees – Marie Curie on the Committee on Intellectual Co-operation, for example, Avril de Sainte-Croix on the Advisory Committee on the Traffic in Women, and Eleanor Rathbone on the Child Welfare Committee – but they were usually in 'technical' rather than 'political' sections and in advisory rather than statutory posts.³ But women also made their voices heard through lobbying and humanitarian organizations, battering on the League's doors with programmes for its expansion, activism or reform. Eglantyne Jebb at Save the Children Fund, Alison Nielans and Mrs Neville Rolfe of the Association for Moral and Social Hygiene, and the women organized into the Council for the Representation of Women in the League of Nations, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, the International Women's Suffrage Alliance and the Young Women's Christian Association all tried to push the League to take a more activist, and what they saw as a more feminist, stance. The League, they thought, could be a vehicle for international feminist agendas, providing resources and networks for their efforts to improve the conditions of life for women and children around the globe.⁴

Only a small amount of that energy and activism was directed towards the mandates system, that unusual experiment in international oversight applied to the Ottoman and German territories seized by the Allied powers in the First World War. Under pressure from Woodrow Wilson, those powers agreed at the...