Gender History in a Transnational Perspective: Biographies, Networks, Gender Orders ed. by Oliver Janz and Daniel Schönpflug (review)

Transnational history has grown in importance over the last two decades and has proved particularly fruitful in deepening our understanding of the nature of women’s organizations and female activists in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Transnational women’s networks took up issues such as gender and social justice, suffrage, and peace that could not be dealt with in the framework of nation states and appealed to something they saw as universal to women. In this context, much attention has been paid to establishing the difference between international and transnational organizations and activism, while recognizing that the two are not mutually exclusive and can coexist within single organizations. This distinction, however fluid, is important as the basis of enquiries into the existence of a human rights discourse within the women’s movement at various stages of its historical development.

This volume has adopted a broad understanding of transnationalism as a continuation of comparative history and places the emphasis on the transnational perspective of the scholar as much as on the object of enquiry. This has advantages in that it allows the volume to encompass studies of international organizations and ideas, imperial histories as well as individual biographies and offer fresh insights and raise new questions on a range of topics.

The volume is in three sections, two of which deal with different aspects of women’s history, while the third is dedicated to examination of the gender order in the relationship of Europe to the colonies. Part one discusses women’s transnational networks and initiatives, including Karen Offen’s reflection on the applicability of the terms “transnational” and indeed “feminist” to earlier stages of the women’s movement. Her examples show that within an organization like the International Council of Women (icw), a concern with shared aims, shared humanity and a shared identity as women meant that aspects of their work and consciousness were indeed transnational in nature. The importance of the individual as transnational actor is demonstrated by the example of American feminist May Wright Sewell, who served as Vice-president and President of the icw between 1899 and 1904. Offen makes a convincing case that Sewell’s international vision, based on the mutual generosity and solidarity of women, transcended national borders and national self-interest. In this, she was far ahead of many of her contemporaries, who remained firmly rooted in their own national contexts. Anne Cova’s contribution to this section considers the national councils of the icw in France, Italy, and Portugal as an effective way of making their political activity visible in nations where women did not have the right to vote. This comparative approach, which brings out differences as well as commonalties, is all the more welcome as scholarship has tended to neglect the councils of Southern Europe.

Julie Carlier’s contribution on a little-known and short-lived international organization, the International Women’s Union (1893–1898), reveals the plurality that characterized the women’s movement during the late nineteenth century and shows how transnational solidarity for a particular cause could blur the boundaries between seemingly disparate groups and call into question categories such as “moderate” and “radical.” While Susan Zimmermann’s focus on the Socialist women’s debate on suffrage reminds us of their refusal to cooperate with bourgeois suffrage movements, Carlier’s study reveals considerable overlap between socialist and middle class feminisms and calls in to question assumptions of a clear class and ideological divide. Pat Thane and Susan Zimmermann look at different aspects of the suffrage movement, Thane looking beyond suffrage as the key to political activity and arguing that the award of suffrage in some nations was accompanied by women’s heightened political activity in international organizations and groups.

The second section is concerned with transnationalism at an individual level and explores the link between transnationalism and female cosmopolitanism in useful ways. The two...