Beyond the Center: New Spatial Axes in International and Transnational Women’s Histories

The articles in this issue explore new spatial configurations in international, transnational, and national women’s history outside the centers of the West. They demonstrate the interpretive power of methodologies that explore sites of interconnections seen through experiences in Asia, Iran, colonial India, and the Queensland colony of Britain. Two articles address new political options opened by the structures of international governance and treaty making under the League of Nations. The next article, on the international birth control movement, reflects a similar methodological concern with the processes of translation into local idiom while another contribution continues the rewarding exploration of transnational history for understanding local feminist politics in the later nineteenth century. The last two articles are national in scope. Each deals with religious revival as a distinct space for cultural and gender critique of dominant paternalistic values, however muted or marginal they were, as a force for larger gender change. These articles are followed by three book review essays as well as a tribute arranged by colleagues and friends of Susan Groag Bell, the pioneer medieval women’s historian, who died in 2015.

Rejecting the limiting label of “regional history,” Shobna Nijhawan writes an international account of the interwar women’s movements from the Asian perspective. Her compelling article expands out “from an Asian Center” and focuses on the lead-up to and main debates at an All-Asian Women’s Conference in India in 1931. The meeting brought together voting delegates from India, Afghanistan, Burma, Ceylon, Japan, and Persia and non-voting visitors from Britain, Ireland, New Zealand, and the United States. This conference, with its appeal to the “educated women from the upper classes” assumed to be living under “similar customs” and “actuated in an equal measure by a longing for a change” is but the vehicle for a more complex methodological and historiographical agenda. Nijhawan uses this event because it “enriches and destabilizes the ‘Euro-American’ . . . paradigm of women’s international organizing.” She brings two interpretive frameworks to the analysis: an understanding women’s agency rooted in Third World feminism and an assessment of the intersection of international and transnational solidarities. She offers a dynamic analytical and historiographical assessment of the concepts inherent in the “idea of Asia,” the organizing principle of the conference, which in turn allows her to interrogate the wider historiographical genealogies of such terms as “imperial feminist” or “feminist orientalist,” as well as notions of pan-Asian identities and visions of world peace. She demonstrates, then, how the Asian women delegates at the time re-appropriated and re-framed the meanings of these ideas for multiple audiences at the international, trans-national, and national levels.

Tadashi Ishikawa in “Human Trafficking and Intra-Imperial Knowledge” has a similarly complex agenda to rethink metropole-colonial relations in Japanese history during the interwar period. He explores the cascading impact of the international discourse of “human trafficking,” which was brought to Japan when the country ratified the 1921 International Convention for the Suppression of Traffic in Women and Children. He not only offers the Japanese case study as an instructive addition to a vibrant and growing literature on the history of sex trafficking. He uses the norms and structures of the League treaty and its complex societal reception among Japanese authorities and civil society groups to overcome “an inflexible division of categories between the Japanese metropole and colonies like Taiwan.” In this way, he brings household and empire together into one analytical framework. His is a study of the translation of international law into legal practice, demonstrating two major arenas of tension. The first, operating at the international level, was substantive disagreement between Japanese authorities’ commitment to “free will and movement” in contrast to the unwillingness of the League’s oversight committee implementing the law to recognize choice in a woman’s decision to cross borders for sex. The second involved intra-imperial contacts and growing societal preoccupation with prostitution and child abuse. Applying the law brought colonial authorities and their civil and criminal court judges into confrontation with a local Taiwanese custom of...