Preliminary Programme

Wed 23 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Thu 24 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 17.30

Fri 25 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Sat 26 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

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Wednesday 23 April 2014 11.00 - 13.00
K-2 WOM15 Women's Political Activism between the Local and the Global
Hörsaal 30 first floor
Network: Women and Gender Chair: Anne Epstein
Organizers: - Discussant: Anne Epstein
Judit Acsády, Zsolt Mészáros : The Reception of VIIth IWSA Congress in Budapest, 1913. Media Representations of the Local and the International Press
In 1913 the Association of Feminists in Budapest hosted the VII Congress of the International Suffrage Alliance. After the VIth Congress the competition for hosting the event run between Vienna and Budapest. One of the reasons for appointing Budapest to hold the event was that that the work of ... (Show more)
In 1913 the Association of Feminists in Budapest hosted the VII Congress of the International Suffrage Alliance. After the VIth Congress the competition for hosting the event run between Vienna and Budapest. One of the reasons for appointing Budapest to hold the event was that that the work of the local movement was found outreaching by the international board. Also it was recognized that the Association of Feminists Budapest both has a remarkably rich and dense network of international relations and both has significant relations with local organizations, including the authorities, namely the City Council. This was an essential motive, as a great financial support was offerd by the Heads of the City for the Feminists to organize the International Congress.
The event became one of the most significant suffrege meetings of the pre-war Europe. It representated an enaourmous effort to construct an international discourse in addressing contemporary social issues. The agenda showed a great variety of issues understanding women’s suffrege not as an ultimate goal but means to achieve just society. (C. Chapman Catt). The event enjoyed great public interest. The number of participants exceeded 2000. Well-known personalities of the international suffrage movement joined the work of the Congress. The event received a huge media interest. Almost identically its significance is recognized regardless of the political standpoint of the journals. The first results of a larger project to map the reactions to the issues raised by the IWSA Congress in 1913 will be presented by the paper based on the close reading of the the primary sourse of the contemporary press: jornals both in Hungary, Austria, England and France. The examination of the different media representations enables us to reconstruct the reception of the IWSA Congress.
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Marie Hammond-Callaghan : 'Two Peace Movements' under the Cold War Divide: the Challenges of Maternalism, Progressivism and Non-alignment in the Voice of Women, U.K. in the Early 1960s
In 1960, the Voice of Women (VOW), Canada was founded from a mass movement of largely middle-class Anglophone women seeking desperately to end the threat of nuclear war. As the early 1960s unfolded, VOW Canada embarked on a series of national and international anti-nuclear campaigns, challenging Canadian foreign policy, ... (Show more)
In 1960, the Voice of Women (VOW), Canada was founded from a mass movement of largely middle-class Anglophone women seeking desperately to end the threat of nuclear war. As the early 1960s unfolded, VOW Canada embarked on a series of national and international anti-nuclear campaigns, challenging Canadian foreign policy, advancing nonaligned, nonpartisan, progressive strategies for peace, and reaching out to their ‘sisters’ in both friendly and ‘enemy’ nations. Laying claim to global motherhood, they joined a broadly based post-war transnational women’s peace movement and developed a significant international constituency. By 1965, VOW Canada had inspired the formation of autonomous branches in the United Kingdom and Japan, and hailed a growing membership throughout the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Ceylon, India, Yugoslavia and Austria.

This paper focuses specifically on the founding of a Voice of Women group in the U.K .in 1962 by anti-nuclear British campaigner Judith Cook (1933-2004). Drawing primarily upon correspondence between Judith Cook and Dora Russell - a prominent British socialist feminist peace activist – as well as early VOW UK newsletters, and relevant VOW, Canada records, this paper explores several key issues arising for the fledgling group: 1) deep concern over bridging ‘two peace movements’ - one aligned with the ‘west’ and another with the ‘east’; 2) the creation of political and cultural space for women’s voices on peace and disarmament issues; and 3) promotion of multilateral and non-aligned approaches in national foreign policy through diplomacy and the United Nations.

Overall, it highlights some of the similar political challenges VOW UK shared with the Canadian VOW organization against a backdrop of varying geopolitical contexts in Cold War Canada and Europe. Like VOW Canada, VOW UK networked globally with progressive, leftist, communist and non-communist women while also confronting a hostile climate of anticommunism at home and even within their own ‘ranks.’

Finally this paper begins to assess the impact of cold war politics on VOW UK’s peace work within ‘mixed’ and ‘single sex’ British disarmament groups, coalitions, and transnational women’s organizations such as the Women’s International and Democratic Federation (WIDF). As some have argued convincingly, women’s organizations across the cold war divide ‘developed and utilized the discourse of motherhood and peace as a political tool’ to achieve progressive causes (Pojmann, 2011). However, an increasingly entrenched ‘Cold War paradigm’ (de Haan, 2010) served to undermine women’s transnational efforts to unify around ‘motherhood for peace’.
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Barbara Molony : Transnational Japanese Feminisms
From the late 19th century through World War II, transnationalism played a critical role in Japanese feminist thought and action. “Transnationalism” is not an uncontested term. Feminism’s transnational connotations (and frequently its reality) have often been the stated reason for opposition to it in many countries’ post-colonial settings. A large ... (Show more)
From the late 19th century through World War II, transnationalism played a critical role in Japanese feminist thought and action. “Transnationalism” is not an uncontested term. Feminism’s transnational connotations (and frequently its reality) have often been the stated reason for opposition to it in many countries’ post-colonial settings. A large body of scholarship places Western feminism at the heart of imperialist privilege, and transnational feminism, like most other liberatory movements, does not have clean hands. And yet, a new type of feminist transnationalism has caught the attention of feminists in many parts of the world. This type is the feminism emanating from human rights initiatives promoted through United Nations’ global conferences and declarations. As some global “south” feminists have asserted, human rights is a “power tool” to achieve women’s rights.
Like feminists in many non-Western societies, late twentieth-century Japanese feminists found the human rights approach useful, both to prod the Japanese government to pass equal-rights legislation and to give theoretical grounding to the movement to redress the gendered violation of human rights by the Japanese military in World War II. The sexual violation of Korean, Chinese, Japanese, and other women opened critical doors to examine the challenge posed by human rights discourse to the history of women’s rights in Japan, especially the movement for citizenship rights derived in part from transnational origins.
In the first decades after the war, scholarship on the history of Japanese feminism was scant, and it viewed women, who often used transnational rights arguments or acted through transnational organizations, as victims struggling against the state. At that time, feminists and historians viewed prewar and wartime women, who did not have formal rights of citizenship such as suffrage, as responsible neither for wartime atrocities nor for the shame of defeat because they saw women as incapable of influencing policy. Moreover, human rights discourse was not yet applied to sexual victims of war. This changed in the 1980s, when transnational human rights thought was used both to enhance postwar Japanese women’s access to inclusion in the nation-state as well as to call into question prewar feminists’ attempts to be included as citizens in the flawed prewar imperial state.
Transnationalism in the late nineteenth century gave otherwise disenfranchised Japanese (and other) women a space for influencing state policy in the absence of (national) civil rights. As transnational organizations moved, by the 1920s, to the forefront of civil rights activism in Japan, they came to intersect increasingly with empire, racism, and nationalism. This paper will examine the evolution of ideas of and about transnational women’s movements in Japan in the context of human rights discourse.
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