Preliminary Programme

Feminist movements on the turn of the century are often seen as exclusively urban movements. Yet, the re-examination of archive sources, correspondence and contemporary publications show that activists outside of capitals and cities were involved as well. The Budapest centred national organization, the Feminist Association (founded in 1904 as the Hungarian auxiliary of IWSA) had a large number of local groups and supporters all over the country including women from small towns and also peasant women from rural areas, as typical examples of organizations from below. History writing has neglected these scenes and these activists so far.
The paper aims to describe the ways of functioning, the motivations, the activities of the local groups, highlighting their connections with the main office of the organization in Budapest and also the direct or indirect links to the international level (for example Hungarian delegates of local rural feminist groups were present first ever at an IWSA congress in Amsterdam, 1908). At the same time the paper aims to reveal these in comparison with the way how the main office of the Feminist Network in Budapest was connected to the IWSA. How values and ideas fluctuated, how female empowerment and expressions of solidarity passed through these links and networks? What characterizes the strategies on the international, national and local levels? How were the activities harmonized? What significances personal relations had and how these personal connections influenced the movements? Beyond the comparative analysis the paper will also give so far not recognised examples of how local feminist activities were accepted by the local communities. (Show less)

This paper examines the way in which women’s suffrage in the new constitutions of former dependencies was approached by departing imperial administrators. It is based on research on Colonial Office documents relating to Ghana, Zanzibar, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Kenya. The Colonial Office and local administrators had to balance local factors opposing women’s suffrage against a modern imperative for universal suffrage in all places, hastened by their own desire to leave as fast as possible with a working constitution intact.

Organisations like the Six Point Group in the 1930s had lobbied the Colonial Office to introduce democracy in the colonies but Whitehall was not interested - and said that colonial subjects were not.

Imperial administrators had early experience with the challenge of women’s suffrage in conflicts over the Donoughmore Commission in Ceylon in 1927 and the Government of India Act of 1935. They were therefore wary of women’s suffrage and offered ways to subvert the women’s vote in places where that would ease the passage of constitutional legislation with minority groups.

International pressure was brought to bear on colonial powers when the United Nations in 1948 declared democracy with universal suffrage to be the goal of all nations. The Soviet-front organisation the Women’s International Democratic Federation also promoted women’s suffrage. For new nations to have universal suffrage was therefore something easily agreed in principle, but local interest groups were often working against women’s voting, notably in Muslim counties such as Zanzibar and parts of Nigeria. Sometimes the solution was a franchise qualified by being limited to tax payers in countries where few women paid tax.

Women’s enfranchisement became one of a series of measures expected in a modern constitution which were not resisted by the departing colonial authority; their problem was a lack of welcome from the new political elite. Activists such as Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti and the Nigerian Women’s Union had stood in opposition to the colonial powers, but increasingly came to find themselves on the same side against entrenched tribal conservatism.

END (Show less)

In this paper, I demonstrate the ways Sophia Duleep Singh, Britain’s most visible Indian suffragette, transformed her family’s exile from India, her relationship with the royal family, her residence at Hampton Court Palace, and even her exoticness as an Indian princess-in-exile into weapons to deploy in the fight for ‘Votes for Women.’ Previously, historians have emphasized the ways the women’s suffrage movement trampled upon the agency of Indian women. Rather than granting Indian women a place in their movement, suffragettes used essentialized visions of Indian womanhood as a powerful argument for British women’s inclusion in imperial decisions through the vote. Yet, Princess Sophia’s actions demonstrate not only the presence of colonial women in British political movements, but also the ability of these women to manipulate their space, their place within British society, and gender expectations of Indian women to create unique methods of protest unavailable to white, middle class suffragettes. My paper focuses on the ways Sophia Duleep Singh used her residence on the grounds of Hampton Court Palace, a historic landmark used to inculcate its visitors with notions of British liberty, to showcase the injustices of the British Empire as well as Britain’s voting laws. In doing so, this paper sheds new light on the ways the Indian diaspora living in Britain actively contested imperial rhetoric of just governance and Indian womanhood and found ways to resist imperial control over their lives and politics. (Show less)

The women’s liberation movement (WLM) erupted into British society in the late 1960s as part of the ‘new social movements’ which swept across the western world. By the mid 1970s almost all British towns of any size had a women’s liberation group and in many large towns and cities there was a women’s centre to which many consciousness raising and activist groups were attached. By activism and challenging sexism in the home and creating new feminist identities women changed their world. There have been many autobiographical accounts from WLM activists. These have been very London focussed and coming mainly from socialist-feminists. Valuable though reflective accounts are, there are limitations to the autobiographical/life history approach. There is a danger of elevating individual lives into personalities who somehow speak for the movement and are regarded as ‘leaders’, a concept which the WLM fiercely rejected.

We need historical accounts to create a record of the WLM as a key feature of post war British society. Given the anti-centrist/localist nature of the movement, this research necessarily involves a ‘bottom up’ approach, paying particular attention to local communities. In the last few years scholars have begun to address the issue of regional diversity within the British WLM. This article aims to contribute to this field by examining a range of English urban centres, specifically Bristol, Brighton, Norwich, Bolton and the Leeds /Bradford area.

This paper will demonstrate the deep penetration of WLM in England, with widespread involvement across the country. It was predominantly middle class but also involved significant numbers of working class women. It will show how social change came from the bottom up through collective and individual action. By examining the impact of regional identity the rich diversity of the English WLM becomes more apparent. Internal and external migrations also contributed much to the dynamic nature of the movement. It will also illustrate the impact of the WLM on local social services, policing, education, arts and health. The women’s movement changed local infrastructures, and cultures and redefined space.

This paper will track changes over time, for example with increasing interest in issues of race from the late 1970s and the recognition that there was not one but many women’s movements. Changes in personal life are also apparent, with significant numbers of women in the movement moving from heterosexual to lesbian relationships. By the 1980s a conflict had become apparent between the prefigurative elements of the movement and the need for pragmatism and engagement with the local state in order to secure funds for combating domestic violence and other projects such as advancing women’s educational opportunities. The WLM in individual towns and cities negotiated their own distinctive ways of dealing with these tensions.

There are other notable features of this research. The role of ideological difference within feminism is possibly not as important as previous studies have indicated. There has been a tendency to over intellectualize the movement. Cultural aspects such as art, literature and the performing arts been overlooked.


(Show less)