Preliminary Programme

This conference paper will focus on the Canadian women’s suffrage movement in the context of the British Empire. How did dominant imperial discourses in early twentieth century Canada shape the Canadian women’s movement? Despite Canada’s status as a dominion, settler colonialism remained an organizing framework for feminist activism. Canadian suffragists were enmeshed in informal transnational networks with activists from other settler colonies as well as the imperial centre, and formal transnational organizations such as the British Dominions Woman Suffrage Union, which originated in 1914. Settler colonialism also informed who got the vote and who didn’t. Female enfranchisement often privileged educated white women, and there remain gaps in the historiography concerning the place of indigenous women, black women pioneers, and the participation of francophone women settlers as well as Métis women in conversations about suffrage in this settler society.
This conference paper will explore what the feminist embrace of liberal democracy meant and how it unfolded in the years immediately leading up to women gaining the federal franchise in Canada. (Show less)

In 1990 the empowering communist women movement, similar by its goals with the second-wave feminism, simply vanished under the pressure of democracy, leaving apparently nothing behind. While Judith Butler was publishing Gender Trouble, bringing western scholarship on gender and feminism to the new millennium, ex-communist and ex-soviet countries were sinking in pre-war, patriarchal believes. From a gender studies perspective, a new Iron Curtain seemed to rise between Western and Eastern Europe. The end of communism in Europe also gave the occasion for massive humanitarian actions within European borders for the first time after the end of WWII. Western humanitarian and human rights organisations managed to organize punctual interventions in the 1980’s, but the general attitude of communist regimes towards these missions remained one of deep suspicion. Most of the humanitarian actions after 1990 targeted children: abandoned children, children with disabilities, children with AIDS.
The main objective of this paper is survey of human resources involved in the humanitarian commitment for children in Romania, both members of humanitarian associations and/or the volunteers they involved in the humanitarian campaigns. I will focus on the motivation that stood behind both the personal and institutional involvement. Special attention will be given to the gender balance inside the corpus of the humanitarian personnel and division of tasks assigning “proper” jobs for men and women. Are there any differences between women and men? How do men cope with the history of important philanthropist women and the common belief that childcare activities are strictly a feminine task? (Show less)

This paper aims to reflect on the importance of emotions such as love, friendship and empathy in the involvement of women in the movements of the left wing organizations and resistance to dictatorships in the countries of the Southern Cone in the decades of 1960 to 1980. At the same time, it also reflects on the relationship between these emotions, seen as having political agency, and the motives and choices seen as rational, such as "ideology," scientific and academic knowledge, readings, economic and social issues. The research is based mainly on a collection of oral history interviews, made by the team of the project "Gender, feminisms and dictatorships in the Southern Cone" of the Laboratory of Gender and History Studies of the Federal University of Santa Catarina, consisting of more than 200 interviews , carried out in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay. In these interviews, in a comparative and crossed way, I look for the motivations for women's involvement in political movements whithin it, emotional components stand out. But they are always nuanced and legitimized by "rational" motivations, which justify them in the discourse elaborated by the interviwed. My goal is to understand emotion as part of the political and historical process of the period. At the same time, I wish to reflect on gender as a marker to differentiate what is considered rational or emotional in the context of this engagement of women and men in leftist organizations. (Show less)