Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women's Movement.

Allen, Judith A.

Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women's Movement, by Leila J. Rupp. Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1997. xiii. 325 pp. $55.00 U.S. (cloth), $19.95 U.S. (paper).

Leila J. Rupp's Worlds of Women accomplishes something rare: readable, interesting organizational history -- the story of transnational women's movements, from 1880s through 1945. Framed by questions about roots of contemporary feminist internationalism, Rupp's account nonetheless draws the international women's movement in its developing context, with a focus on salient differences. These include generational differences, as suffragette feminism became disputed by successor frameworks of interwar feminists. Generational feminist differences entailed conflicts over sexuality, especially same-sex and "open" heterosexual relationships, and birth control.

Rupp also scrutinizes racial and ethnic differences, as well as divisions over nationalism notions of citizenship pertaining between the industrialized northern and western hemisphere, and colonized and decolonizing "developing" countries and regions. Class divisions proved intractable when international conferences and standing committees dominated within international feminist action. She persuasively rejects nation-based, especially Anglo-American chronologies for feminism, namely: once upon a time there was a broad alliance of different feminists around the vote, which like everything else, came apart in the aftermath of World War One, rising again in a new "wave" only in the late 1960s. Instead, Rupp contends that the Great War facilitated feminist internationalism, energizing rather than stalling: its golden age was interwar.

Burning international feminist concerns included wartime sexual violence; "the traffic in women;" marriage, custody, and citizenship laws; waged labour; education; and much more. Feminism emerges more in issues and debates about and between key figures -- for instance Carrie Chapman Catt, Jane Addams, Chrystal MacMillan, and Ishabel Aberdeen -- than through theoretical discussion. Differences made some participants less clear as to the claims of feminism at a theoretical level across the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Yet, Rupp's identification of substantial consensus on feminist concerns is as remarkable as sources of division and discord.

Her account, rich in primary sources, never loses the forest for the trees. She narrates a complex subject economically and accurately without neglecting important issues. This book is the authoritative study of twentieth-century international women's movements.

Perhaps inevitably Anglophone and European dominance of leadership in three organizations investigated -- the International Council of Women (I.C.W.), the International Women's League for Peace and Freedom, and the International Alliance of Women -- produces a "head office" inflection to Rupp's narrative, notwithstanding her agile critique of political epistemes conferred by the leaders' nationalities. Simmering controversies on "peripheries," whether Ukraine, Egypt, or New South Wales appear only through their impact on the "center," narrowing the scope of the account.(*)

For instance, in an account of differences over Aberdeen's leadership of the I.C.W., Rupp footnotes "a woman from New South Wales" (p. 189) as a supporter, without noting the fact that this "woman" was none other than Rose Scott (1847- 1925), the Australian equivalent of Elizabeth Cady Stanton in the US, Nellie McClung in Canada, or Millicent Garrett Fawcett in England. Having led the campaign for woman suffrage to success by 1902, nearly two decades before Canada, Britain, or the United States, an aging Scott took a strong stance against suffragette militancy, sympathized with moderate suffragist Millicent Garrett Fawcett besieged by Pankhurst "antics." Through Aberdeen and others, she sought to secure international feminist condemnation of militancy, as the rich I.C.W. sources within Scott's papers in Sydney's Mitchell Library make abundantly clear. Yet shortly after Scott joined the Women's League for Peace and Freedom, her wartime correspondence with Jane Addams was confiscated and censored, and Scott was placed under the surveillance of national security forces as a "subversive." Worlds of Women's "head office" perspective, undoubtedly dictated by logistics and sources available in the northern hemisphere, prevents appreciation of the implications -- instances such as Scott's international machinations and affiliatons receiving analysis in Worlds of Women. The Scott example is less significant in itself than indicative of complex organizational dynamics in international feminism of this period. I wonder how the account would transform if the active agency of delegates from colonies and regionally remote areas were more fully analyzed?

Worlds of Women is lively, urbane; and enlightening, challenging default periodizations in women's political history. Its insightful perspectives upon twentieth-century international women's movements include clear-eyed appraisal of the tensions its leaders confronted in struggles to advance their sex transnationally. The ambivalent legacy of national and citizenship shrewdly analyzed by Virginia Woolf in Three Guineas (1938) powerfully constrained those most earnestly seeking feminist emancipation. Such questions remain complex today, even if we employ different terms -- "culture", "essentialism", "ethnocentrism", and "multiculturalism".

(*) I make this observation as the biographer of a leader from one such periphery: see Judith A. Allen, Rose Scott: Vision and Revision in Feminism, 1880-1925 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1994).

Judith A. Allen Gender Studies Indiana University