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Women Activists between War and Peace employs a comparative approach in exploring women''s political and social activism across the European continent in the years that followed the First World War. It brings together leading scholars in the field to discuss the contribution of women''s movements in, and individual female activists from, Austria, Bulgaria, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, Russia and the United States. The book contains an introduction that helpfully outlines key concepts and broader, European-wide issues and concerns, such as peace, democracy and the role of the national and international in constructing the new, post-war political order. It then proceeds to examine the nature of women''s activism through the prism of five pivotal topics: * Suffrage and nationalism* Pacifism and internationalism * Revolution and socialism * Journalism and print media * War and the body A timeline and illustrations are also included in the book, along with a useful guide to further reading. This is a vitally important text for all students of women''s history, twentieth-century Europe and the legacy of the First World War.>
List of contents
List of Illustrations
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Time-Line: Women Activists between War and Peace, 1918-1923
Introduction: Women Activists between War and Peace: Europe, 1918-1923
Ingrid Sharp and Matthew Stibbe
1. Suffrage and Nationalism in Comparative Perspective: Britain, Hungary, Finland and the Transnational Experience of Rosika Schwimmer
Lead authors: Julie V. Gottlieb and Judith Szapor, with Tiina Lintunen (on Finland) and Dagmar Wernitznig (on Rosika Schwimmer)
2. Internationalism, Pacifism, Transnationalism: Women's Movements and the Building of a Sustainable Peace in the Post-War World
Lead author: Ingrid Sharp, with Judit Acsády (on Hungary) and Nikolai Vukov (on Bulgaria)
3. Women and Socialist Revolution, 1917-1923
Lead author: Matthew Stibbe (on Germany), with Olga Shnyrova (on Russia) and Veronika Helfert (on Austria)
4. Mediating the National and the International: Women, Journalism and Hungary in the Aftermath of the First World War
Lead authors: Maria DiCenzo, Judit Acsády, David Hudson and Balázs Sipos
5. Women's Movements, War and the Body
Lead authors: Alison S. Fell and Susan R. Grayzel
Further Reading
About the author
Ingrid Sharp is Professor of German Cultural and Gender History at the University of Leeds, UK. She is the editor of The Women's Movement in Wartime (co-edited with Alison Fell, 2007) and of Aftermaths of War (2011) and Women Activists between War and Peace (2017), both co-edited with Matthew Stibbe.Matthew Stibbe is Professor of Modern European History at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. He is the author of several books, including Germany, 1914-1933: Politics, Society and Culture (2010), and the editor of several volumes of essays on 20th-century European themes, including Aftermaths of War (2011) and Women Activists between War and Peace (2017), both co-edited with Ingrid Sharp.
Report
This collection of essays opens a new window onto women's activism in post-WWI Europe by reaching beyond the boundaries of Western Europe to include the voices of women from Eastern Europe and the Scandinavian region. The essays included number only five, but they are a rich collaboration between and among scholars from a variety of historic fields. The contributors have mined new sources to analyze the roles of women activists in journalism, political movements, the pacifist movement, and women's citizenship rights; specifically, a woman's right to vote as well as her relationship with her own body as the physical and psychological traumas of war encroached on and forever modified understandings of "male" and "female." Consequently, these essay masterfully weave together women's postwar activism by viewing the sources through various lenses in order to examine the ways in which activism belied national boundaries and brought women together from disparate social, cultural, and geographic places to work toward a shared goal. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. CHOICE
