Women Activists between War and Peace: Europe, 1918-1923 - Softcover

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

A must-read on the significance of the women activists at local, national and supranational settings in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. It is equally illuminating on gender relations and men's attempts to stifle or support these women. The volume achieves something rare: the co-authorship offers geographical and thematic range but not at the expense of coherence, neither within nor between chapters. The result is moving, shocking and inspiring in equal measure.
Corinna Peniston-Bird, Senior Lecturer, Lancaster University, UK

This is a remarkable and innovative approach to comparative women's history. The multi-authored essays are particularly useful in helping us to analyse women's post-war activism not only by considering the impact of internationalism versus particular national settings in a truly transnational perspective, but also by questioning paradigms of European women's history through case studies of Eastern Europe, particularly Hungary .
Birgitta Bader-Zaar, Assistant Professor for Modern History, University of Vienna, Austria

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.