Sisters in Asia

The League of Nations and Feminist Anticolonial Internationalism

Bibliographic Data

ID2228845
AuthorsNova Robinson (Seattle University, corresponding author)
Year2022
Volume47
Issue4
Pages987-1012
Publication date2022-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueSigns: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0097-9740 • E-ISSN: 1545-6943
PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1086/718869
OpenAlexW4282943970
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited17

This article uses the All-Asian Women’s Conference (AAWC), which brought elite feminist activists from six Asian nations together in Lahore in 1931, as a case study to investigate how the League of Nations influenced the first wave of international feminism. The AAWC faced competition from other Asian women’s organizations and from international women’s organizations based in Europe, which claimed to speak for all the world’s women. The attempts of some Western European and US feminists to represent Asian women fueled some of the conference’s anticolonialist rhetoric. The League’s organizational structure, which only let organizations with an “international” designation participate in its formal proceedings, caused some of the competition over who got to speak for Asian women. Seeking an international designation led feminists to establish new organizations like the AAWC. Many of these new feminist networks were ultimately unsustainable—the AAWC only met once—which raises questions about what kind of connection is needed to forge sustainable feminist coalitions across borders. To fully understand the AAWC’s goals and objectives, the conference needs to be studied against the backdrop of the emergent international women’s rights system, which was taking shape at the League of Nations and in which international women’s organizations headquartered in industrialized capitals in Western Europe and the United States had the most power. The activists who gathered in Lahore had the difficult task of presenting Asian womanhood as simultaneously apart from and a part of the international women’s movement

Economic growth · Economics · Elite · Feminism · Internationalism (politics) · League · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Women's history · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Gender Studies · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · Law

Tools

Open DOI