M ona L. S iegel . Peace on Our Terms

Mona L. Siegel’s Peace on Our Terms would be an excellent book to assign to students alongside Erez Manela’s The Wilsonian Moment. Manela’s 2007 book charts how nationalist activists across the non-Western world were emboldened by US president Woodrow Wilson’s rhetoric of national self-determination to demand an end to colonial rule, even after they discovered that neither Wilson nor his colleagues around the negotiating table at Versailles were interested in self-determination for nonwhite peoples. Siegel demonstrates that feminists, too, were initially inspired to optimism by the rhetoric of rights touted by Wilson and others, and that they were equally unwilling to lay down their demands when it became clear that the white men running the show at Versailles were not interested in granting them concessions. Her global tour of feminist activism in 1919 not only highlights women’s political activity “in this extraordinary political moment—when so much was simultaneously at...

Ancient history · Battle · Nationalism · Negotiation · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Rhetoric · Sociology · Theology · White (mutation) · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Gender Studies · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies