Between entertainment and nationalist politics: The uses of folklore in the spectacle of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance

Abstract

Mineke Bosch begins this expanded history of feminist internationalism with a reexamination of Dutch suffragism in the prewar heyday of European suffragism. As such, she contributes to a revisionist history of its organizational embodiment, the International Woman Suffrage Alliance. In the context of one country, Bosch raises issues which also operated between nations. In particular, she concentrates on the visual representation, especially through folklore and dress, of the internal hierarchy and subnational difference to be found within “Dutchness.” Versions of the representational strategy and visual style that she traces, of the pure peasant woman versus the modern, cosmopolitan suffragist, appeared elsewhere in international feminism, in the more familiar space between imperial metropole and colony. Bosch also introduces another theme of this issue, inasmuch as she challenges the notion that Euro American feminism was not homogeneous. The suffragists of the Netherlands contended with British suffragists even as they borrowed from them; and they used the United States as an intermediate site, a rising world power that allowed for some leverage outside the British Empire.