De-centring Twentieth-Century Women's Movements

Abstract

Cheryl Law, Suffrage and Power: The Women's Movement, 1918–1928 (London: I. B. Taurus, 1997), 260 pp., £39.50, ISBN 1-86064-201-2.Christine Bard, ed., Un Siècle d'antiféminisme (Paris: Fayard, 1999), 481 pp., FF 150.00, ISBN 2-213-60285-9.Kathryn Kish Sklar, Anja Schüler and Susan Strasser, eds., Social Justice Feminists in the United States and Germany: A Dialogue in Documents, 1885–1933 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 381 pp., $19.95, ISBN. 0-8014-8469-3.Leila Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women's Movement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 325 pp., cloth $55.00, pb $19.95, ISBN 0-691-01675-5.Mrinalini Sinha, Donna Guy and Angela Woollacott, eds., Feminisms and Internationalism, Gender and History Special Issue, 264 pp. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999). $24.95, ISBN 0-631-20919-0.When we think of the women's movements of the early twentieth century, organisations like Britain's WSPU (Women's Social and Political Union) come to mind and we envision suffragettes marching and getting themselves arrested in cities like London. None of the books discussed here deals with this ‘mainstream’ view of feminism. Instead, they investigate women's movements and reactions to them from other perspectives. Approaching their subject matter from different angles, these recent works offer new interpretations of the history of feminism in the twentieth century. Together they make us consider a geographical re-focusing on the subject of women's movements. They raise questions about the chronology of feminism; they highlight the complicated relationships between ‘globalisation’ and nationalism and centre and periphery; and they draw attention to changing definitions of feminism depending on time and place and the issues at stake.