Feminist Global Politics, Military Occupation, and the Media, 1900–1970s

Abstract

Feminist Global Politics, Military Occupation, and the Media, 1900–1970s Elisa Camiscioli and Jean H. Quataert The themes in this issue overlap in instructive ways and reflect multiple angles on femininity, masculinity, and the transnational influences on postwar consumerism. They offer new perspectives on feminist global networks and black women's internationalism; address the sexual politics of military occupation in Japan and dictatorship in Thailand; and refract feminist debates through such popular magazines as Ms. and Vogue as well as responses to foreign films. In addition, a number of authors capture intriguing themes of difference that historically disrupted a singular feminist narrative of identity and simultaneously utilize the intersectional methodologies made possible by accommodating such differences. Three well-matched book review essays round out the discussion, exploring new work on African American women's history as well as research on sexuality, the law, and the state. We open with two instructive case studies of global feminist networking, the one centering on the League of Nations and the other reflecting women's Pan-African politics from the shores of the United States to Africa and back again. Regula Ludi, in "Setting New Standards," explores a remarkable 1930s feminist and women's campaign that pushed the League to examine women's legal status worldwide. Her article adds to recent scholarship rehabilitating this early intergovernmental organization with its work of "technical" cooperation in social and humanitarian matters, including child welfare, health, refugee resettlement policies, and women's rights. The inquiry marked a decisive step in bringing women's circumstances to international attention, challenging the time-honored norms of international law that made women's issues solely a matter of domestic jurisdiction. Ludi examines the epistemological basis of the questionnaire, which was entangled with imperialist notions. She shows that out of the contentious debates among feminists from different regions of the globe, a consensus emerged that made women's equality self-evident and, in the language of the day, relevant "for the whole of humanity." This discursive shift, indeed, set the stage for inclusion of the sex equality clause in the UN Charter in 1945. The debate shows, on the one hand, that feminism was "a force shaping world order" but, on the other, exposed its contemporary biases toward legal formalism. The focus substituted a formal equality for substantive equality, neglecting power differentials, economic inequalities, and customary practices that impinged on women's lives. By the 1970s, [End Page 7] with the women's global human rights movement, these limitations raised urgent new questions about exclusions and, ultimately, the "hegemony of Western feminism." Angela Hornsby-Gutting's broad inquiry demonstrates that African American women's politics operated in "multiple spheres—religious, international, educational, and domestic—simultaneously." In "Woman's Work: Race, Foreign Missions, and Respectability," Hornsby-Gutting follows the long career of over fifty years of Nannie Helen Burroughs, the religious activist and advocate of racial and gender equality who founded the National Training School for Women and Girls, located outside the Deep South in Washington, DC. Hornsby-Gutting carefully integrates her analysis into existing scholarship on the "politics of respectability," missionary and notably Baptist histories, and developments in education. She deepens these perspectives by highlighting many overlooked transnational and global dimensions of the themes. Indeed, Burroughs founded her school in 1909, four years after attending and speaking at the Baptist World Alliance gathering in London. She structured the school's hybrid classical and industrial curricula to counter many currents of mainstream white-centered pedagogy dismissive of black women's potential. She also trained women for missionary work and used Pan-African sentiments to teach about religious and race relations in the United States and their parallels in foreign lands. For example, the school's publication, The Worker, interlinked the fate of African Americans with, as she wrote, the "darker races under colonialism," singling out atrocities in the Belgian Congo. This global purview did not remain at the level of theory. Her training school underwrote the expenses for the education of African students in the United States. A number came from Liberia, others from Nigeria; some founded their own "N.T.S. dress shops" for women while others, among them Johannah Ayorinde, played an...