In Community: Recovering Transnational Networks, International Movements, and Local Concerns

Abstract

In Community: Recovering Transnational Networks, International Movements, and Local Concerns Jennifer J. Davis and Sandie Holguín How have women shaped communities to advance political objectives, cultivate shared interests, and protect vulnerable members? We profile nine expert responses to that broad question in the six research articles and three book reviews that comprise the Spring 2023 issue of the Journal of Women’s History. Research by Daria Dyakonova opens this issue, inviting readers to reflect on the collaborations across borders that mobilized communist and feminist movements in the 1920s. In “‘Through the Dictatorship of the Proletariat in all Countries, Onward to the Complete Emancipation of Women!’: The Transnational Networks of Communist Women’s Movements in the Early 1920s,” Dyakonova examines communist women’s efforts to pursue legislation and political practices that would promote gender equality. Relying on institutional documents produced by the Communist Women’s Movement (CWM) in the Soviet Union and across Europe, Dyakonova highlights the signal contribution these activists made to contemporary debates on women’s suffrage, gendered divisions of labor, reproductive care, childcare, gender relations within Communist party organizations, and relations with non-Communist feminists. In a 2020 interview, the historian Francisca de Haan observed that public memory of socialist women’s activism collapsed along with European state socialism even though “women in socialist countries had more rights and a better social status than women in many capitalist or Third World countries.”1 Dyakonova’s research represents a critical intervention, therefore, that weaves the story of Soviet women’s contributions to transnational communist and feminist movements into a broader conversation about the interwar period, which has focused more on western European and American women’s engagement with pacifist, anticolonial, and anti-vice movements.2 Dyakonova concludes that members of the CWM perceived their efforts to promote gender equality within socialist governments as essential in recruiting non-Party affiliated women to support “the revolutionary cause.” Jennifer Bond’s research moves our gaze from transnational communist networks across Europe to the international religious organization of the YWCA in China. In the article, “Inculcating a Gendered Christian Internationalism: The Chinese Student YWCA,” Bond contends that during the 1920s, the YWCA in Republican China gave female students access to new positions of responsibility and networks while the organization aimed to cultivate Chinese girls as members of a “gendered global Christian” [End Page 5] citizenry. Leadership within the student YWCAs enabled girls and young women to attend international conferences and partake in training opportunities that informed their later professional and political alliances. For this generation of women, to be Christian signified a commitment to internationalism, diplomacy, and egalitarianism. However, Bond observes, this identity proved to be remarkably flexible, accommodating a range of political regimes and international audiences. Chinese women adapted metaphors of a global “sisterhood” to navigate between local, national, and international concerns, while leveraging potential alliances with women outside of China. Following research insights published by scholars of internationalist feminisms, including Francisca de Haan and Leila Rupp, Bond documents how internationalist networks for women’s issues flourished in the years after the Great War, and how the women in these organizations conceptualized women’s issues beyond suffrage. Indeed, decades later, activists would make clear that women’s issues might include human rights abuses. Sara Kimble’s article, “Internationalist Women Against Nazi Atrocities in Occupied Europe, 1941–1947,” contextualizes the anti-atrocities campaign launched in 1942 by the members of the Liaison Committee of Women’s International Organisations (LCWIO). By examining the LCWIO records, Kimble finds that women refugees, including Wanda Grabińska and Emmy Freundlich, played particularly important roles in documenting Nazi atrocities including forced labor, mass starvation, systematic rape and sexual assault. Freundlich articulated a peculiar responsibility shared by refugees who had escaped the Nazi regime to testify to its horrors, “Women in occupied countries would have cause for deep reproach to their more fortunate sisters unless some repudiation of inhumanity… were made.” The anti-atrocity statement of 1942 was the first step in formalizing that repudiation: a woman-organized protest against the abuse of women. They build the case using evidence surreptitiously provided by dissidents within the occupied Polish government, citing international law, religious principles, property statutes, and family...