What Makes a Movement? Women's Transnational Anticolonialism Between Colony and Class

The links between middle-class suffragettes, colonial elite women, and the international pacifist networks of the early 20th century have been well studied, as have the imperial and racial overtones of much of the early women's movement in Europe and North America. Historians have worked to parse what constitute “feminist” “socialist” or “imperial” politics, largely by tracing the discourses at a series of feminist meetings or in the publications of groups such as the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), International Women’s Secretariat of the Comintern, or the All-Asian Women’s Conference. Before decolonization and the rise of the welfare state, women who travelled in these circles, whether they were from Europe, Asia, Africa, or the Americas, fell into a few broad categories, enabled by the late 19th century’s expansion of the female urban workforce and the rise of women’s participation in higher education, trade unions, and electoral politics, and the rise to prominence of women who were able to travel and write in support of various progressive causes. I suggest an examination of the international women's conference and the circulating feminist pamphlet together with the global politics and aesthetics of the strike, the riot, and the streetfight, which were on meaningful occasion led and peopled by women. By traversing the colony/metropole divide as well as class divisions in our understanding of “women’s” transnational anticolonialism, we might query the continuities, or more often, the discontinuities between the feminist movement of the early 20th century, the burgeoning international left of the interwar years, led and kept alive by women who understood their status and politics in class terms, and the acts of militant street-level politics carried out by women on every inhabited continent in pursuit of higher wages, fewer arrests, more food, fewer fascists, and better housing.