Volume 32, Issue 1, January–February 2009, Pages 4–12
Special Issue on Circling the Globe: International Feminism Reconsidered, 1910 to 1975
Synopsis
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.
Copyright © 2008 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
