Women's Activism

Global Perspectives from the 1890s to the Present

Francisca de Haan, Margaret Allen, June Purvis, Krassimira Daskalova, Francisca de Haan, Margaret Allen, June Purvis, Krassimira Daskalova

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415535755
• eBook ISBN: 9781136171895
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

Women's Activism brings together twelve innovative contributions from feminist historians from around the world to look at how women have always found ways to challenge or fight inequalities and hierarchies as individuals, in international women's organizations, as political leaders, and in global forums such as the United Nations.

The book is divided into three parts. Part one, brings together four essays about organized women's activism across borders. The chapters in part two focus on the variety of women's activism and explore women's activism in different national and political contexts. And part three explores the changing relationships and inequalities among women.

This book addresses women's internationalism and struggle for their rights in the international arena; it deals with racism and colonialism in Australia, India and Europe; women's movements and political activism in South Africa, Eastern Bengal (Bangladesh), the United Kingdom, Japan and France. Essential reading for anyone interested in women's history and the history of activism more generally

PART I
Transnational women's
activism

1

Overcoming hierarchies through internationalism

May Wright Sewall’s engagement with the International Council of Women (1888–1904)

Karen Offen

INTRODUCTION

May Wright Sewall (1844–1920) was a stellar contributor to the development of international feminism. This energetic and farsighted American feminist became a prime mover in initiating and establishing the International Council of Women (ICW), founded in 1888, the first major international women’s organization. In her capacity as president of the National Council of Women of the United States (1891–95), Mrs Sewall also served the ICW as de facto president from 1890 to 1893, during which time she organized the World’s Congress of Representative Women, the first international congress to be held during the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

Sewall then served the ICW as vice president at large during the presidency of Lady Ishbel Aberdeen (1894–99), a progressive Scottish aristocrat who, in turn, organized the huge London ICW congress in 1899. In London, the ICW delegates elected Sewall as president. Her tireless organizational work during those next five years (1899–1904) ensured that this first and most successful of the international women’s organizations would ultimately endure. Both before and during her presidency, Sewall promoted what she called the ‘Council Idea’ by encouraging the formation of national councils and by establishing topical standing committees that included one member from each national council. The first three of these ICW committees were concerned with ‘peace and arbitration’, ‘laws on domestic relations’, and ‘the press’.

Sewall’s contribution to international organizing went far beyond that of the pragmatic organizer (and, not incidentally, the primary historian of the formative years of the ICW) that she was.¹ She was, above all, a visionary whose thought inspired her activism as she elaborated the Council Idea and formulated the ‘New Internationalism’.

This chapter outlines May Wright Sewall’s organizational activities, with particular emphasis on her articulation of an innovative, collaborative New Internationalism among women, designed to offset and challenge the extremely competitive and chauvinistic nationalism that characterized early twentieth-century masculine politics. Sewell’s New Internationalism anticipated a human harmony and spiritual unity that could mute (if not entirely dissolve) class and ethnic boundaries. Her thinking encompasses all the characteristics of what we now call ‘transnationalism’.² Her ‘bridging’ ideas concerning local, regional, national and international collaboration retain great resonance for us today.³

Given her worldwide prominence in the 1890s and early 1900s, it is surprising that neither Sewall’s international activities nor her innovative philosophy of internationalism has attracted the scholarly attention it deserves.⁴ Historians of American feminism have focused far more on the first generation of suffrage advocates – Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott – than on the women of the second generation. Even among the second-generation feminist activists, Carrie Chapman Catt and Harriot Stanton Blatch have received considerably more coverage than Sewall. Why was this? For one thing, Sewall’s work outside the USA did not ‘fit’ within the still-prevailing national or regional American historiographical contexts for feminist activism – the two book-length works that do examine her contributions are concerned primarily with her local and regional philanthropic contributions in the USA.⁵ Scholars of international feminism such as Leila J. Rupp, on the other hand, have focused on the developing organizational culture of international sisterhood rather than on the specific contributions of its pioneering leaders.⁶

It is my (perhaps unfashionable) intention in this chapter to insist upon the critical importance of this remarkable woman and to highlight her vision of the New Internationalism as she fostered the growth of the ICW during the early years of its development. By recapturing and analysing Sewall’s activities at the international level, especially her speeches and publications during her five-year presidency of the ICW (building on her early de facto presidency and vice presidency), this chapter will shed light on the essential ingredients that helped to build a smoothly functioning, energetic and influential transnational feminist network, one that successfully with-stood and transcended multiple and potentially divisive inequalities among women activists from very different cultures, and that still exists today.⁷

THE STRUCTURE AND OBJECTIVES OF THE ICW ACCORDING TO MAY WRIGHT SEWALL

Three linked points must be kept in mind in any evaluation of the ICW and Sewall’s specific contributions: first, the Council Idea itself; second, its multiple-issue agenda; and third, its assertion that all women are ‘working women’.

According to the Council Idea, as elaborated by May Wright Sewall, the ICW never enrolled individual members.⁸ Its objective was to launch and affiliate whole national councils, consisting of already-affiliated national organizations, and thereby to foster a massive bulk membership that ultimately could speak publicly with an authoritative voice. Already in 1900 she had to some degree succeeded in planting the desired image: a headline in Harper’s Bazaar that summer proclaimed ‘Mrs. May Wright Sewall – Leader of 5,000,000 Women’.⁹ However, in most countries, even when local groups existed, it took years, even decades, to develop national organizations that could affiliate to national councils. This accounts for the initially slow growth of the ICW, but also contributed to its ultimate success. This also marked its difference from the several other budding international women’s initiatives that sprang up during the 1890s.¹⁰

Second, the ICW’s mission (through the national councils) was to foster a collective women’s consensus on all the major issues of the day, becoming – in effect – a Parliament of Women. This was, at the time, a grandiose though not entirely unrealistic objective. From its inception, the ICW had behind it the full weight of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), along with the international moral force of Susan B. Anthony. This, plus the impetus given its development by Sewall’s recruiting, the extraordinary impact of the World’s Congress of Representative Women, and its unique vision and structure, meant that the ICW had no real rival. That the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA) ‘hived off’ in the early 1900s as a single-theme advocacy organization (under the impetus of Carrie Chapman Catt and her associates, and with Anthony’s consent) could not, and did not, deal a death blow to the ICW, which was never intended to become a single-issue action organization. The ICW would endorse woman suffrage at its Berlin Congress in 1904.

Finally, Sewall introduced into the ICW’s vocabulary the unifying concept of ‘women workers’. Women workers was a deliberately inclusive term that embraced – and valued – all work done by women, whether paid or unpaid labour. This definition of women’s work and women workers challenged the still prevailing notion of liberal political economists who promoted the male breadwinner model and ‘productive’ paid labour and, in consequence, devalued women’s contributions, positing that neither women’s unremunerated domestic labour nor their unremunerated volunteer labour ‘counted’ in economic terms.

The notion of women workers takes on further significance in light of another challenge to liberal political economy throughout the 1890s and into the twentieth century: the Second International Workingmen’s Association’s insistence that all women should be gainfully employed (in order to become economically independent) – and, in addition, should affiliate only with socialist parties and their International.¹¹ Women like Sewall refused to be pigeonholed as ‘bourgeois’ as distinct from ‘socialist’; in her view, women workers existed in every economic stratum, and whether or not they volunteered or were paid for their contributions was quite irrelevant. This was another approach to forming a community of women – women who valued their contributions to the larger society and to the world in terms that transcended conventional economic thinking.

MAY WRIGHT SEWALL’S BACKGROUND AND IDEAS

I have summarized the life story of May Wright Sewall in an earlier article, so provide only a short version here.¹² She was born in 1844 in the state of Wisconsin, in the American mid-west. Her parents, the Wrights, were originally from New England, but it is not clear whether her father, a teacher, or her mother came from unusually prosperous families. Certainly they believed in educating girls. Their daughter was initially home-schooled, attended academies and then, still very unusual for a girl, enrolled in and graduated in 1866 from Northwestern Female College, which subsequently affiliated with Northwestern University, a now well known private university near Chicago, which had opted to admit women in 1869. She earned a master’s degree at Northwestern in 1871. Significantly for her future international work, she specialized in foreign languages. May Wright Sewall worked as an educator in Michigan, where she became principal of a school, before settling in Indianapolis with her second husband to run the Girls’ Classical School. Married twice but childless, Sewall threw her energies into girls’ education, journalism, dress reform, controversies surrounding women’s employment, local philanthropic efforts, and ultimately women’s rights campaigns, including suffrage, at the state and national levels. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a time of global anxiety about wars and empires, she also turned to peace and arbitration work.

Sewall envisioned the Council Idea as leading to a ‘permanent International Parliament of Women’, which would address issues related particularly to womanhood, but ‘where all the great questions that concern humanity shall be discussed from the woman’s point of view’.¹³ She was keen to enlist her European counterparts in this effort, particularly the French. In fact, Sewall (like a number of Americans in the fin-de-siècle) was an ardent Francophile. Thus, shortly after the founding of the ICW in 1888, Sewall set sail for Europe.¹⁴ During her second trip in 1889, she attended and spoke at the first government-endorsed feminist congress in Paris on ‘Women’s Work and Institut...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• PART I. Transnational women’s activism
• PART II. Varieties of women’s activism
• PART III. Changing relationships between ‘unequal sisters’
• Index