A suffragist’s private diary, not a parliamentary record, is the key to understanding how international women’s activism really worked. This research argues that existing histories of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA) focus too narrowly on official meetings and high politics, missing the sensory, emotional, and interpersonal experiences that drove the movement. By using a microhistorical approach—starting with individual bodies and feelings, then zooming out to friendships and fallouts—the project aims to show how suffragists navigated war, uneven voting rights, and ideological splits. The researcher will trace American, British, and German activists’ transnational interactions using archives at the Library of Congress, including materials on rank-and-file members as well as leaders. This is fundamental, curiosity-driven research. It will not produce a policy tool or public resource. But by recovering the intimate social fabric of the IWSA, it could reshape how historians understand the tensions between nationalism and internationalism, and between imperial feminism and genuine solidarity—questions that still echo in global women’s movements today.
View original technical description
Internationalism is a fascinating, yet often overlooked, dimension of the early twentieth-century women’s suffrage movement. My research meaningfully intervenes in existing scholarship on the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA), which tends to define institutional contours and thus limits its scope to high politics. My cultural-historical framing privileges individual and interpersonal experiences of international suffrage activism, optimally served by a microhistorical methodology. I begin with an intimate lens on individuals’ sensory, embodied, and emotional experiences. I then zoom out to focus on relations – sometimes affable, sometimes fraught – between international suffragists, which weathered the First World War, differential rates of enfranchisement, and ideological polarities. This enriched understanding of friendships and fallouts equips me to examine broader phenomena, namely how the IWSA negotiated the conflicting demands of nationalism and internationalism, imperial feminism and ‘global sisterhood’, and suffragism and feminism. I emulate my subjects’ commitment to internationalism by triangulating between American, British, and German experiences. This International Fellowship will therefore be instrumental in allowing me to trace American suffragists’ transnational interactions, movements, and relationships. Moreover, access to the Library’s expansive archives (primarily in the Main, European, and Manuscript Reading Rooms) in tandem with expertise on Local History and Genealogy will enable me to explore the quotidian experiences of figureheads and rank-and-file IWSA members alike. Only by immersing myself in the Library’s exclusive source materials and collaborating with specialists will I grasp the intimate details of suffragists’ lives which are vital to the success of my PhD. I will be the project lead.
Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.
Is something wrong? Let us know