Mona Siegel

This article examines international collaboration between Western and Chinese feminists in the interwar decades. Focusing on the 1927–28 ‘mission to Asia’ sponsored by the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), the article shows that, contrary to what existing historiography would lead us to suspect, neither feminist Orientalism nor colonial nationalism stood as a serious impediment to the formation of a truly international feminist alliance. Instead, European and Chinese women's varying experiences and memories of international conflict, and their varying understandings of the relationship between feminism, pacifism, militarism and political violence, defined the limits of global feminist collaboration in the late 1920s. The WILPF delegates, like many European women in the 1920s, were living in the shadow of the First World War, a conflict they condemned as futile and barbaric; their Chinese ‘sisters’ were living in the midst of a battle to determine the political future of their nation. For both sets of women, the question of women's emancipation was fundamentally entwined with broader national and international struggles. This article incorporates reports, personal letters and diaries of WILPF delegates as well as articles, speeches and letters by Chinese women to offer new insights into one of the earliest efforts to build a truly international women's movement and draw our attention to the centrality of warfare in defining the limits of global feminist collaboration in the twentieth century.

This article examines the controversy elicited by the visit of two Western feminists—Camille Drevet of France and Edith Pye of Great Britain—to French Indochina in 1927. Traveling as delegates of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) and as guests of the Annamite Constitutionalist Party, Drevet and Pye challenged French male colonists whose vision of modern colonial governance rested on a defense of tradition and the presumed benefits of paternalistic guardianship over indigenous men and all women. Concerns regarding modern womanhood and an incipient Vietnamese youth revolt led French male colonists to denounce the threat that women's emancipation posed to Indochina. Vietnamese radicals were inspired by the WILPF visit, understanding that arguments to liberate women and the nation both rested on opposition to paternalistic subordination. The WILPF delegates emerged from the trip firmly opposed to colonialism; nonetheless, they struggled to articulate an explicitly feminist anti-imperialist agenda linking female and colonial subservience.

On May 4, 2006, French and German cultural ministers announced the publication of Histoire/Geschichte, the world's first secondary school history textbook produced jointly by two countries. Authored by a team of French and German historians and published simultaneously in both languages, the book's release drew considerable public attention. French and German heads-of-state readily pointed to the joint history textbook as a shining example of the close and positive relations between their two countries, while their governments heralded the book for “symbolically sealing Franco-German reconciliation.” Beyond European shores, East Asian commentators in particular have taken note of Franco-German textbook collaboration, citing it as a possible model for how to work through their own region's often antagonistic past. Diplomatic praise is not mere hyperbole. From the Franco-Prussian War (1870) through World War I (1914–1918) and World War II (1939–1945), France and Germany were widely perceived to be “hereditary enemies.” The publication of Histoire/Geschichte embodies one of the most crucial developments in modern international relations: the emergence of France and Germany as the “linchpin” of the New Europe.