Full Description
Much of the recent literature on cultural demobilisation or remobilisation after the First World War has focused on men and masculinity. By contrast, this interdisciplinary volume of essays sets out to examine the importance of women's movements and individual female activists to the shaping of post-war Europe at the private, communal, national and transnational levels. Key themes include the commemoration of the war dead; the renegotiation of gender roles; suffrage and political rights; and women's contribution to the establishment of new visions of peace or national revenge and regeneration in the years 1918 to 1923. The eighteen chapters cover countries in Central and Eastern Europe, as well as Western Europe, and defeated as well as victorious nations, thus allowing for a more nuanced understanding of the deep impact of the war and its aftermath on the continent as a whole.
Contributors are Nikolai Vukov, Emma Schiavon, Christiane Streubel, Erika Kuhlman, Ann Rea, Ingrid Sharp, Olga Shnyrova, Fatmira Musaj and Beryl Nicholson, Christine Bard, Gabriella Hauch, Judith Szapor, Sylwia Kuźma-Markowska, Virginija Jurėnienė, Judit Acsády, Matthew Stibbe, Bruce Berglund, David Hudson and Jill Liddington.
Contents
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements ix
List of Abbreviations xi
List of Illustrations xv
List of Contributors xvii
Introduction: Women's Movements and Female Activists in the Aftermath of War: International Perspectives 1918-1923
Ingrid Sharp and Matthew Stibbe 1
PART ONE
COMMEMORATION, REMEMBERING,REMOBILISATION
The aftermaths of defeat: the fallen, the catastrophe, and the public response of women to the end of the First World War in Bulgaria
Nikolai Vukov 29
The women's suffrage campaign in Italy in 1919 and Voce nuova ("New Voice"): Corporatism, nationalism and the struggle for political rights
Emma Schiavon 49
Raps across the knuckles: The extension of war culture by radical nationalist women journalists in post-1918 Germany
Christiane Streubel 69
The Rhineland Horror campaign and the aftermath of war
Erika Kuhlman 89
PART TWO
THE RENEGOTIATION OF GENDER ROLES
From "Free Love" to Married Love: Gender politics, Marie Stopes, and middlebrow fiction by women in the early nineteen twenties
Ann Rea 113
The disappearing surplus: the spinster in the post-war debate in Weimar Germany, 1918-1920
Ingrid Sharp 135
After the vote was won. The fate of the women's suffrage movement in Russia after the October Revolution: individuals, ideas and deeds
Olga Shnyrova 159
Women activists in Albania following independence and World War I
Fatmira Musaj and Beryl Nicholson 179
PART THREE
WOMEN'S SUFFRAGE AND POLITICAL RIGHTS
A bitter-sweet victory: Feminisms in France (1918-1923)
Christine Bard 199
Sisters and Comrades. Women's movements and the "Austrian Revolution": Gender in insurrection, the Rate movement, parties and parliament
Gabriella Hauch 221
Who represents Hungarian women? The demise of the liberal bourgeois women's rights movement and the rise of the rightwing women's movement in the aftermath of World War I
Judith Szapor 245
Soldiers, members of parliament, social activists: the Polish women's movement after World War I
Sylwia Kuźma-Markowska 265
Political and public aspects of the activity of the Lithuanian women's movement, 1918-1923
Virginija Jurėnienė 287
PART FOUR
RECONSTRUCTING COMMUNITIES/VISIONS OF PEACE
Diverse constructions: Feminist and conservative women's movements and their contribution to the (re-)construction of gender relations in Hungary after the First World War
Judit Acsady 309
Elsa Brandstrom and the reintegration of returning prisoners of war and their families in post-war Germany and Austria
Matthew Stibbe 333
"We stand on the threshold of a new age": Alice Masarykova, the Czechoslovak Red Cross, and the building of a new Europe
Bruce R. Berglund 355
"Having Seen Enough": Eleanor Franklin Egan and the journalism of Great War displacement
David Hudson 375
Britain in the Balkans: the response of the Scottish Women's Hospital Units
Jill Liddington 395
Index 419
