The Women's International Democratic Federation (WIDF): History, Main Agenda, and Contributions, 1945-1991

=== [PDF page 1] === The Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF): History, Main Agenda, and Contributions, 1945-1991 Francisca de Haan, Central European University Introduction Founded in Paris in late-November 1945, the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) was the largest and probably most influential international women’s organization of the post-1945 era, in ways that will become clear below. Based on my reading of the organization’s documents, I would characterize WIDF as a progressive, “left-feminist” international umbrella organization with an anti-colonial and anti-racist agenda.1 WIDF had a strong association with the communist world, and many of its leading women were communists. In addition, a considerable number of progressive but non-communist women were also involved in the organization and its national branches, and this remained the case over time.2 Diversity similarly characterized WIDF national affiliates. Some were already existing women’s organizations that affiliated themselves with WIDF, others were established especially for that purpose. Generally, they were progressive women’s organizations with local branches, which, again, could consist of smaller units, down to their individual members. Some WIDF national member organizations were the women’s organization of a Communist Party, others were independent women’s organizations, and there were other formats, sometimes changing over time. WIDF member organizations included large and influential ones, such as the Soviet Women’s [Anti-Fascist] Committee, the Union of Italian Women (UDI), the All China Women’s [Democratic] Federation, and the Indonesian women’s organization Gerwani, as well as, for example, the Union of Australian Women and the Netherlands’ Women’s Movement (NVB). 3 Politically, WIDF generally supported the Soviet Union. This support, however, does not mean that the Federation was a “Soviet front” organization with other goals than professed nor that it was “not really” interested in women’s rights, as the US House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC) stated in its 1949 report about WIDF and its American affiliate, the Congress of American Women (CAW). HUAC’s accusations became very influential, both in the actual history of WIDF and in the historiography. Suspicion and rejection of WIDF as a “Soviet tool” have been pervasive in the West since. Indeed, HUAC’s campaign was so successful that WIDF has largely disappeared from Western feminist historians’ mental map (to a dark place “behind the Iron Curtain”), 4 or, if it did or does === [PDF page 2] === appear, HUAC’s accusations still resonate; hence the Federation is treated with suspicion and its championing of women’s rights is not mentioned, not taken seriously or suspected to serve other goals.5 In addition to this specific history, there are other reasons why the mainstream Western feminist historiography has largely ignored WIDF and/or its contributions.6 One is that this historiography generally focuses on liberal and gender-only feminism and excludes or treats as less central women’s movements and organizations with a broader political agenda, including Third World women’s organizations and/or those with a socialist, socialistfeminist or pro-Communist orientation.7 In the case of WIDF, however, the reasons for its exclusion go deeper and include not only the ongoing impact of HUAC’s accusations but also the ways in which Cold War attacks on WIDF have influenced the state, location, and accessibility of WIDF archives and the possibility of doing oral history. Below I will first briefly discuss this impact of the Cold War on our not-knowing about WIDF, or having only a partial and generally biased view of the organization. 8 HUAC’s smear campaign also shaped what we (think we) know of WIDF’s origins, which, unlike what HUAC maintained, lie in a broad European anti-fascist feminist network that developed from 1934. I will briefly sketch this network and how it led to the establishment of WIDF, then outline WIDF’s main agenda and activities, including its crucial role in the United Nations (UN)– where among other things it initiated both International Women’s Year and the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) – and finally draw some conclusions. Two things need to be emphasized in advance: the first is that WIDF still exists, so that the story below, about the organization until about 1990, is unfinished. Second, this is part of an on-going research project, so that some findings and interpretations inevitably are still tentative. Cold War Impact To understand how the Cold War impacted on what we know about WIDF, we have to go back to the immediate post-WWII months and years. WIDF had an anti-fascist, pro-peace, pro-democracy, and pro-women agenda that clearly struck a chord with many women. Despite the horrible events and losses of WWII, these women believed that a better world would be possible, based on a continuation of the wartime alliance between the Western democracies and the Soviet Union.9 Because the WIDF program was so appealing, WIDF national branches were established in numerous countries, with sometimes impressive numbers of women involved. To name two striking examples: its US branch, the Congress of === [PDF page 3] === American Women, established in early 1946, in 1947 claimed to have 250,000 members, whereas the Danish branch of WIDF, the Danmarks Demokratiske Kvindeforbund (DKK), in the early 1950s had some 25 branches in Copenhagen alone. 10 One of the women involved in these early years was Gerda Lerner, the later pioneer of women’s history as an academic discipline. She was of Viennese, Jewish middle-class background and, already in high school, was a committed anti-fascist. Hence she was in great danger after the Nazi-Germany annexation of Austria (the so-called Anschluss) in March 1938. In 1940 she managed to flee to the United States. After the war, Lerner became a local and then also national CAW activist. In her political memoir, Fireweed, published in 2002, she describes how the local CAW branch she was involved in, in a neighborhood in Los Angeles, organized grassroots women, with a focus on issues such as rising food prices, insufficient child care, unequal pay, women losing their jobs to soldiers returning home and anti- racism. She adds that “CAW consistently incorporated women’s history in its work.”11 In addition to these various forms of activism, which occurred in cities across the United States, CAW women also focused their activities on the UN,12 and the national CAW leadership was involved in representing WIDF in the UN Commission on the Status of Women. However, once the Cold War developed13 these large bodies of (alleged) “communist” or “pro-communist” women became intolerable to Western governments, especially that of the United States, and the CAW and WIDF became the subject of investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).14 HUAC, in addition to destroying the CAW – the organization was forced to disband in 1950 as a result of the various forms of pressure exerted by the US government – also managed to create a distorted image of WIDF, most importantly for our purposes here by claiming in a report that WIDF was not what it pretended to be. HUAC accused WIDF of being a Soviet “front organization,” rather than a progressive international women’s organization. Therefore, WIDF according to HUAC was “not really” interested in “women’s problems, as such” but only pretended to be so, using that pretence as a way to lure “gullible women” into the Communist [Soviet] sphere. The Federation’s real aim, the HUAC report stated, was “to serve as a specialized arm of Soviet political warfare in the current ‘peace’ campaign to disarm and demobilize the United States and democratic nations generally, in order to render them helpless in the face of the Communist drive for world conquest.”15 The fact that these accusations were taken seriously tells us a lot about the anticommunist hysteria at the time. The House Un-American Activities Committee’s report on the CAW and WIDF, with those accusations, has successfully established the image of WIDF === [PDF page 4] === as a Soviet instrument and – still in the logic of that anti-communist world view – as not to be taken seriously in the history of women’s movements and/or the international struggle for women’s rights. Its polar opposite was (and is) the notion that the United States was (is) the flag bearer of women’s rights globally; this belief, very successfully spread worldwide as well (and equally unquestioned in most cases), is just as much an ideological position as is the notion that socialists or “communists” would not be interested in women’s rights. And just as the Soviet Union has contributed much more to enhance women’s status globally/internationally than has been acknowledged, 16 so the United States’ support for this cause has been much more limited or conditioned by broader political agendas than often assumed.17 However, these anti-communist and pro-US notions/accusations/world views are still shaping contemporary historiography, without being noticed for what they are. 18 In the United States, the fierce anti-communism of the later 1940s and 1950s led to persecution of people on the left, the distortion of “communist” goals (in what Natalie Zemon Davis in 1951 aptly called “Operation Mind”) and the stigmatization of (alleged) communists who, in Gerda Lerner’s words, were “cast …as traitors and spies in order to stifle dissent.”19 Lerner has poignantly described the resulting atmosphere of fear. Many Congress of American Women activists became so afraid for themselves or their families that they burned their papers and decided not to speak about their involvement, making it harder for historians to uncover and describe this important part of the history of women’s activism. 20 The Cold War and its end had an equally important impact on the central WIDF archives. The organization had its headquarters in Paris until it was forced to leave France in January 1951, not only because it was an “international Communist organization” but in particular because its French affiliate, the Union des Femmes Françaises (Union of French Women, UFF), under the leadership of its President, Eugénie Cotton, who was WIDF founding President as well, had campaigned against the French colonial war in Vietnam. After careful deliberations, WIDF moved to Berlin, where the organization functioned until about 1991. By that time, state socialism in Europe had collapsed and an important part of the infrastructural support for the Federation had fallen away. After a few uncertain years, the Federation managed to re-constitute itself in 1994. Meanwhile, a not-insignificant part of its records was destroyed, another substantial part went back to Paris, and yet other material seems to have been relocated to other countries. The materials in Paris are still in private hands but will be deposited in a public archive in the near future.21 Without suggesting that WIDF has only been a passive victim in the Cold War clashes it was involved in – indeed, the Federation was an “active producer of Cold War narratives”22 – my point here is the impact of === [PDF page 5] === these events on the production of knowledge about transnational, left-feminist history: if WIDF had been able to remain in France and (part of) the WIDF archives had been stored in a French library or archival institute – as happened with other left-wing archives – this loss of material would have been avoided and the organization would have been less invisible and easy to overlook. For now, we don’t know what has been destroyed or lost and may never know. Finally, suspicion, stigmatization, a-priori rejection and persecution of communists or alleged communists are not just issues of the past. The European Parliament, for example, in 2009 has designated August 23 – the anniversary of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop nonaggression pact23 – as a “Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism.” The announcement of this day led to a comment in the UK newspaper The Guardian that “the pretence that Soviet repression reached anything like the scale or depths of Nazi savagery – or that the post-war ‘enslavement’ of eastern Europe can be equated with wartime Nazi genocide – is a mendacity that tips towards Holocaust denial.”24 Also, in recent years a number of statesupported institutes to investigate the “Crimes of Communism” were established in Europe. Thus, similar to the USA, where “those on the right see [the history of the Communist Party] as a series of crimes,”25 the dominant political climate in Europe is now such that the word communism is more easily and disproportionally associated with “crimes” than with the crucial Soviet contribution in defeating Nazi Germany, with anti-fascism more generally, or with a struggle for social justice or an egalitarian society. This is not to deny the crimes committed by the Soviet Union, but to distinguish between what certain states, political leaders, parties and other entities have done in the name of communism, and the meaning of socialist and communist social and political movements which, especially from a global perspective, have inspired and supported many millions of men and women in the fight against oppression and for social justice.26 The current climate, however, is so negative that people are reticent to remember and talk about their former involvement in these movements, what has aptly been called “the silence of communists”27 (whereas there seems to be no such pressure on anti-Semites and/or neo-Fascists to be silent about their views). In addition, there are countries, such as Indonesia, where communism is still prohibited. In that country, the history of both (alleged) communist activism and of its bloody persecution – in 1965/’66 the Communist Party of Indonesia was “destroyed in one of the bloodiest transitions to power in modern times,” with about one million (alleged) communists murdered – is still a deep taboo or even dangerous topic.28 === [PDF page 6] === To return to the historiography, central Cold War tenets, such as the notion that the socialist or communist advocacy of women’s rights was in essence false, 29 or its corollary, the denial of socialist women’s political agency,30 have not been sufficiently recognized and continue to shape the writing of history, which is understandable if we consider the scale and depth of the anti-communist sentiments. And, as recently remarked regarding another aspect of US history, “There’s nothing harder to change than a paradigm, than long-standing thinking.”31 Although a lot of primary WIDF or WIDF-related material is either lost or still unavailable, significant amounts, including original correspondence and minutes, do exist and can be accessed in public archives. However, it is located in a variety of countries and often not yet or only partially identified in archival descriptions, so that the research is timeconsuming and complex.32 This, of course, makes the inclusion of a serious amount of WIDF publications in this database all the more important. WIDF Beginnings: Women and Feminists involved in Anti-Fascism Beginning in 1933/34, liberal, socialist and left-feminist women in Europe were involved in anti-fascist activism and organizing, aware of fascism’s and Nazism’s violent nature, hatred of the left, and deeply racist and sexist ideology, and alarmed by their rapid rise to power. The French Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier (1912-1996), for example, who would later be Secretary-General of WIDF, like many others became a member of the French Communist Party after the fascist riots in Paris on February 6, 1934, whose aim was to encourage a fascist take-over of power. As an undercover journalist-photographer she travelled to Germany, where she took pictures of early Nazi concentration camps in that country.33 In response to the increasing fascist threat, Communist parties that were members of the Comintern (the international Communist organization founded by Lenin in Moscow in 1919 and dissolved in 1943, also known as the Third International) in 1934 ended their policy of in-fighting on the left and instead began to build an anti-fascist front; hence in France and Spain political parties of the left and centre were able to form a common front against Fascism, the so-called Popular Front. The women’s movement in Europe similarly reacted to the increasing fascist threat with a number of initiatives. Socialist- feminist-peace activist Gabrielle Duchêne (1870-1954), who headed the French national section of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) and also served as vice-president of the WILPF international executive during the interwar years, initiated the “World Congress of Women against War and Fascism” === [PDF page 7] === that took place in Paris in August 1934. This Paris Congress led to the establishment of the “World Committee of Women against War and Fascism” (Comité mondial des femmes contre la guerre et le fascisme or CMF). Later, Duchêne would become actively involved in WIDF, for example as a member of its Commission for the Rights of Women, as the WIDF 1948 Congress Report shows.34 LINK The 1936 French Popular Front Government headed by the socialist politician Leon Blum included three women members: Suzanne Lacore, Undersecretary of State for Child Protection, Section Française de l'Internationale Ouvrière, SFIO; Irène Joliot-Curie, 1935 Nobel Prize winner, Undersecretary of State for Scientific Research, independent; and Cécile Brunschvicg, Undersecretary of State for National Education, also independent; the latter two, Joliot-Curie and Brunschvicg, would be involved in WIDF.35 Many women who participated in these pro-peace and anti-fascist activities also attended the 1936 Brussels Congress of the Rassemblement Universel pour la Paix/International Peace Campaign. The Brussels Congress’s main organizer was Rosa Manus [LINK to books by or about her] (1881-1943), a Vice President of the International Alliance of Women (IAW), who died in Ravensbrück, the concentration camp established for women political opponents of the Nazi regime. 36 UK co-organizer of the Brussels Congress was Elizabeth Acland Allen, Vice-President of the (British) Women’s Liberal Federation, General-Secretary (1942-1960) of the National Council for Civil Liberties, a member of the International Initiative Committee that in 1945 prepared the founding conference of WIDF, head of the British delegation to the WIDF founding Congress, and the keynote speaker on women’s rights there.37 Along similar feminist anti-fascist/Popular Front lines,38 at a meeting in October 1937 in Caxton Hall, Westminster, London, Gabrielle Duchêne proposed to hold a simultaneous “Women’s Day” in all countries, to be organized in each case by a national committee that focused on their own, specific “demands for equal status or such other urgent reforms as they were working for.” In this 1937 meeting with British feminists, including IAW president Margery Corbett-Ashby[link to browse people lising for Corbett Ashby], Duchêne argued for her proposal by linking it to the recently established League of Nations (LoN) Committee of Experts on the Legal Status of Women.39 Although we have no particulars yet about Popular Front International Women’s Day (IWD) celebrations in the years immediately following 1937, we know that in Great Britain it was celebrated along these lines.40 Thus, in March 1943, International Women’s Day, organized by the “National Committee for Celebration of International Women’s Day,” was supported by a wide range of public personalities, === [PDF page 8] === representing an amazingly broad list of social and political positions, in a joint anti-fascist front, aimed at giving a boost to women’s anti-war efforts. Included were women belonging to the aristocracy, intellectuals, and well-known liberal feminist, socialist, communist and Zionist women, among them Beatrice Webb (known for her support for the Soviet Union), Monica Whately (a feminist, journalist, investigator and lecturer, known for her support for India’s independence),41 Isabelle Blume-Grégoire, a socialist member of the Belgian Parliament,42 Margery Corbett-Ashby, and the Czech lawyer Maria Jurneckova. 43 These activities created the broader political context and network in which the idea for WIDF took shape. The founding president of WIDF was the French left-feminist intellectual Eugénie Cotton (1881-1967), who studied with Marie Curie, in 1925 received a doctorate in physics herself, and became close friends with the latter’s daughter Irène Joliot-Curie.44 In her unpublished memoirs, Cotton writes that she first floated the idea for international women’s action at a meeting in Clichy (close to Paris) in October 1944 attended by British women, and that this idea was further strengthened when she attended an International Women’s Day celebration in London in March 1945.45 During the Second World War, International Women’s Day functioned as a moment of support, mutual inspiration and encouragement in the anti-fascist struggle, openly celebrated in London in 1943, even with telegrams of support from Mrs. Churchill, Eleanor Roosevelt, the wife of the US President, and Mrs. Smuts, the wife of the president of South-Africa.46 International Women’s Day was also secretly commemorated in Ravensbrück and possibly in other concentration camps. 47 The idea for WIDF was born, then, in a context of shared, transnational, anti-fascist and anti-war, socialist and feminist activism that was especially important for women of the “United Nations,” as the anti-fascist countries called themselves during WWII. This also means that, even if we cannot (yet/ever) retrieve all the details about WIDF’s origins, it was not something as vague nor as (apparently) sinister as “the international Communist movement” that initiated WIDF, as HUAC claimed.48 Founding Congress and Main Agenda The founding congress of WIDF took place in the “Palais de la Mutualité” in Paris, from Monday November 26 to Friday November 30, 1945, attended by some 850 women from forty countries who represented 81 million women; the week ended with a big manifestation in the ‘Vélodrome d’Hiver’ on Saturday 1 December 1945. 49 WIDF espoused four principles that its leaders regarded as interrelated: anti-fascism, lasting peace, women’s rights, and better conditions for children. The WIDF 1945 Statutes specified that the === [PDF page 9] === organization’s goals were: active participation in the struggle for the complete annihilation of fascism; shared action to organize women in all countries of the world to defend their rights; the protection of public health and in particular the physical and mental health of children; to strengthen the friendship and unity among women in the whole world. In addition, the organization would do all that it could to realize the following demands (shortened here): complete equality for women and men; equal work and equal pay; equality for women in the domains of education and professional training; more and better social services and security for working women and women in the countryside; protection of mothers, regardless of marital status (for the full Statutes, see their first Congress Report). 50 LINK [to main 1945 proceedings document here] WIDF’s governing structure consisted of a triennial International Congress of Women (the highest authority), with the size and vote of national delegations based on the size of the population they represented; a Council, which met at least once a year, in which all member countries were represented and which directed the Federation in between the Congresses; an Executive Committee, which met at least twice per year, whose minimally 27 members were elected by the Council and confirmed by the Congress, and which governed WIDF in between the Council meetings; a Secretariat, consisting of a Secretary General and four secretaries chosen by the Council from among the members of the Executive Committee, who were responsible for the general management of the Federation’s governing structure and business, including the propaganda work; and lastly a Commission of Verification, consisting of three Council members who were not part of the Executive Committee, and whose task it was to control the Federation’s bookkeeping. Five countries (the United States, the United Kingdom, France, the Soviet Union and China) each had to pay an annual contribution of 750,000 francs; nine countries (including Australia, Italy and Canada, Sweden and Switzerland) 200,000 francs; fifteen countries each 50,000 francs and eleven countries 10,000 francs. In theory this would have given WIDF an annual budget of 6.610.000 francs (more than 400,000 euros, excluding gifts and other forms of income). 51 With its emphasis on peace as a prerequisite for a just world and women’s rights and, conversely, the insight that war fundamentally prevented these, WIDF stood in a long and diverse tradition of women/feminists fighting for peace, including British Quaker women in the 1820s, the Swedish Fredrika Bremer (1801-1865) and the Austrian Bertha von Suttner (1843-1914), and organizations such as the ICW, IWSA/IAW WILPF and Gabrielle Duchêne’s 1934 World Committee of Women against War and Fascism. 52 === [PDF page 10] === At the same time, there were at least two important differences with earlier efforts. One is that WIDF’s founders’ aspiration to prevent further war was fueled by their having lived through the most horrible war ever, the Second World War, which took the lives of approximately 65 million people world wide, 40 million of them non-combatants. In many cases WIDF women had also survived active participation in the anti-fascist resistance, and/or had lost family members in war and resistance such as Dolores Ibarruri, Kata Pejnovic and Nina Popova.53 As historian Marc Mazower has noted, “resistance itself was an exercise in communal solidarity, whose values lent themselves to an egalitarian and morally elevated vision of the post-war world.”54 The women in Paris who established WIDF clearly identified as “Sisters in Resistance” – the title of a documentary about four French non-Communist women who played leading roles in the French resistance and had survived Ravensbrück. 55 Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, already mentioned above, who was WIDF’s SecretaryGeneral for the first ten years, is another important example. After the French defeat in 1940 she became involved in the Resistance. Arrested in February 1942, she was part of a convoy of 230 non-Jewish French women who were sent first to Auschwitz and then, those still alive, to Ravensbrück, where they were later liberated by the Red Army. Vaillant-Couturier, who would be a member of the French Parliament for many years, served as a main French witness at the first Nuremburg trial in January 1946 against the main Nazi criminals.56 In addition to the catastrophe of WWII, some of the older women involved, such as WIDF founding President Eugénie Cotton LINK [to browse people entry for EC] herself (1881-1967), had also lived through and witnessed the consequences of the First World War, which had been particularly traumatic for France. 57 The need for a lasting peace, therefore, was more than a theoretical issue for WIDF‘s founders; it was a most-deeply felt conviction – and not something they propagated in order to further the (false) Soviet “‘peace’ campaign,” as HUAC would suggest a few years later. 58 The second difference with earlier organized women’s efforts to fight for or maintain peace, a point equally emphasized by Eugénie Cotton in her opening speech at the 1945 founding conference, was that WIDF enabled the “mass of women” to become politically active, both because of its socialist world view and because the number of women with political rights – basically the right to vote – had increased enormously after WWII. In Cotton’s words, 10 === [PDF page 11] === “In a world determined to change the state of things that has led men to fight two horrible world wars within 25 year, the new element, the power of the mass of women active in public life, can and must be of very great importance.” 59 LINK But although WIDF emphasized the importance of peace and would continue to do so, peace was not regarded nor presented as the organization’s single goal but rather as the necessary precondition for its other three aims: anti-fascism/democracy, women’s rights and children’s rights. From the beginning, these causes were seen and explained as interrelated. Women’s rights, thus, were not a minor or additional part of the WIDF agenda; indeed, they were a fundamental conviction for Eugénie Cotton and other leading WIDF women and played a central role in the organization’s history and struggle. This is not only evident from the organization’s goals, mentioned above, but can be seen in the reports of all its congresses, (see Table 2 below and the congress reports included in the WASI database). Two particularly interesting examples are the WIDF 1953 Copenhagen Congress LINK, where women’s rights were the main theme and that ended with the adoption of a globally influential “Women’s Charter,” and its 1975 Berlin Congress LINK.60 An important characteristic of WIDF was that it was more inclusive than the older international women’s organizations, especially the International Council of Women and the International Alliance of Women, not only because the WIDF leadership and constituency included women of working-class origins, but also because women from all parts of the world were involved. In 1945 WIDF already reserved a place for a Chinese Vice President, which was filled in 1948 by Mrs. Tsai Chang.61 In 1953 the number of WIDF Vice-Presidents was increased from four to ten: Nina Popova, Dolores Ibarruri, Dr. Andrea Andreen, Tsai Chang, Céza Nabaraoui, Monica Felton, Funmilayo Ransome Kuti, 62 Rita Montagnana, Erzsébet Andics, and Lilly Wachter (with seats reserved for India, Japan, Brazil and the USA).63 Table 3 below gives an indication of WIDF’s broad global involvement until the early 1960s. WIDF’s socialist worldview inherently meant support for the struggles of colonized countries and people for national independence, struggles that accelerated after WWII. The organization’s focus on women in Asia and Africa [LINK to That They May Live], its antiwar activism (e.g., its support for Indonesian and Vietnamese women in their struggles for independence and against the colonial occupiers in their countries) and its active support for peace in Asia and Africa, plus its explicit anti-racist stance64 were among the most significant differences between the WIDF and the ICW and IAW, which accepted Western colonial rule and were much less actively involved with “Third World Women.” 11 === [PDF page 12] === An important part of WIDF’s activism and global outreach were its publications. WIDF organized women on the left from dozens of countries around the world who challenged gender, class, colonial and ethnic or racial inequalities, most of whom never met or attended one of the WIDF congresses. But they did read or see its widely distributed publications, including the monthly (from 1966, quarterly) Women of the Whole World (for a while published in six major languages), which served to create bonds and an imagined community of progressive women world wide, in addition to providing information about WIDF and its activities, its congresses, national affiliates, and specific events and political causes.65 WIDF in the United Nations From 25 April to 26 June 1945, the founding conference of the United Nations Organization took place in San Francisco. During this conference and in subsequent years, representatives of the three main international women’s organizations of the post-war era, the ICW, IAW and WIDF, were deeply involved in the efforts to include women and women’s issues in the new UN, its bodies and agenda.66 WIDF as such did not yet exist before November 1945, but the Australian transnational left-feminist Jessie Street, who would be involved in the WIDF, was one of a small group of women who played key roles in getting women’s rights explicitly acknowledged and included in the UN Charter – with support of the Soviet delegation at crucial moments.67 Following the San Francisco Conference, Jessie Street visited a number of American cities and from there went to London and then Moscow. After having traveled through the USSR, she flew from Moscow to Paris with the Soviet delegation to the WIDF founding congress in Paris. She did not take up an official position in WIDF but remained involved with the organization and supported it in difficult times. 68 WIDF, like the other women’s organizations involved, regarded the United Nations as of the utmost importance, both because the UN was the international body set up to prevent war, guard the peace and enhance human rights, including women’s rights, and because this was an institution through which they hoped to exert world-wide influence. At the WIDF founding congress, a motion in support of the UN was adopted, and support expressed for a Commission on the Status of Women.69 In February 1947, WIDF was one of a number of international women’s organizations that got consultative status in category B with the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and its Commissions, including the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW). There is no detailed and balanced research yet about the CSW’s work in this period that establishes what the various sides and organizations contributed to its 12 === [PDF page 13] === agenda, efforts, and achievements. While we need further research about WIDF’s contribution to the UN, it is clear that the unfolding Cold War had a huge impact on the work of and exchanges in the CSW – so much so that the CSW in its early years has been described as a “Cold War battle field.”70 Moreover, as already noted above, the organization became a direct target of antiCommunist policies as well. Not only was WIDF forced to move its headquarters from France in January 1951, but the organization also lost its Consultative Status at the UN in April 1954. This happened at the initiative of the United States, supported by Great Britain, in what friend and foe recognized as an undemocratic procedure. 71 The reason in this case was that WIDF had investigated the crimes committed by the US military in Korea during the Korean War (1950-1953), and published a brochure about its findings. The brochure, We Accuse LINK, published in more than twenty languages, received a lot of attention worldwide and made the American government furious.72 WIDF was only readmitted to Consultative Status at the UN in June 1967 (thanks to the support of former colonized, newly independent countries); in May 1969 its status was upgraded to Consultative Status A. Not very long after its return, in 1972, WIDF proposed to hold an International Women’s Year (IWY). 73 This proposal was accepted and IWY, held in 1975, turned out to be the beginning of a broader process of making women and women’s issues more central to the UN and “gender equality” a generally accepted part of the international human rights agenda. This process included the extension of IWY into a Decade for Women (1976-1985), the four UN World Conferences on Women in 1975, 1980, 1985 and 1995, and the acceptance of the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) in 1979, the proposal for which also came from WIDF. The impact of WIDF on the status of women world wide through its UN work alone clearly cannot be overestimated. 74 Although WIDF stood at the basis of IWY, which included the first UN World Conference on Women in Mexico City in June 1975, the organization appears to have played only a minor role at the Mexico City NGO Forum, due to renewed/on-going Cold War politics which led to WIDF being sidelined from the Mexico City Forum organization. 75 WIDF held its own IWY World Congress in Berlin in October 1975. The dynamics around and impact of this World Congress, which had been planned much earlier than the Mexico City Conference and was recognized by the UN, still need to be carefully explored.76 The fact that the Western historiography on IWY has mostly been silent about it certainly does not mean that the WIDF World Congress was insignificant. 13 === [PDF page 14] === Women’s rights were not the only domain in which WIDF influenced the UN. As briefly mentioned above, the organization from its beginning had a clear policy focus on the well-being of children. Already in 1949, it called for June 1 to be an International Children’s Day; and it co-initiated the 1979 UN International Year of the Child. 77 Other Activities and Conclusions In addition to its strong focus on the UN, the WIFD also tried to realize its goals through cofounding and participating in other international forums, such as the World Peace Council (1949), of which Eugénie Cotton was co-founder,78 and the Permanent International Committee of Mothers (1955), in which WIDF Swedish Vice President Dr. Andrea Andreen played a leading role. WIDF continued to grow over the years, as Table 2 below shows. It is high time that WIDF becomes an integral part of the scholarship and narratives about the international or “global” women’s movement. Including it will have consequences for a number of issues, including that of chronology, the attribution of a number of key initiatives regarding women’s status, and, hence, the evaluation of the so-called “First,” “Second” and “Third World’s” commitment to women’s emancipation and related issues of social justice. There is no doubt that WIDF has influenced and inspired many women around the world in a variety of ways: through its overall progressive politics and agenda; through a number of highly influential national member organizations; its widely publicized congresses; its establishing of links between women’s organizations in different parts of the world; its material and political support for women’s organizations and struggles in “Third World Countries,” including training opportunities; through its fundamental work in the UN, and, last but not least, through its widely distributed and read publications, with the journal Women of the Whole World as the centerpiece. The just and peaceful world that the WIDF founders believed in was based on their hope for continuation of the WWII anti-fascist alliance between the Soviet Union and the Western powers. The subsequent very fast changes in world politics must have been deeply unsettling and disappointing, even if not wholly unanticipated, for some of the more experienced communist women in the organization, such as Anna Pauker and Dolores Ibarruri. In a keynote lecture at the recent 8 th European Feminist Research Conference about Emma Goldman, Clare Hemmings asked how we, as feminist scholars, deal with aspects of the historical subjects we study that we find problematic or even unacceptable from our current political perspective and knowledge. In the case of Emma Goldman these included her 14 === [PDF page 15] === derogatory comments on women and her lack of engagement with contemporary racial politics in the USA. Clearly, this is an important question regarding WIDF as well, since the organization not only widely supported women’s progressive struggles, often with material and political support from state socialist countries (e.g. the Soviet Union, the DDR, Bulgaria), but also politically aligned itself with Soviet foreign policies, and did not (openly) criticize the Soviet Union for its oppressive policies and suppression of dissent. This important issue needs more space and systematic attention than I can give it here, but I want to suggest that while discussing it we ask similar questions about the Western international women’s organizations, which, for example, were silent about racism and colonialism, or about wars waged in the name of anti-communism, such as the Vietnam War.79 It will be clear that there are important parts of WIDF history that I have not or barely mentioned, let alone discussed. From 1991, the organization had problems to continue functioning because it had no money, office or review nor a general secretary. In 1994 WIDF put itself on a new footing – Sylvie Jan, WIDF President from 1994 to 2002 called it a renaissance of the organization –,while making it very clear that this was a continuation of the organization established in 1945. In 2002, WIDF relocated to Sao Paolo, where it is currently headed by its Brazilian president, Marcia Campos. 80 Both in terms of research and in terms of its contributions, therefore, the history of WIDF is ongoing. Table 1: WIDF Presidents Name Years Country Eugénie Cotton 1945-1967 France Hertta Kuusinen 1969-1974 Finland Freda Brown 1975 - 1991 Australia Fatma Ahmed Ibrahim 1991- [1994?] Sudan Sylvie Jan 1994-2002 France Marcia Campos 2002- Brasil 15 === [PDF page 16] === Table 2: WIDF Congresses 1945-1991 (* in column 1 indicates that this Proceedings is included in Women and Social Movements International) WIDF Congress Number Year/Date 1945, 26 Nov. – 1 Dec. 1948 Dec.1 1952 Place Paris Budapest Vienna 1953, 5-10 June Copenhagen 1955 Lausanne 1958, 1-5 June Vienna 1960, April Copenhagen 1963 Moscow 1969, 14-17 June; WIDF congress was June 18 1975, 20-24 Oct. Helsinki 10 Berlin 1981, 8-13 October WIDF Congress itself, 14-15 Oct. 1987, 23-27 June Prague 1991, 30-31 March – 1 April Sheffield, Moscow Number of Delegates, Countries/Organizations [source] 850 delegates from 40 countries 390 delegates of 51 member countries Participants from 66 countries [WIDF 40 years, 24] 1990 representatives from 67 countries; 613 delegates, 1312 guests, 65 observers [1953 Congress Report, p. 3] Participants from 66 countries [WIDF 40 years, 24] Delegates and observers from 55 countries [1958 Congress Report, p. 7] 73 countries represented 1543 women from 113 countries [1963 Congress Report, p. 3] Affiliated org. from 92 countries [WIDF 40 years, 27]. 1952 delegates etc. from 141 countries Other WIDF Sponsored Conferences Conference in Defense of Children World Congress of Mothers International Assembly of Women to commemorate 50 years of IWD - Affiliated org. from 103 countries [WIDF 40 years, 28] - 121 in 106 countries [Prague 1981 Congress Report, p. 24] 131 affiliated org. from 116 countries [WIDF 40 years, 31] [Same number in Prague 1981 Congress Report, p. 24] 103 delegates representing 68 organizations from 62 countries [WIDF Newsletter 1991/1] 16 === [PDF page 17] === Table 3: Examples of WIDF Global Involvement until the Early 1960s 1945 1948 1949 WIDF founding congress: participants from 850 women from Europe, Asia (China, India, Indochina, Ceylon), Australia, Africa (Algeria, Egypt, Morocco) and the Americas (Canada, the US, Cuba, and Brazil, Argentine) Report on The Women of Asia and Africa 1956 Conference of the Women in Asia (held in Peking, China; originally intended to be in Calcutta, India) Cotton leads a campaign urging French mothers not to send their sons to fight in the colonial war in Vietnam An international committee sent to Korea, to investigate the atrocities committed by the US military there. The resulting brochure, We Accuse, published in + 20 languages, received a lot of publicity world wide. Swedish WIDF council member, from 1953 V-P, Dr. Andrea Andreen is member of an international committee to investigate the use of bacterial weapons by the US in Korea and China WIDF Council held in Peking 1959 Women of Latin America Conference in Chile 1961 First Afro-Asian Women’s Conference 1950 1951 1952 Notes Left-feminist as defined by Ellen DuBois: “a perspective which fuses a recognition of the systematic oppression of women with an appreciation of other structures of power underlying … society (what we now most often call ‘the intersections of race, class, and gender’). Therefore [she continues], by left feminism, I also mean an understanding that the attainment of genuine equality for women – all women – requires a radical challenge to … society, the mobilisation of masses of people, and fundamental social change.” Ellen C. DuBois, “Eleanor Flexner and the History of American Feminism,” Gender & History, 3:() (1991): 81-90, quote on p. 84; condensed on p. 85 to “a sense of women’s systematic oppression with a larger understanding of social inequality.” This is my characterization, accepting that “feminist” is not a label that all of them embraced. The high Cold War rejection and persecution of communists and alleged communists drove many “non - Communists” away, but from the 1950s an increasing number of anti-colonial women from the global South also joined the Federation, so that it kept its mixed character. On the Soviet Women’s [Anti-Fascist] Committee, see Yana Knopova- Ziferblat, “The Soviet Union and the International Domain of Women’s Rights and Struggles: A Theoretical Framework and a Case Study of the Soviet Women’s Committee, 1941-1991,” MA thesis, Central European University, Budapest, 2011, and Melanie Ilic, “Soviet Women, Cultural Exchange and the Women’s International Democratic Federation,” in 17 === [PDF page 18] === Sari Autio-Sarasmo and Katalin Miklossy, eds., Reassessing Cold War Europe (New York: Routledge, 2011) 157-74; on Italian and Yugoslav women’s organizations in WIDF during the early Cold War, see Chiara Bonfiglioli, “Cold War Internationalisms, Nationalisms and the Yugoslav -Soviet Split: The Union of Italian Women and the Antifascist Women’s Front of Yugoslavia,” in Francisca de Haan, June Purvis, Margaret Allen and Krassimira Daskalova, eds., Women’s Activism: Global Perspectives from the 1890s to the Present (London: Routledge, 2012; in press); on the ACW[D]F, see Wang Zheng, “‘State Feminism’? Gender and Socialist State Formation in Maoist China,” Feminist Studies 31 no. 3 (2005): 519-51; on Gerwani, see Saskia Wieringa, Sexual Politics in Indonesia (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002); Barbara Curthoys and Audrey McDonald, More Than a Hat and Glove Brigade. The Story of the Union of Australian Women (Sydney: Bookpress, 2001); on the NVB, Jolande Withuis, Opoffering en heroiek. De mentale wereld van een communistische vrouwenorganisatie in naoorlogs Nederland, 1946-1976 (Meppel: Boom, 1990). Francisca de Haan, “Continuing Cold War Paradigms in Western Historiography of Transnational Women’s Organizations: The Case of the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF),” Women’s History Review 19, no. 4 (September 2010): 547-73. Examples include Karen Offen, European Feminisms 1700-1950: A Political History (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2000) xxviii and 387, where she writes that in 1953 WIDF “raise[d] the women’s rights banner,” and her further discussion in the book; the same statement about 1953 is reprinted in Idem (ed.) Globalizing Feminisms 1789-1945 (London and New York: Routledge, 2010); Emmanuelle Carle, Gabrielle Duchêne et la recherche d'une autre route: entre le pacifisme féministe et l'antifascisme (PhD Thesis, McGill University, Montreal, 2005), 435. In addition to other examples mentioned in De Haan, “Continuing Cold War Paradigms,” it is telling that, for example, Christine Bolt, Sisterhood Questioned? Race, Class and Internationalism in the American and British Women’s Movements, c. 1880s-1970s (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), does not mention/know about WIDF, or that Karen Garner doesn’t mention that WIDF proposed International Women’s Year (see below); see her Shaping a Global Women’s Agenda: Women’s NGOs and Global Governance, 1925-85 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 215. Another recent example is Jennifer Suchland, “Is Postsocialism Transnational?,” Signs 36 no. 4 (Summer 2011): 837-62, who writes that “In many respects, the full entrance of women’s voices from the second world into the United Nations and international stage could not occur until after 1989–91” (843). It does so while generally accepting the Western women’s organizations’ self-professed “politically neutrality.” For more on this, see De Haan, “Continuing Cold War Paradigms.” Influential examples are Leila J. Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997) and Offen, European Feminisms. For “Third World” women’s movements/activism with a broader agenda than gender equality alone, see Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo and Lourdes Torres, eds., Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). Other factors that have contributed to the lack of knowledge about WIDF include the dominance of national and androcentric perspectives in the historiography, see De Haan, “Continuing Cold War Paradigms.” 18 === [PDF page 19] === I won’t discuss WIDF’s relation with state-supported women’s organizations in Central and Eastern Europe, nor how WIDF was or is viewed there. Scholars such as Raluca Maria Popa and Kristen Ghodsee are currently exploring European state socialist women’s organizations’ role in and connections with WIDF. Congrès International des Femmes; Compte Rendu des Travaux du Congrès Qui S'est Tenu À Paris du 26 Novembre au 1er Décembre 1945 [hereafter Congrès International des Femmes … Décembre 1945] (Paris: Fédération démocratique internationale des femmes, 1946), 216 LINK; Gerda Lerner, Fireweed: A Political Autobiography (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), 256. 10 Amy Swerdlow, “The CAW: Left-Feminist Peace Politics in the Cold War,” in Linda Kerber, Alice Kessler- Harris and Kathryn Kish Sklar, eds., U.S. History as Women’s History: New Feminist Essays (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 296-312. Personal communication, Katrine Madsbjerg, Copenhagen ABA archivist, December 2011. 11 Lerner, Fireweed, 257; Swerdlow, “The CAW.” Kate Weigand, Red Feminism. American Communism and the Making of Women’s Liberation (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). 12 See the striking picture on the cover of Congress of American Women Bulletin 1 no. 6 (June 1947) of CAW women with the first UN Secretary General, Trygve Lie, after having submitted a petition to him. Sophia Smith Collection, Women’s International Democratic Federation collection, Box 1 (Affiliates). 13 Opinions on when the Cold War started differ strikingly, see, e.g.: Georges-Henri Soutou, La Guerre froide, 1943-1990 [Paris: Pluriel, 2010, orig. 2001] and André Fontaine, La Guerre froide 1917-1991 (Paris: Éditions de la Martinière, 2004). Soutou also points at the Eurocentrism of the term, La Guerre froide, 7. Robert J. McMahon, The Cold War: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), uses the more common timeframe of 1945-’47 as the period when US-SU relations went “From cooperation to conflict,” 21 and further. Accordingly, I refer here to the clear end of earlier attempts at and expectations of a form of cooperation between the two superpowers, the USA and the Soviet Union, from 1946/’47. 14 According to the historian Susan L. Brinson, “Many, though not all, [US] historians agree that the anti- Communist attacks of the 1940s and 1950s were politically motivated assaults on the New Deal,” which was seen as “antibusiness.” “Thus, the reality of anti-Communism was that it was a public mask for a political backlash [against progressive New Deal policies].” See her book The Red Scare, Politics, and the Federal Communications Commission, 1941-1960 (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2004), 2-3; for the political use in the US of the “wholesale denunciation of the enemy within,” see also Eric Hobsbawn, The Age of Extremes. A History of the World, 1914-1991 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994), 235. 15 Committee on Un-American Activities, US House of Representatives [hereafter, HUAC], Report on the Congress of American Women (Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1950, 23 October 1949, original release date), 1.For a description of the measures against and attacks on the CAW, and the pressure this put on them, see Lerner, Fireweed, 272-73. 16 Knopova- Ziferblat, “The Soviet Union and the International Domain of Women’s Rights and Struggles.” See further footnote 67 below. 17 Just one example is the belief that Virginia Gildersleeve, Dean of Barnard Women’s College, as US delegate to the UNO founding conference in San Francisco in 1945 supported the cause fo r women’s rights, whereas it was rather the opposite, as discussed by Toril Skard, “Getting our History Right: How Were the Equal Rights of 19 === [PDF page 20] === Women and Men Included in the Charter of the United Nations?” Forum for Development Studies no. 1 (2008): 37-60. 18 De Haan, “Continuing Cold War Paradigms.” A good example are the essays in Anne Winslow, ed., Women, Politics, and the United Nations (Westport, Conn. and London: Greenwood Press, 1995). 19 Lerner, Fireweed, 289. University of Michigan Council of the Arts, Sciences and Professions, Civil Liberties Committee of the University of Michigan [Natalie Zemon Davis], Operation Mind: A Brief Documentary Account of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (Ann Arbor, 1952). 20 Lerner, Fireweed, 273-74. On the depth of American anti-communism, its consequences, and the traumas it generated, see Ellen Schrecker, Many are the Crimes. McCarthyism in America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998), esp. Ch. 10, “‘A Good Deal of Trauma’: The Impact of McCarthyism.” 21 Interview of the author with former WIDF president Sylvie Jan, Paris, January 17, 2012. Email, Florence Hervé to the author, June 8, 2012. More precise information is not yet available. 22 This is Chiara Bonfiglioli’s apt formulation in her “Revolutionary Networks: Women’s Political and Social Activism in Cold War Italy and Yugoslavia (1945-1957),” PhD thesis, Utrecht University, 2012, 11. 23 According to Hobsbawn, The Age of Extremes, 151, “it was the fear of being left to confront Hitler alone which eventually drove Stalin, since 1934 the unswerving champion of an alliance with the West against him [Hitler], into the Stalin-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, by which he hoped to keep the USSR out of the war while Germany and the Western powers would weaken one another, to the benefit of his state which, by the secret clauses of the pact, acquired a large part of the western territories lost by Russia after the revolution.” 24 Seumas Milne, “This Rewriting of History is Spreading Europe’s Poison,” The Guardian, Sept. 9, 2009: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/09/second -world-war-soviet-pact (last accessed Feb. 19, 2012). In addition, it is important to notice that many announcements and speakers refer to “Communism and Nazism,” rather than Stalinism and Nazism, so that literally all distinctions are being lost. 25 Schrecker, Many are the Crimes, 5. 26 Schrecker, Many are the Crimes, 5, makes a similar distinction. 27 Vittorio Foa, Miriam Mafai and Alfredo Reichlin, Le Silence des communistes (Paris: L’Arche, 2007). Influential American examples include feminist leader Betty Friedan, who n ever acknowledged her left past, and Gerda Lerner, who only published about this important part of her history in 2002. 28 Saskia Eleonora Wieringa, “Sexual Slander and the 1965/66 Mass Killings in Indonesia: Political and Methodological Considerations,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 41 no. 4 (2011): 544-65, quote on p. 554. In Indonesia too, (alleged) communists were branded as traitors, similar to what Lerner wrote about the USA. 29 To make things more complex, conservatives, in the US, Europe and elsewhere, have also always rejected “communism” because of its support for women’s equality or the women’s emancipation project. 30 For a sophisticated analysis of state socialist women’s political agency in the case of China, see Wang Zheng, “‘State Feminism’?” 31 Prof. Waters, quoted in “Old American theory is ‘speared’,” BBC News, 21-10-2011. 32 The Amsterdam International Institute for Social History, for example, has a lot more WIDF material than its web catalogue indicates, and the same applies to the Gothenburg Women’s History Collection. 33 Hommage à Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier (Paris: Fédération Nationale des Déportés et Internés Résistants et Patriotes, 1997). 20 === [PDF page 21] === 34 Carle, Gabrielle Duchêne; Bolt, Sisterhood Questioned?, 140. On Duchêne’s WIDF activities, see for example, Second Women's International Congress: Account of the Work of the Congress which Took Place in Budapest (Hungary) from the 1st to the 6th of December, 1948 [hereafter: Second Women's International Congress … 1948] (Paris: Women's International Democratic Federation, 1949) 552 LINK. 35 See Congrès International des Femmes … Décembre 1945. LINK 36 For the RUP/IPC archive, see http://search.socialhistory.org/Record/ARCH01165/Description; for Manus, see http://www.aletta.nu/aletta/eng/zoek/head; for Ravensbrück, see http://www.ravensbrueck.de/. 37 The National Council for Civil Liberties was established in 1934. Among many other things Allen published an impressive brochure about the nature of fascism: It shall not happen here. Anti-Semitism, fascists and civil liberty ([London] 1943). From 1945 she was a member of the British National Committee for International Women’s Day (IWD). See further May 21, 2012). On her WIDF involvement, see Contre le Fascisme, Pour la Paix et le Bonheur, Réalisons l’Union des Femmes de tous les Pays! Interventions des Déléguées Étrangères au 1 er Congrès National de l’Union des Femmes Françaises. Paris, 17-20 Juin 1945. Edité par le Comité d’Initiative International Pour la préparation et l’organisation d’un Congrès International des Femmes; and Congrès International des Femmes […] Décembre 1945. LINK. [Also LINK to Elizabeth Acland Allen’s browse people entry when she has been indexed.] 38 Schrecker uses the term “Popular Front feminism,” see her Many are the Crimes, 387-88. I see the feminist anti-fascist network of the 1930s as an important part of the history of international feminis m, which has been unknown to us due to both the WWII losses and the subsequent Cold War; however, I doubt that leading IAW women such as Rosa Manus and Margery Corbett-Ashby would have identified with Popular Front policies, hence I suggest to speak of anti-fascist and Popular Front feminism rather than subsuming it all under the latter term. 39 The Women’s Library (London), “Rough Notes Taken at Informal Conference with M me Duchene, Caxton Hall, October 29th, 1937, A Simultaneous ‘Women’s Day’ in All Countries.” [2 pages, typed], Papers of International Alliance of Women, 7TBG/2/C/05, Box FL401. In other words, while the acceptance of a League of Nations Committee of Experts to study the Legal Status of Women had in part been justified and supported by the need to react to the attacks on women’s rights by fascist regimes as well as the overall broader conservative climate in the 1930s, Duchêne, in turn, used the fact that such a Committee had been appointed as an argument for her advocacy for International Women’s Day celebrated on a wide scale. The LoN Committee of Experts to investigate the Legal Status of Women also provides another link between pre-1940 and WIDF feminists via the Chair of that LoN’s Committee: Kerstin Hesselgren. Dr. Andrea Andreen, involved with WIDF from 1945, in 1946 succeeded Hesselgren as president of the Left Federation of Swedish Women (Svenska Kvinnors Vänsterförbund, SKV), the Swedish WIDF affiliate. 40 Social democratic women celebrated IWD in London in 1941, see Irene Bandauer-Schöffmann, “Absenz, Resistenz und Erinnerung. Frauentage zwischen 1933 und 1945 und die Thematisierung von Faschismus und Krieg,” in Heidi Niederkofler, Maria Mesner, Johanna Zechner, eds., Frauentag! Erfindung und Karriere einer Tradition. Kataloge des Österreichischen Museums für Volkskunde, vol. 93 (Vienna: Löcker Verlag, 2011), 12021. On the 1941 meeting, see also http://www.arbark.se/pdf_wrd/neunsinger-intl-womens-day-a-prism.pdf. At 21 === [PDF page 22] === least two of the women who attended the 1941 celebration, Blume-Grégoire and Jurneckova, were actively involved in the 1943 London celebration mentioned below. 41 See about her: Linda Walker, “Whately, (Mary) Monica (1889–1960),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004), [http://www04.sub.su.se:2545/view/article/ 63900, accessed 21 May 2012]. Whately attended the 1934 Paris World Congress of Women against War and Fascism (mistakenly dated here as having taken place in 1933), and was a member of the Six Point Group (which also included Jessie Street). 42 http://www.iev.be/getattachment/3485cc30-fc0a-40d7-81c3-7a497c3c1fd 4/PS_test-(1).aspx (last accessed 21 May 2012). Robert Levy, Ana Pauker: The Rise and Fall of a Jewish Communist (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2001), 49 incorrectly refers to Blume-Grégoire as the daughter of the French politician Leon Blum. 43 The Women’s Library, pamphlet “International Women’s Day 1943 Celebrat ions,” issued by the National Committee for the Celebration of International Women’s Day. Papers of International Alliance of Women, 44 See Eugénie Cotton: Founding Member and President of the Women's International Democratic Federat ion, December 1945 - June 1967, Founding and Presidium Member of the World Peace Council, Honorary Headmistress of the Sèvres Normal College for Girls (Berlin: Women's International Democratic Federation, 1970). LINK 45 The meeting in Clichy was the first of what would become the UFF, of which Eugénie Cotton became a member together with Sorbonne professors Irène Joliot-Curie and Pauline Ramart. “Eugénie Cotton entre à I’UFF,” Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand (Paris), Fonds Eugénie Cotton, 1 AP 27. 46 Jan Smuts was highly regarded by many for his role in establishing the League of Nations. See Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace. The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009), Ch. 1: “Jan Smuts and Imperial Internationalism.” The Women’s Library, “Women on the March. International Women’s Day 1943,” pamphlet 305.4 2 INT. 47 For Ravensbrück 1945, see Bandauer-Schöffmann, “Absenz, Resistenz und Erinnerung,” 119-20. 48 HUAC, Report on the Congress of American Women, 1; and echoed in Offen, European Feminisms, 386-87. 49 See Francisca de Haan, “Hoffnungen auf eine bessere Welt: Die frühen Jahre der Internationalen Demokratischen Frauenföderation (IDFF/WIDF) (1945-1950),” in Gabriele Kämper, Regine Othmer and Carola Sachse. eds., Gebrochene Utopien. Feministische Studien 27:(2 (November 2009), 241-57. 50 Congrès International des Femmes … Décembre 1945, 381-89. LINK New WIDF statutes, published in Women of the Whole World, December 1957, no longer mentioned anti-fascism, but had the same emphasis on women’s rights and cooperation, peace and children’s welfare. 51 Congrès International des Femmes […] Décembre 1945, 399. LINK 52 Cynthia Cockburn, From Where We Stand: War, Women’s Activism and Feminist Analysis (London and New York: Zed Books, 2007), 132. 53 For Pejnovic see Maja Brkljačić, “Pejnović, Kata (1899-1966),” in Francisca de Haan, Krassimira Daskalova and Anna Loutfi, eds., A Biographical Dictionary of Women’s Movements and Feminisms. Central, Eastern, and 22 === [PDF page 23] === South Eastern Europe, 19th and 20th Centuries (Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2006), 420-23. 54 Mark Mazower, Dark Continent. Europe’s Twentieth Century (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), 192. 55 “Sisters in Resistance,” directed by Maia Wechsler (2000). They were: Geneviève de Gaulle Anthonioz, Jacqueline Pery d'Alincourt, Anise Postel-Vinay and Germaine Tillion. See about the film http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/sistersinresistance/film.html (last accessed August 5, 2009). 56 Charlotte Delbo, Convoy to Auschwitz. Women of the French Resistance (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997; originally published in France in 1965). For more details, see De Haan, “Continuing Cold War Paradigms,” 563. Vaillant-Couturier also testified against Klaus Barbie, head of the Gestapo of Lyon from 1942 to 1944, at his trial in 1987. Extracts of her testimony at the Nuremberg trial can be found at http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/nuremberg/vaillanttest.html or in French at http://www.anti-rev.org/temoignages/VaillantCouturier96a (last accessed August 5, 2009). 57 Cotton herself in 1916 lost a new-born baby due to war circumstances; see Eugénie Cotton: Founding Member and President, 24. LINK 58 HUAC, Report on the Congress of American Women, 1. 59 Congrès International des Femmes … Décembre 1945, xxiii. LINK 60 As One! For Equality, for Happiness, for Peace: World Congress of Women, Copenhagen, June 5 - 10, 1953, Reports, Speeches (extracts) Documents (Berlin: Women's International Democratic Federation, 1953). LINK For the impact of this congress on women in Indonesia, see Kate McGregor, “Indonesian Women, the Women’s International Democratic Federation and the Struggle for ‘Women’s Rights’, 1946-1965,” Indonesia and the Malay World 40, issue 117 (2012) 193-208; International Women's Year: Equality, Development, Peace; Congress (Berlin: Women's International Democratic Federation, 1975). LINK 61 Second Women's International Congress … 1948, 22. LINK 62 See about her, Cheryl Johnson-Odim, “‘For Their Freedoms’: The Anti-imperialist and International Feminist Activity of Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti of Nigeria,” Women's Studies International Forum 32 (2009): 51–59. 63 As One! For Equality, for Happiness, for Peace: World Congress of Women, Copen hagen, June 5 - 10, 1953, 257-259 LINK 64 See, for example, Second Women's International Congress … 1948, 36: “In the same way the solidarity between all women and their need for justice led W.I.D.F. to take up a position against all racial discrimination.” For examples of their activities, see also the WIDF Activities Report 1963-69, LINK and the WIDF Activities Report 1964-69, Appendix. LINK 65 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); for an analysis of the ACWF journal, see Wang Zheng, “Creating a Socialist Feminist Cultural Front: Women of China (1949-1966),” The China Quarterly no. 204 (December 2010), 827-49; otherwise, a comparative analysis of a number of WIDF-related journals, as they appeared in different national contexts, would be a wonderful research project. 66 Francisca de Haan, “A Concise History of Women’s Rights,” UN Chronicle XLVII no. 1 (2010) http://www.un.org:80/wcm/content/site/chronicle/lang/en/home/archive/issues2010/empoweringwomen/briefsur veywomensrights; Skard, “Getting our History Right.” Glenda Sluga, “‘Spectacular Feminism’: The 23 === [PDF page 24] === International History of Women, World Citizenship and Human Rights,” in De Haan et al., eds., Women’s Activism: Global Perspectives from the 1890s to the Present. 67 Heather Radi, ed., Jessie Street: Documents and Essays (Broadway, N.S.W.: Women’s Redress Press, 1990). The Brazilian feminist Bertha Lutz noticeably pointed this out in a letter of August 11, 1945 to IAW President Margery Corbett Ashby: “The countries which are grouped around Russia and she herself helped very much, so did some of the Latin American men.” The Women’s Library, Papers of Margery Irene Corbett Ashby, 7/MCA/C2. 68 Jessie Street, A Revised Autobiography, ed. Leonore Coltheart (Annandale, N.S.W.: Federation Press, 2004) Ch. 9. She was a member of the UN-CSW until 1948, when the Australian government replaced her because she was considered too “red.” Leonore Coltheart, “Citizens of the World: Jessie Street and International Feminism,” Hecate 31 (2005): 182-94. 69 This may be less self-evident than it now appears; the IAW, for example, was initially against a separate CSW. Congrès International des Femmes … Décembre 1945, 218-19. LINK 70 Helen Laville, Cold War Women: The International Activities of American Women’s Organizations (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press; distributed in the USA by Palgrave, 2002), 113. 71 Gertrude Bussey and Margaret Tims, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. 1915 -1965. A Record of Fifty Years of Work (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1965) 198; Dora Russell, The Tamarisk Tree. Vol. 3. Challenge to the Cold War (London: Virago Press, 1985) 151-69. 72 We accuse! Report of the Commission of the Women's International Democratic Federation in Korea, May 16 to 27, 1951 (Berlin: WIDF, 1951). LINK For a striking description of the committee’s work, see Russell, The Tamarisk Tree, 144-46. 73 The proposal was submitted to the UN-CSW by Romania on behalf of WIDF. Raluca Maria Popa, “Translating Equality between Women and Men across Cold War Divides: Women Activists from Hungary and Romania and the Creation of International Women’s Year,” in Jill Massino and Shana Penn, eds. Gender Politics and Everyday Life in State Socialist East and Central Europe (New York and London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009), 63. See also Women of the Whole World, 1973, no. 2, p. 5; and Women's International Democratic Federation: Published for the 40 th Anniversary of the Founding of the WIDF (Berlin: WIDF, 1985) 20. 74 For WIDF and CEDAW, see Women of the Whole World, 1972, no. 2, p. 3 (as mentioned in Popa, “Translating Equality,” note 26), and Women's International Democratic Federation: Published for the 40 th Anniversary of the Founding of the WIDF, 20. 75 Garner indicates some of the maneuvering around this in her Shaping a Global Women’s Agenda, 217-18. 76 Women of the Whole World, 1973, no. 2, p. 5; International Women's Year: Equality, Development, Peace; Congress. LINK 77 Women's International Democratic Federation: Published for the 40 th Anniversary of the Founding of the WIDF, 18-19. 78 Eugénie Cotton: Founding Member and President. LINK 79 Clare Hemmings, “A Genealogy of Ambivalence: Emma Goldman, Post Feminists and Feminist Politics for our Times, ” Keynote presented at the 8th European Feminist Research Conference, Central European University, Budapest, May 20, 2012; Francisca de Haan, “Politics and Friendship in the Early Decades of the WIDF – an Exploration Based on Letters and other Personal Documents,” Workshop “Intimate Internationalism: Women 24 === [PDF page 25] === Transforming the Political in Postwar Europe,” Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung, Potsdam, October 1-2, 2010. 80 Email, Florence Hervé to the author, June 8, 2012; De Haan, “Continuing Cold War Paradigms,” note 27; http://www.fdim-widf.org/diretos/index2.html (last accessed Feb. 20, 2012). 25