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Traces transnational suffrage organizing across the interwar Mediterranean
In the period immediately following the First World War, numerous countries began granting women the right to vote. Yet the rise of authoritarian regimes in the 1920s and 1930s halted the progress of women's social and political equality in countries around the Mediterranean Sea. Focusing on the interactions of the Italian Suffrage Federation, the Union of Women of Spain, the Egyptian Feminist Union, and the Turkish Women's Union, Strength in Unity follows their transnational connections and organizing against authoritarian and antifeminist political conditions.
Kara A. Peruccio explores how these organizations worked in tandem and sometimes in tension with the International Woman Suffrage Alliance between 1923 and 1935. Although the Alliance emphasized solidarity amongst women irrespective of creed or nationality, its leadership from predominantly Protestant North Atlantic countries viewed these Mediterranean women as inferior. The Alliance was less concerned with the rise of authoritarian regimes in Egypt, Italy, Spain, and Turkey than they were with their own biases against Islam and the Catholic Church. Peruccio documents the ways that domestic politics impacted how these Mediterranean women navigated the Alliance’s biases and its dependence upon imperial and geopolitical hierarchies.
Ultimately, Strength in Unity captures the complexities of feminist organizing during a pivotal era of national and global transformations that reshaped modern women’s rights.
Strength in Unity innovatively examines the growth of the international women’s suffrage movement during the interwar period, shedding new light not only on their transnational projects, but also on their complex internal politics. Using an exceptional range and depth of sources in five languages, this book focuses on engagements between the Northern European and US-based International Woman Suffrage Alliance and four Mediterranean national women’s suffrage organizations. Peruccio develops a powerful Mediterranean framework that reveals elitist and colonial inequities between the Protestant-dominated Alliance countries and the Othered primarily Catholic and Muslim Mediterranean nations.
Strength in Unity is a model of transnational history. Peruccio breaks new ground in exploring suffrage associations throughout the Mediterranean. She pulls no punches in documenting not only the discrimination these activist women faced within the international women's movement but also their compromises with authoritarian regimes.