Description
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 womens 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 Womens 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 Alliances 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 womens rights.