Women Activists between War and Peace

Ingrid Sharp is Senior Lecturer in German at the University of Leeds, UK. She is the editor of Aftermaths of War (co-edited with Matthew Stibbe, 2011) and The Women's Movement in Wartime (co-edited with Alison Fell, 2007).Matthew Stibbe is Professor of Modern European History at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. He has authored several books and edited several volumes of essays on twentieth-century European themes, including Aftermaths of War (co-edited with Ingrid Sharp, 2011).

• List of Illustrations Notes on ContributorsAcknowledgements List of Abbreviations Time-Line: Women Activists between War and Peace, 1918-1923 Introduction: Women Activists between War and Peace: Europe, 1918-1923Ingrid Sharp and Matthew Stibbe1. Suffrage and Nationalism in Comparative Perspective: Britain, Hungary, Finland and the Transnational Experience of Rosika SchwimmerLead authors: Julie V. Gottlieb and Judith Szapor, with Tiina Lintunen (on Finland) and Dagmar Wernitznig (on Rosika Schwimmer)2. Internationalism, Pacifism, Transnationalism: Women’s Movements and the Building of a Sustainable Peace in the Post-War WorldLead author: Ingrid Sharp, with Judit Acsády (on Hungary) and Nikolai Vukov (on Bulgaria)3. Women and Socialist Revolution, 1917-1923 Lead author: Matthew Stibbe (on Germany), with Olga Shnyrova (on Russia) and Veronika Helfert (on Austria)4. Mediating the National and the International: Women, Journalism and Hungary in the Aftermath of the First World WarLead authors: Maria DiCenzo, Judit Acsády, David Hudson and Balázs Sipos5. Women’s Movements, War and the Body Lead authors: Alison S. Fell and Susan R. GrayzelFurther Reading

This collection of essays opens a new window onto women's activism in post-WWI Europe by reaching beyond the boundaries of Western Europe to include the voices of women from Eastern Europe and the Scandinavian region. The essays included number only five, but they are a rich collaboration between and among scholars from a variety of historic fields. The contributors have mined new sources to analyze the roles of women activists in journalism, political movements, the pacifist movement, and women's citizenship rights; specifically, a woman's right to vote as well as her relationship with her own body as the physical and psychological traumas of war encroached on and forever modified understandings of "male" and "female." Consequently, these essay masterfully weave together women's postwar activism by viewing the sources through various lenses in order to examine the ways in which activism belied national boundaries and brought women together from disparate social, cultural, and geographic places to work toward a shared goal. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.