Clara Zetkin (left) & Rosa Luxemburg in their way to the SPD Congress. Magdeburg, 1910

Harlem Renaissance

Written in red their protest stands,
For the gods of the World to see;
On the dooming wall their bodiless hands
have blazoned "Upharsin," and flaring brands
Illumine the message: "Seize the lands!
Open the prisons and make men free!"
Flame out the living words of the dead
Written--in--red.

Gods of the World! Their mouths are dumb!
Your guns have spoken and they are dust.
But the shrouded Living, whose hearts were numb,
have felt the beat of a wakening drum
Within them sounding-the Dead men's tongue--
Calling: "Smite off the ancient rust!"
Have beheld "Resurrexit," the word of the Dead,
Written--in--red.

Bear it aloft, O roaring, flame!
Skyward aloft, where all may see.
Slaves of the World! Our caose is the same;
One is the immemorial shame;
One is the struggle, and in One name--
Manhood--we battle to set men free.
"Uncurse us the Land!" burn the words of the
Dead,
Written--in--red.

“In 1933, German conservatives thought they could control Hitler. Two years later, they were being executed in their own homes. I spent weeks researching this question, desperately looking for counter-examples, for hope, for any time in history where people successfully stopped fascists after they started winning elections.

Here's what I found: Once fascists win power democratically, they have never been removed democratically. Not once. Ever.

I know that sounds impossible. I kept digging, thinking surely someone, somewhere, stopped them. The actual record is so much worse than you think.

Let's start with Germany because everyone thinks they know this story. Franz von Papen, the conservative politician who convinced President Hindenburg to make Hitler Chancellor, said ‘We've hired him’ in January 1933. He thought he was so clever. Within 18 months, the Nazis were machine-gunning von Papen's allies in their homes during the Night of Long Knives. Von Papen himself barely escaped to Austria with his life. Every single conservative who thought they could ‘control’ or ‘moderate’ Hitler was either dead, in exile, or groveling for survival by 1934.

Florence Mills, Johnny Hudgins. Rehearsing on Pavillon Theatre Roof, 1926

“Rosa Luxemburg has become a heroine of our times. She herself would not have predicted it, not least of all because she saw unpredictability as lying at the heart of politics. For Luxemburg, we are the makers of a history which exceeds our control, as well it must if we are not to descend into autocracy and terror. Her vision of politics is suffused with something ungraspable, an idea that struck fear into her allies and critics alike. This does not mean she was without purpose. Her targets were inequality and injustice and she had an unswerving idea of how they had to be redressed. She was a Marxist. This is just one of the reasons for returning to her today when the increasingly blatant ugliness of capitalism has given the language of Marx new resonance. She was — crucially — a woman, whose eloquence and militancy were fired from the heart, and who more than once found herself the target of most vicious misogyny. And she was Jewish, a foreigner wherever she went, as she slipped back and forth across national borders — from Poland, to Switzerland, to Germany — for most of her life. Rosa Luxemburg was intrepid to a fault. As a young woman of nineteen, already at risk of arrest for her association with underground revolutionary groups in Warsaw, she left Poland hidden under straw in a paesant’s cart. 

Un-belonging was her strength. It must surely have played its part in helping her to soar mentally beyond the walls of the prisons where she often found herself, as her writings — her letters, pamphlets, journalism, political tracts — so amply testify. […]

Listen to her vocabulary. What matters is what explodes and spills, what errupts we might say. Her key term for describing political struggle is ‘friction’. Luxemburg is not a party manager. She does not compute, calculate, or count costs and benefits in advance. She does not hedge her bets. This does not stop her from being single-minded. She is asking for what might seem a contradiction in terms — a political vision directed unerringly at the future which also recognizes the fact that the world will surely err. ‘It would be regretable,’ she wrote to Russian Marxist Alexandr Potresov in 1904, ‘if firmness and unyieldingness in practice necessarily had to be combined with a Lenin-style narrow-mindedness of theoretical views, rather than being combined with broadness and flexibility of thought’ (you could be firm and flexible at the same time). The mistakes made by a truly revolutionary workers’ movement are, she wrote in ‘Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy’ in the same year, ‘immeasurably more fruitful and more valuable’ than the infallibility of any party. The greatest mistake of a revolutionary party is to think that it owns the history which it has done something, but only something, to create. Luxemburg is taking a swipe at omnipotence and perfectibility together. The sole way for the revolution — for any revolution — to usher in a genuine spirit of democratic freedom, where all views are by definition imperfect and incomplete, is to recognize the fallibility already at the heart of the revolutionary moment itself. The only flawless revolution would be dead. ‘Without mistakes, you are going nowhere.’ […]

She was one of the earliest theorists of globalization (or of ‘historical-geographical materialism’, in Marxist geographer David Harvey’s phrase). Her unfinished Introduction to Politcal Economy, based on her lectures at the Social Democratic Party school in Berlin from 1907 to 1914, included a chapter with the title: “The Dissolution of Primitive Communism: From the Ancient Germans and the Incas to India, Russia and Southern Africa’, In this too she was way ahead of her time. There is no part of the hemisphere — no piece of the universe — in which we are not implicated. To be limitless is to be a citizen of the world. Her moral and the geographical sweep of her vision are inseperable. 

Excerpts from Women in Dark Times by Jacqueline Rose, Fitycarraldo Editions, 2025 (first published in 2014.  

WHEN WE READ WE NEVER READ ALONE ....

LIBRETTO FOR THE LIVING DEAD

CHRONOLOGIES OF ORGANISING, NEGOTIATING, GATHERING, STRUGGLING, SUBSISTING

A SCORE FOR NON-LINEAR WAYS OF READING, RELATING, CONTINUING

Italy was even dumber, if that's possible. October 1922, Mussolini announces he's marching on Rome with 30,000 blackshirts. Except here's the thing: they were poorly armed, disorganized, and the Italian military could have crushed them in about three hours. The King had his generals ready. He had martial law papers drawn up. The military was waiting for the order. Instead, he invited Mussolini to form a government. Just handed him power. Twenty-three years later, partisans hung Mussolini's corpse upside down at a gas station while crowds beat it with sticks. The king died in exile. Hundreds of thousands of Italians died for that moment of cowardice.

Spain might be the worst because everyone saw it coming. Three years of escalating fascist violence. Actual assassination attempts. Then in 1936, Franco and his generals launch a straight-up military coup. The Spanish Republic begged for help. France said "not our problem." Britain said ‘both sides are bad.’ America declared neutrality. The result? Franco ruled for 39 years. He died peacefully in his bed in 1975. They're still finding mass graves in Spain. Still. In 2025.

Want something more recent? Look at Hungary. Orbán won democratically in 2010. By 2011 he'd rewritten the constitution. By 2012 he controlled the media. By 2013 he'd gutted the judiciary. It's 2025 and he's still in power. The EU has been ‘very concerned’ for fourteen fucking years. They've written strongly worded letters. They've held meetings. Hungary is now a one-party state in the middle of Europe and everyone just...accepts it.

On another Timeline: 

Women, power, and politics: milestones from Lebanon

“At Cairo station one spring day in 1923, a crowd of women with veils and long, black cloaks descended from their horse-drawn carriages to welcome home two friends returning from an international feminist meeting in Rome. Huda Shaarawi and Saiza Nabarawi stepped out onto the running board of the train. Suddenly Huda—followed by Saiza, the younger of the two—drew back the veil from her face. The waiting women broke into loud applause. Some imitated the act. Contemporary accounts observed how the eunuchs guarding the women frowned with displeasure. This daring act signaled the end of the harem system in Egypt. At that moment, Huda stood between two halves of her life—one conducted within the conventions of the harem system and the one she would lead at the head of a women’s movement.”

>>> This stays between us, Part 1

The photograph shows, from left to right, Nabawiyya Musa, Huda Sha`rawi, and Saiza Nabarawi – the Egyptian delegates at the 1923 International Alliance of Women (IAW) conference in Rome. The head of the delegation, Huda Sha`rawi, played a key role in early 20th century Egyptian feminism and Egyptian national struggle against the British. Among other things she was active in social work for poor women and children, founded the Intellectual Association of Egyptian Women (1914) and the Egyptian Feminist Union (1923) and served as the president of the Wafdist Women's Central Committee (since 1920). Upon their return from the 1923 conference in Rome Sha`rawi, Musa, and Nabarawi in a symbolic act removed their veils in public at Cairo station.

Rome

Cairo

Okay, but surely someone, somewhere, stopped them?

Finland 1932 is the only clean win I can find. The fascist Lapua Movement tried an armed coup before they'd secured government power. The military stayed loyal to democracy, crushed the rebellion, and banned the movement. That's it. That's the success story. One time out of roughly fifty attempts, fascists were stopped because they were stupid enough to try violence before winning elections.

France in 1934 looked like a victory for about five minutes. Fascist leagues tried to storm parliament on February 6th. Six days later, twelve million workers went on general strike. Twelve million. The entire country stopped. No trains, no factories, no shops, nothing. The fascists backed down. Great victory, right? Except those exact same fascists enthusiastically collaborated when the Nazis invaded six years later. They just waited.

Portugal's fascist regime finally fell in 1974. After 48 years. How? Military officers launched a coup. Democratic resistance had been crushed for five decades. International pressure meant nothing. The dictator Salazar died in 1970 and his successor just kept going until the military said enough. That's your success story: wait half a century and hope the military gets tired.

The pattern is so consistent it's almost funny if it weren't so terrifying. Every single time it goes like this: Conservatives panic about socialism or progressives or whatever. They ally with fascists as the ‘lesser evil.’ Fascists take power. Fascists immediately purge the conservatives who helped them. Then it's 30-50 years of dictatorship. This happened in Germany, Italy, Spain, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Greece, Portugal, Croatia, Romania, and Hungary.

Amsterdam

Ceza Nabaraouy (Saiza Nabarawi) was the co-founder in 1923 of the Egyptian Feminist Union (EFU), editor of the EFU’s French-language journal, L’Egyptienne, and ‘the closest feminist collaborator’ of Huda Sha’rawi, Egypt’s long-term feminist leader. At the 1949 IAW Congress in Amsterdam, Nabaraouy became one of the Alliance’s Vice-Presidents. But in December 1952 she attended a WIDF-related peace congress in Vienna, after which the IAW Board asked her to choose between the IAW and the WIDF. Nabaraouy chose the Women’s International Democratic Federation, becoming one of its Vice-Presidents in 1953. Indeed, she was so active and appreciated in her new organisation that she later became one of its ‘Honorary Vice-Presidents’. In 1965, on occasion of the WIDF’s twentieth anniversary, she was honoured as one of its ‘Veterans’, and she remained actively involved in the Federation until her death in 1985. >>>  Continuing Cold War Paradigms in Western Historiography of Transnational Women’s Organisations: the case of the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF)

Vienna

Bruxelles

Willi Münzenberg, Jawaharlal and Kamala Nehru, Ernst Toller, Georg Ledebour, Henriette Roland-Holst, Edo Fimmen at the Congress.

Want to know how many times conservatives successfully ‘controlled’ the fascists they allied with? Zero. Want to know how many times fascists purged the conservatives after taking power? All of them. Every single time.

And here's the part that breaks your heart. Violence works. For them. Fascists use violence while claiming to be victims. They create chaos that ‘requires’ their authoritarian solution. Then they purge anyone who opposes them. Meanwhile, democrats keep insisting on following rules that fascists completely ignore. They file lawsuits. They write editorials. They vote on resolutions. And fascists just laugh and keep consolidating power.

The statistics are brutal. Fascist takeovers prevented after winning power democratically: zero. Average length of fascist rule once established: 31 years. Fascist regimes removed by voting: zero. Fascist regimes removed by asking nicely: zero. Most were removed by war or military coups, and tens of millions died in the process.

I'm not allowed to make the obvious contemporary comparisons, but you're already making them in your head. ‘We can control him’ is being said right now, in 2025, by people who apparently never cracked a history book.

Based on the historical record, there are exactly three ways this goes. Option one: Stop them before they take power. Option two: War. Option three: Wait for them to die of old age.

But here's the thing: we already missed our chance. The window isn't closing; it's closed.

Founding conference of the League Against Imperialism held in Brussels on February 10, 1927 >>> First International Congress against Imperialistic Colonisation 

New York

The congress was the first Pan-African Congress organized by women. While Du Bois is generally given credit (and, it should be said, he often took credit) for organizing the Pan-African congresses, fundraising, planning, and hosting of the 1927 congress was done by the Circle of Peace and Foreign Affairs. The Circle of Peace was an organization of African American clubwomen led by Addie Waite Hunton, an activist and internationalist who had worked with the YWCA and the NAACP. Other members of the congress organizing committee included choreographer Dora Cole Norman, editor and writer Jessie Redmon, educator Dorothy R. Peterson, and a number of figures from uptown society associated with the NAACP and The Crisis.

(...)

Other delegates also spoke on the question of anti-imperialism. Dr. Georges Normail Sylvain described the political and economic conditions in the Caribbean and there were addresses on the status of the Virgin Islands, Bahamas, and Barbados. William Pickens of the NAACP gave a report on the League Against Imperialism conference held earlier that year in Brussels and argued for Black solidarity with all groups pushing for self-determination

>>> Black Agenda Report

When Communism Met Black Anti-Colonialism in Interwar France
by DAVID MURPHY

The Supreme Court declared Trump above the law. He's threatening to arrest political opponents. He's already sent the FBI after elected officials when they haven’t committed crimes. Congress is his. Most state governments are his. Billionaire oligarchs openly coordinate with him. The window slammed shut.

So let's stop pretending we're in the ‘prevention’ phase and start talking about what you do when fascists already control the institutions but haven't fully consolidated power yet. Because historically, nobody's been here before, not like this.

No wealthy democracy with nuclear weapons has ever fallen to fascism. The 1930s examples everyone cites were broken countries. Weimar Germany was weakened by World War I and hyperinflation. Italy was barely industrialized. Spain was largely agrarian. They didn't have the world's reserve currency. They didn't have thousands of nukes. They didn't have surveillance technology that would make the Stasi weep with envy.

America has all of that. Plus geographic isolation that makes external intervention impossible. Plus a population where 30-40% genuinely wants authoritarian rule as long as it hurts the ‘right people.’ The historical playbook is useless here. We're in unprecedented territory.

Berlin

International Alliance of Women conference(IAW) in Berlin in 1929. Display in the exhibiton »Stand in Solidarity! Black Resistance and global Anti-Colonialism in Berlin, 1919-1933« in the Villa Oppenheim (Sept 2023 - March 2024).

The Indian delegate Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya criticized the underrepresentation of delegations of colonized people at the Women's Congress. In the same year, she attended the League against imperialism's congress in Frankfurt, following the invitation of her brother-in-law Virendranath Chattopadhyaya. She had aiready visited him in Berlin in 1922 and gotten to know his anti-colonial network — a meeting that influenced her politically

"it was also at the 1929 IAW conference that Kamaladevi had had her first contact with prominent North American Progressive Era women representatives, with whom she seemed to find broader common ground. Molly Ray Carroll, a specialist in labor law working for the U.S. Federal Department of Labor, invited her to attend the transnational, secular humanist WILPF conference at Prague later that summer." >>>

.

Two years after its founding and a vastly different, but still significant, second international Congress of the League Against Imperialism took place in Frankfurt am Main in the summer of 1929. >>> 

But that also means the old rules about what's possible might not apply.

Option 1: The Blue State Coalition

California's economy is bigger than the UK's. New York controls global finance. The blue states collectively represent over 60% of America's GDP. They could, theoretically, make the federal government irrelevant.

Imagine if California, Oregon, Washington, New York, Massachusetts, and others started coordinating directly. Ignoring federal mandates. Creating their own interstate compacts for everything from climate policy to civil rights. They already started this with climate agreements when Trump pulled out of Paris. But I'm talking about going much further.

State-level cryptocurrency to avoid federal monetary control. State-funded healthcare systems that ignore federal restrictions. State-level immigration policies that simply refuse to cooperate with ICE. Make the federal government have to physically enforce every single policy, stretching their resources to breaking.

The precedent? The way Northern states nullified fugitive slave laws in the 1850s. The way states are currently ignoring federal marijuana prohibition. But coordinated and comprehensive.

Frankfurt/Main

Following the triennial congress of the International Alliance of Women for Suffrage and Equal Citizenship (IAW) in Berlin in 1929, the Egyptian feminist Saiza Nabarawi called for “Eastern” women to follow the example of women in Asia and the Americas who had begun to form regional associations to advance their common interests. Such groups, she wrote, could only augment the strength of the Alliance and “hasten the triumph of feminist principles.” The first concrete steps to unite Eastern women, however, were taken not by Egyptian feminists but by their counterparts in Greater Syria. Two Eastern Women’s Congresses—the first in Damascus in 1930 and the second in Tehran two years later—were organized by the General Union of Syrian Women. Presided over by Nour Hamada, a Druze leader of several women’s organizations, they attracted delegates from mostly Arab or Muslim countries. Although the overall impact of the conferences was limited—they did not generate a perma- nent regional women’s movement nor did they induce local governments to implement desired reforms—they are suggestive of how Middle Eastern feminists sought to reconcile the demands of feminist internationalism with those of anticolonial nationalism. >>>  "Between Nationalism and Feminism: The Eastern Women's Congresses of 1930 and 1932", Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, Vol. 4, No. 1, Special Issue: Early Twentieth-Century Middle Eastern Feminisms, Nationalisms, and Transnationalisms (Winter 2008)

First International Conference of Negro Workers, Hamburg 1930  > one of the main organisers, George Padmore. The only black woman attending is Jenny Reid from the USA. Together with Padmore and Kouyaté, she is elected to head the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers (ITUCNW).

George Padmore

Hamburg

First Pan-Pacific Women's Conference >>>

Damaskus

Option 2: Selective Compliance and Irish Democracy

The Irish called it ‘Irish Democracy’ when they were under British rule, the silent, dogged resistance of millions who simply ignored laws they found illegitimate. Don't protest. Don't riot. Just don't comply.

Red states need blue state money. Blue state taxes fund red state governments. What if millions of people in blue states simultaneously decided to claim exempt on their W-4s and simply... stopped paying federal taxes? Not as protest but as a coordinated ‘forgetting.’ Overwhelm the IRS. Make enforcement impossible.

Doctors in blue states could ignore abortion restrictions. Teachers could ignore curriculum mandates. State police could refuse to enforce federal laws. Not dramatically, just... incompetently. ‘Sorry, we couldn't find them.’ ‘The paperwork got lost.’ ‘Our systems are down.’

Make every single act of authoritarian control require physical enforcement, then make that enforcement impossibly expensive and difficult.

Shanghai

Honolulu

Tehran

from left to right: Ram Perih (India), a japanese delegate, Eleonore Despard (Ireland), Klara Zetkin (Germany), a delegate from Czech Republic, and Miriam Baker (Cameroon)

Internationale Frauenkonferenz (International Women Conference) of IAH (Internationale Arbeiterhilfe/International Workers' Aid), October 1931, Berlin -- 200 Women, 26 countries

>>> 

On the international colonial exhibition in Paris 1931

First All-Asian Women's Conference (AAWC), Lahore, India 

Option 3: Secession

We already have two incompatible visions of what America should be. One side wants a multi-ethnic democracy with a social safety net. The other wants a white Christian ethnostate with unlimited corporate power. These cannot coexist indefinitely.

What if blue states started seriously discussing secession? Not threatened as political theater but actually planned. Constitutional conventions. Referendums. Negotiations for national debt division. Military base transfers. Currency agreements.

Yes, the last time states tried to leave it caused a civil war. But that was over slavery, with clearly defined geographic boundaries and two relatively equal economic systems. This would be the economic powerhouses leaving the welfare states. What would the red states do, invade California? With what money?

The mere serious threat might be enough to force structural changes. Quebec nearly left Canada twice and got massive concessions both times just from credible threats.

Lahore

Berlin

Conference organizers expressed the need for all-Asian women’s organizing as a natural extension of Indian women’s cross-regional organizing within India.They also referenced other newly formed international women’s initiatives centered in regions other than Europe and North America:

               The women from India have already experienced the inspiration of gathering together from all parts of India, and have realized the power of united service of the needs of this country. The women who met at the Women’s Pan-Pacific Conference in Honolulu joined the hands of East and West. Women of Europe have many times rejoiced in their solidarity. The women of the America[s] made vital contracts in their Pan-American Conference but Asia lags behind in unified self-consciousness.

 Encouraged specifically by the international pan-Pacific women’s gathering in Honolulu in 1930 and the new possibilities of organizing and mobilizing women, as modeled by the All-India Women’s Conference (established in 1927), one organizer Margaret Cousins first sent out a letter to influential women and men across India to inquire about their interest in an all-Asian women’s gathering. After receiving positive responses, the All-India Women’s Conference on Education and Social Reforms in Bombay (January 1930) endorsed a proposal, which fourteen women from India signed. An invitation letter was subsequently translated into 40 languages and sent to more than 300 individuals in 33 countries. The expenses incurred for postage and telegrams amounted to 353 rupees. Vernacular newspapers in Palestine, Mesopotamia, Syria, China, and Russia also printed the invitation. The conference organizers did not spare any efforts to publicize the All-Asian Women’s Conference through channels available to them. They sent thirty-five letters to China, which did not receive a reply. This silence is conspicuous especially since a Chinese activist, Mrs. Sun Yat Sen, had been nominated as the president of the Conference. China’s preoccupation with the Pan-Pacific Women’s Association (which Indian women regularly attended) may explain Chinese women’s absence from the All-Asian Women’s Conference.

quoted from: >> Shobna Nijhawan: International Feminism from an Asian Center: The All-Asian Women’s Conference (Lahore, 1931) as a Transnational Feminist Moment

Option 4: International Intervention

This has never happened to a nuclear power, but there's a first time for everything. Blue states could request UN election monitoring. They could sign their own climate agreements with the EU. They could create alternate diplomatic channels.

California could request Canadian peacekeepers for ‘election security.’ New York could invite European observers for ‘financial transparency.’ Make it embarrassing. Make America's collapse visible to the world. Force the international community to pick sides.

No, the UN can't invade America. But they can isolate it. Sanctions work. Ask Russia. International humiliation works. Ask South Africa under apartheid.

We're past normal. The fascists already won round one. They control the institutions. They have their judges. They have their media ecosystem. They have their army of true believers who will excuse anything.

But they don't have the money. They don't have the cities. They don't have the educated workforce. They don't have the young. And most importantly, they don't have legitimacy in the eyes of the majority.

The historical record says once fascists gain power, they stay for 30-50 years. But the historical record doesn't have examples of fascists taking over a country where their opposition controls most of the economy, technology, and cultural production. We're in uncharted territory, which means we need unprecedented responses.

The question isn't whether these options are extreme. They are. The question is whether we're ready to admit that normal is already gone. The window to prevent fascism closed. But the opportunity for something else, something unprecedented, might just be opening.

The German conservatives who said ‘we can control him’ were all dead or fled within two years. We're just months into our version of this story. The question is: are we going to be the first generation that finds a new way out, or are we going to be another cautionary tale future historians write about?

At least we're finally asking the right questions.”

- Chris Armitage

Addis

Paris

Walter Benjamin, 

The Author as Producer,

Address at the Institute for the

Study of Fascism, Paris, April 27, 1934 

"It was 1926 in the Ethiopian calendar; that would be 1934 in the world calendar. I would fly several times a week – always over Addis. It was an unusual experience and my friends all envied me."  .... The pilots then had the idea of starting air services in Ethiopia which she believed led to the birth of Ethiopian Airlines.  .... "It didn’t get very far at the time of course, because of the invasion by Italy" she said. Muluemebet Emiru: Africa’s First Woman Pilot. >>>>

Jamaican journalist and activist Amy Ashwood Garvey at a demonstration organised by the International African Friends of Abyssinia (IAFA) in Trafalgar Square in 1935. Ethiopian Sympathizers at London Meeting. 

London

Sylvia Pankhurst (1882–1960), erstwhile suffragette, co-founder of the British Communist Party and a staunch antifascist, became a leading opponent of the invasion, though her role in this conflict has been largely forgotten. She began by writing to newspapers such as the Manchester Guardian urging the British government to intervene to save Ethiopia and to stop secret accords with Italy that threatened to jeopardize the African country’s sovereignty. These included the Hoare-Laval Pact between Britain, France and Italy that proposed a partition of Ethiopia, thus effectively sanctioning the legality of the invasion. In the months that followed the invasion, Pankhurst became the main protagonist of the ‘print activism’ around the war. Almost single-handedly, she created the broadsheet New Times and Ethiopia News, partly to counteract fascist propaganda that justified the invasion. On 5 May 1936, the first issue of the broadsheet went to press, the same day the Italian army entered Addis. Pankhurst regarded Ethiopia as the first victim of fascism, after Italy itself.

>>> Neelam Srivastava:The intellectual as partisan: Sylvia Pankhurst and the Italian invasion of Ethiopia

With Padmore as chairman and CLR James as editor, their small network included Kenya's Jomo Kenyata, Guyana's Ras Makonnen, Barbados's Chris Jones, Sierra Leone's Isaac Wallace Johnson and Jamaica's Wiliam Harrison. On their periphery were Mali's .TGaran Kouyaté, Jamaica's Amy Ashwood Garvey, Guyana's Peter Milliard, Sierra Leone's Laminah Sankoh, Nigeria's Babalola Wilkey and on the lower frequencies Trinidad's Eric Williams. This earlier activism of the IASB and journalism of the IAO was a launching pad of the historic 1945 Pan-African Congress held in Manchester where Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah emerged for the first time as a global anti-colonial leader. >>> ( George Padmore's and C.L.R. James's International African Opinion By Matthew Quest)

Addis

By 1937 the Friends had morphed into the International African Service Bureau (IASB), featuring George Padmore, Amy Ashwood Garvey, Jomo Kenyatta, T.r. Makonnen, Chris Brathwaite, Wallace Johnson, CLR James, Nnamdi Azikwe and Louis Mbanafo. >>>

Paris

Fascism Now?

Inquiries for an Expanded Frame

Special Issue of CES Volume 7, Issue 1

>> The Anti-Imperialist Horizon

>> Colonial Fascism — A Syllabus

>> Militant Mangrove School

>>.....

Proceedings book of the Eastern Women’s Conference for the Defense of Palestine held on 15-18 October 1938 at the headquarters of the Egyptian Arab Women’s Union in Cairo to discuss the conditions in Palestine and the Palestinian cause and to provide support for Palestine. The conference was attended by several prominent feminist figures in the Arab world, where Huda Sha'arawi was president of the conference.

International Alliance of Women conference(IAW) in Copenhagen in 1939.

Differences between Eastern and Western women on the international stage erupted again at the outset of Kamaladevi’s 1939 trip when at the July IAW conference in Copenhagen. In a scathing report to the AIWC, Kamaladevi and Dr. Malini Sukthankar, Vice President and Honorary Secretary of the AIWC respectively, wrote about the “superficial character” and narrow vision of the “majority of the women [delegates] obsessed by their own problems” who “could not think of Eastern people except as primitive and backward needing the protective wing of some European power or other.” As in 1929, only India and Egypt represented the East, too small a contingent to influence debate when the delegates harshly attacked fascism but drew a tight curtain “over imperialism, as colonial problems were treated as ‘internal matters of the ruling country.’” >>>

Cairo

Women of China was the only national women's magazine to circulate continuously during the years before the Cultural Revolution. The magazine first appeared in Yan'an on 1 June 1939 when the Communist Party was engaged in the resistance against Japan.5 It suspended publication in 1942 but was revived in July 1949 as Women of New China, under a resolution of the First National Congress of Chinese Women on the eve of the founding of the PRC. The magazine's editors in Yan'an and after 1949 were mainly from the cohort who joined the Communist Revolution in the 1930s. Women of New China was officially affiliated with the newly established All-China Women's Democratic Federation (ACWDF). A member of the Executive Committee of the ACWDF and Director of the ACWDF's Propaganda and Education Department, Shen Zijiu (1898-1989), was appointed the revived magazine's first editor-in-chief. >>> Creating a Socialist Feminist Cultural Front: "Women of China" (1949–1966)

Nagpur

La Main à Plume

“In 1941, while André Breton and many other surrealists were in exile in America, a handful of young people decided to group together in Paris in order to maintain surrealism in occupied France. In reference to the verse by Rimbaud (“La main à plume vaut la main à charrue”, “the writer’s hand is as important as the hand that guides the plough”), the group calls itself la Main à plumeand to signify its will to revolt against the powers that be. The opposition was not only intellectual and this generation of those that were “twenty years old in the year 1940″ were to pay a heavy price to the armed struggle. In its four years of existence, la Main à plume managed to publish, in semi-clandestinity, a dozen collective publications and about thirty individual pamphlets. >>>

On July 20, 1942 at Nagpur more then 25,000 Dalit women participated in the historic All India Depressed Classes Women’s Conference, led by Babasaheb Ambedkar. 

Mahila Atma Raksha Samiti (MARS) was founded in Kolkota, 1942  >> wiki

A year later,  the Mahila Atmaraksha Samiti (MARS) was also banned and its members moved into hiding. Regional and national leaders were imprisoned or driven underground, moving constantly from house to house to escape arrest.

The rural movement integral to MARS’ activism called Tebhaga was also on the government’s watchlist. In the Tebhaga movement, waged farmworkers and small-landholding peasant women and men sought basic human rights: fair land practices, and an end to the feudal tributes of forced labor (begar) and the sexual control of rural women. Violent police repression, that included widespread rape of rural women, sought to crush the uprising that united peasants and agricultural workers of all backgrounds, Muslims and Hindus, adivasis  and Dalits.  

MARS, Bengal’s member organization in WIDF, developed powerful strategies to organize the “sarbahara”—or ‘those who’ve lost everything.’ Members of MARS mobilized mass public protests of women seeking redress on their own behalf.  They built leadership at local and regional levels among the most oppressed women. They developed the signature petition to represent the numbers of women who supported their demands and give heft to cross-class campaigns. Perhaps most revolutionary of all, they listened to dispossessed women.

Rural landless women and urban, resettled refugees from India’s partition violence were two central bases for MARS’ membership. Demands for affordable food, clothing and housing combined with a focus on women’s economic independence to imagine women’s future independence from need. MARS propaganda – its songs, plays, pamphlets and speeches, explained women’s basic survival issues through an analysis of regional class conflict and capitalism’s global imperial war.  

>> Elisabeth Armstrong: Here and There, A Story of Women’s Internationalism, 1948-1953, Smith College 2021

Hello West Indies! This is Una Marson Calling!

"Voice" -the monthly radio magazine programme in the Eastern Service of the B.B.C. (Left to right, sitting) Venu Chitale, J.M. Tambimuttu, T.S. Eliot, Una Marson, Mulik Raj Anand, C.Pemberton, Narayana Menon; (standing) George Orweil, Nancy Barratt, Wiltiam Empson.

Milano

Gruppi di difesa della donna. Milano 1943 – 1945

Ada Gobetti 

Kolkata

Mahila Atmaraksha Samiti michhil in Burdwan town, 1940s. Photo via Ebong Alap. >>>

Burdwan/Bardhaman

Egyptian delegation to the Congrès International des Femmes, Paris, 1945, with Inji Efflatoun in centre. >>>

Čukorovac

Women’s Antifascist Movement Conference in the village of Čukorovac, Serbia, May 1944

Union des femmes d’Algérie (Union of Algerian Women, or UFA) was established in the aftermath of North Africa’s liberation from the Nazi-collaborationist Vichy regime in 1944. But the UFA was not founded by Algerian women. Rather, the UFA was the product of white, European communist women who had settled in Algeria as petit colons (‘little colonists’), organising in ‘household committees’ to defend the liberation of North Africa and campaign against rising living costs. In the same year, in the neighbouring French Protectorates of Morocco and Tunisia, the communist-aligned and European-headed Union des femmes du Maroc (UFM) and Union des femmes de Tunisie (UFT) were also established. >>>

Paris

Founding Congress of the Women's International Democratic Federation, Paris
At WIDFs founding congress, 347 delegates from 40 countries represented 181 women's organizations. They came to Paris in November 1945 from Algeria, Ceylon, Egypt, India, Indochina, Morocco, Palestine and Sudan. None came from sub-Saharan Africa. An African country appeared for the first time in the WIDF monthly bulletin, in connection with the struggle of black women in South Africa, and again in 1946, when the Union des femmes de Madagascar joined the organization. That same year, at the start of the Indochina war, the Executive Committee launched an “Appeal to the Women of the World” to investigate the condition of colonized women.   >>>. Macoucou à Pékin. L’arène internationale : une ressource politique pour les Africaines dans les années 1940-1950

“In late November 1945, when the Women’s International Democratic Federation emerged from the ashes of World War II on principles of world peace, women’s rights, democracy, anti-fascism, and children’s welfare, 850 participants from forty countries attended its first gathering in Paris, France. Joining WIDF was an organizational, not an individual act, and the list of attendees provides women’s names, their country of origin, and their organizational affiliation. Participants were not all communist-linked mass organizations. In fact, many of them were more ideologically jumbled, including those that emerged from the call for women’s unified activism against fascism. Four women from India attended their founding Congress, including Ela Reid from MARS. One of them, Vidya Munsi, traveled to Paris directly after the conference of the World Federation of Democratic Youth, another communist-linked mass organization that was held in London the month before. “Over 15,000 women filled the Velodrome D’Hiver (Winter Stadium) to capacity,” remembered Munsi of the founding address by French resistance leader Eugenie Cotton, who led the international women’s organization from 1945 to 1967.
In 1945, WIDF was the only transnational women’s organization that explicitly condemned colonialism and demanded international solidarity for liberation struggles. Its founding document stated: “The Congress calls on all democratic women’s organizations of all countries to help the women of the colonial and dependent countries in their fight for economic and political rights.” Activists from Vietnam and India in particular, but also the United States and Egypt, deepened WIDF’s opening commitments both theoretically and politically. They pushed delegates to define fascism in relationship to imperialism. They described fascism and its racialized genocide as one powerful force behind military conflict. They argued that colonial occupation and anti-black violence were other forms of fascistic violence that crushed the freedom of people around the world. Ela Reid, Jaikishore Handoo, Duong The Hauh, and other delegates made arguments powerful enough to shift the position of delegations like the one from Algeria, in 1945 made up primarily of French-origin, mostly communist members who lived in North Africa. Duong The Hauh, an expatriate from Vietnam who lived in France, tethered anti-fascism to anti-colonialism. She radically decentered Europe by naming another inside/outside contradiction laid bare during the war.

"Mothers and spouses from Europe, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Russia, France, you who suffered the atrocities committed by the bloodthirsty brutes of Nazism, you who lived next to the crematoriums in Belsen and Maidanek, you learned how far human cruelty can go when an odious regime allows a group of declassed, ambitious, predatory men to indulge freely and entirely into their wild beasts’ instincts. And if the bloodiest drama could unfold this way in Europe, if the most cruel and barbarous actions could be committed by the most civilized countries of the globe, it is because even before this war, even during peacetime, this barbarity already existed there at a latent state, it has always existed, in real and permanent ways in the colonies. We are, us Indochinese, a colonized people for eighty years. We have been knowing for eighty years a perpetual regime of occupation, oppression, police terror, that reduces human beings to the level of a beast."

Duong The Hauh reminded her audience that inside Europe, anti-Semitism drove the horror of mass incarceration and the murder of Jewish and also Roma people as racialized, religious threats to a homogenous white Christian Europe. Outside Europe, she argued, colonialism was a racialized system of expropriation of land, lives, and resources; as such, it preceded the anti-Semitic holocaust of the mid-twentieth century. “Civilization” references Europe’s self-image as well as its fig-leaf rationalization of colonial occupation, extraction of resources, and monopoly over the markets of non-Europe. For Duong The Hauh, the barbarous civilization inside Europe had been integral to its colonial occupations outside Europe for decades, for centuries. Any anti-fascism that was truly integral to women’s internationalism must know its history and take stock of its roots. Colonialism was Europe’s exterior face of imperialist civilization/barbarity, she argued, and could not possibly remain on the margins of women’s internationalism any longer.”

Excerpt from Bury the Corpse of Colonialism, Elisabeth B. Armstrong

London

Esther Cooper (left), Alice Dritz (middle), Vidya Kanuga (right)

World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY), First Congress, London, November, 1945

This photograph was included in the official record of the conference, “Forward for our Future!” It begs the question to us, its viewers, today: What must it feel like to stand in the ashes of war that spanned the globe, wrenching the lives of the majority of the people on the planet, cutting short the lives of millions of others? As we stand in our own rubble of wars that never end even when the media declares them finished, or obscures that wars of economic blockade, military occupation or aerial bombing exist right now. What does this memory about a conversation mean for us now as we refuse to accept the differential injuries of our lived violence? Vidya, Esther, and Alice collaborated on a systemic analysis of their moment. At this gathering, with other young people’s movements around the world, they linked racism to colonialism to fascism. Vidya and Esther added patriarchy as integral to the war and violence capitalism relied on to reproduce itself. They enacted their analysis differently; Vidya established global movements and Esther built her local one.

Vidya Kanuga traveled from Sheffield where she had been studying medicine to attend the conference – she first came to England in 1938 to pursue her education. Vidya had joined the Communist Party of Great Britain, as it was then called, in 1942, and was a leader in the Federation of Indian Students. Throughout the war, Indian students fought British colonial occupation as integral to their opposition to fascism. They built a global opposition that included African students and Caribbean students from the colonies. Esther Cooper was a member of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) and traveled from Birmingham, Alabama. She was the executive secretary of the Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC), a group that led the most radical direct action, grassroots organizing of young people against Jim Crow racism in the southern states during the war and afterwards. Scholars like Dayo Gore and Erik McDuffie highlight the pivotal vitality of Black feminist leadership that emerged from the Communist movement in the United States during the 20th Century – a movement that included Party members and fellow travelers.

>>> A Conversation about the Future

>>> Anticolonial Feminist Imaginaries

Manchester

Marie-Clause Vaillant Couturier testifies to her ordeal in the concentration camps Ravensbrück and Auschwitz in the witness stand at the IMT, 1946.

"Many of the WIDF leading women had joined communist parties in the 1930s, in the fight against rising fascism. The French Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, WIDF General Secretary from 1945 to 1954, was one of them. As a young photojournalist, in early 1933 she (illegally) took pictures of Nazi concentration camps Dachau and Oranienburg, where communists and other opponents of the Hitler regime were interned. During WWII, she was involved in the Resistance, as had been many congress participants." >>> The Vietnam Activities of the Women's International Democratic Federation (WIDF)

“Armenian women in Armenian costume at 14 July parade in 1946 with LAS’s bust” >> Communist Armenian Women's History

A most fascinating chapter of Armenian women’s history unfolded in France during and immediately after WWII. In 1942, led by the novelist and poet LAS (Louise Aslanian), Armenian women participants of the French Resistance founded the Fransahay Ganants Miutyun (“Union des femmes arméniennes”) in Paris. In the first two years of its existence the Union was an underground organization. While LAS was arrested a month before the liberation of Paris and died in the Ravensbrück Concentration Camp soon afterwards, her comrades decided to continue the fight though on a different platform. In November 1944 they came out of the underground and openly organized their first Central Committee. They began working on various “national” (azkayin) agendas such as the preservation of the Armenian language and culture, organization of summer camps for the children of the Armenian poor, financially assisting the families of the fallen resistance fighters, and commemorating the life of LAS, in particular by publishing her unpublished pieces. From early on the Union kept correspondence with Soviet Armenia but its ties became much firmer after Soviet Armenia’s repatriation (hayrenatartsutyun) calls in 1946. In March 1947 the Union began publishing a journal titled Hai Guine (“Armenian Woman”) which continued until 1949 and worked somewhat like a propaganda tool for what they usually called nerkaght(“in-migration”) or azkahavak (“in-gathering of the nation”). Yet dismissing this women’s journal as the mouthpiece of Stalin’s calls would not do justice to its feminist aim and content. This paper analyzes Hai Guine as a socialist feminist journal that was trans-historical and trans-national in its content and in terms of the background of its contributors.

Abeokuta

In 1947, Nigerian Funmilayo Ransome Kuti wrote on behalf of the Abeokuta Women's Union to join the WIDF. In the years that followed, she continued to take up her pen to denounce the repression suffered by women in her country. Her often lengthy texts defend the idea that women's struggle at national level is interdependent with their struggles at international level. Her commitment propelled her to the vice-presidency of the WIDF in 1955, the only African among the 16 women holding positions of responsibility within the federation.

Paris

Feb 1947, Lahore In full uniform police constable No. 1751, Nasiruddin, came forward on Tuesday [Feb 11] to court arrest along with 50 others. Among the total of 51 persons who marched into the police cordon on the mall were five scheduled caste members. … An impressive demonstration by Muslim women took place in front of the residence of the Education Minister, who has made derogatory statements against the students of Islamia College. The women’s procession then marched towards the Female Jail where Begum Shah Nawaz and Mumtaz Shah Nawaz are detained. The processionists shouted League slogans in front of the jail. Begum Shah Nawaz and Mumtaz Shah Nawaz responded from within. >>> & >>>

Lahore

London ... Kolkata 

Kolkata -- Budapest

In 1948, Kolkata was a city in foment that seeded revolt spilling beyond the confines of independent India to revolutionary movements across Asia. The World Federation of Democratic Youth held their Asian convention in Kolkata in February, 1948. Students from Indonesia, Vietnam, Myanmar and elsewhere demanded an independence not just from colonial occupation, but from capitalism itself. The militant position held by Indonesian young people sprang from betrayal: their new republic faced bombing by the Dutch. The experiences of the Vietnamese participants mirrored their own. Entrenched in an insurgency to regain their recently declared independence, Vietnamese delegates told the story of French colonial refusal to let go and the Euro-American henchmen that supported them.

>> Elisabeth Armstrong: Here and There, A Story of Women’s Internationalism, 1948-1953, Smith College 2021

Second Women's International Congress (WIDF), December 1948, Budapest

Gita Bannerji (Gita Bandyopadhyay) took a slightly different route from many of her comrades, and flew as one of two Indian delegates to WIDF’s 2nd Congress held in Budapest, Hungary, in December, 1948. She didn’t return to Kolkata until 1951. After the conference in Budapest, she traveled to Paris to work at the central offices of WIDF in Paris. Bannerji, alongside the Secretary of WIDF from the People’s Republic of China, Lu Cui and the French communist Simone Bertrand, shouldered much of the logistics, outreach and communication for WIDF’s mandate to support women’s anticolonial organizing. Lu Cui’s work involved considerable travel to colonized regions of the world to develop WIDF’s contacts with local organizers, and support their activism. Between 1949 and 1951, Gita mostly traveled within in Europe with some notable exceptions. As her letters attest, she, quite literally in some cases, represented the anticolonial struggles around the world to internationalist allies.

By the end of 1948, when Bannerji arrived, the central offices of the Women’s International Democratic Federation had been running for three years. Its official membership was ninety- one million women. Located in Paris, the post-war global city for antifascist organizing, its staff enjoyed support from the pro-communist government. By 1950, France’s central government had changed, their welcome worn thin. Eugenie Cotton, president of WIDF, also worked to found the World Peace Council. Cotton was arrested for advocating that women should tear up their sons’ enlistment papers to fight against the Vietnamese liberation movement. As Adeline Broussan detailed in her essay for this volume, “Resistantes Against the Colonial Order,” through what she calls “grassroots diplomacy” at WIDF gatherings, Vietnamese women radicalized French communist women. Their radicalization also galvanized the major shift within the French Communist Party to denounce French colonialism in absolute terms. But the consolidation of anti-colonialism at the French imperial center came with a cost. By January, 1951, the WIDF offices moved to Berlin – the Berlin of the state-socialist German Democratic Republic, where they stayed until 1991. (...)   While in Paris, Gita played a key role organizing the 1949 Asian Women’s Conference, held in Beijing.

>> Elisabeth Armstrong: Here and There, A Story of Women’s Internationalism, 1948-1953, Smith College 2021

International Alliance of Women conference (IAW), Amsterdam 1949

At first, the women grouped district by district in Abidjan, then throughout the country. The French governor, Laurent Péchoux, mentions that at the party's second inter-territorial congress, held in Abidjan in January 1949, “women's membership of the RDA (with the aim of intensifying propaganda and financing)” was one of the “important, albeit secondary, issues”. While for the men, this issue remained secondary, for the women, the objective was to consolidate the Ivorian section of the party (the PDCI-RDA), but also to exist on an international scale to reinforce their struggle against the French administration.

In Côte d'Ivoire, 1949 was marked by violent clashes between militants and colonial authorities. The French administration began to support dissident parties, then arrested the main leaders of the PDCI. It was against this backdrop of crisis that Célestine Ouezzin Coulibaly helped organize the RDA women's committee in Abidjan. She gave it the task of “creating a political bureau attached to the PDCI, organizing tours of the country, bringing together women from all the centers, convening a women's congress in Abidjan, and politically educating women, most of whom were illiterate”. This local structuring went hand in hand with fund-raising to finance the sending of a delegate to the Women's Conference of Colonial Countries scheduled to take place in Beijing in December.

Abidjan

My work as a member of the Secretariat (Administrative Committee) of the Women's International Democratic Federation took me to the Soviet Union and China in the winter of 1949-50. This organization, with 135,000,000 members living in 64 countries of Europe, Asia, Africa and North'and South America, is the largest women's organization in the world. This is because it unites women of all races, religions 'and opinions, in all kinds of countries-socialist, capitalist and colonial who want to work together for peace, for progress and the happiness of their children. It was founded in Paris in 1945, ' by women who had led in the resistance against Hitlerism. Its President is Mme. Eugenie Cotton, eminent French scientist and educator. Although 70 years old, she was recently indicted by the French government for 'an attempt to de-moralize the army and the nation.' This was because she is also the President of the Union of French Women, which, in the course of its fight against the war in Viet Nam, had plastered the walls of France with a poster showing a mother tearing up her minor son's enlistment paper and saying, "No, you won't enlist!" But such an avalanche of protests came from women all over the world that the govemment has now been forced to drop the indictment.

General Secretary of the WIDF is Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, a dynamic and courageous French woman whose four years of starvation and suffering in the dreaded Auchwitz concentration camp left her with a burning determination that fascism, hunger and war must forever be wiped out. She is a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor and a member of the French Parliament.

Its Vice-presidents include Nina Popova, leader of the Soviet Anti-fascist Committee; Tsai Chang of China, veteran of the famed "Long March" of the Chinese People's Army in 1934; Dolores Ibarruri ("La Pasionaria") of Spain, who, during the Spanish Civil War, gave the world the im-. mortal slogan, 'It is better to die on your feet than live on your knees"; and Dr. Gene Weltfish of the United States, emi- nent anthropologist and professor at Columbia University. Although the headquarters of the WIDF are now in Berlin, its annual Council meetings are held in different capitals of the world. In November, 1949, it was held for the first time. in Moscow.

I went to Peking in December, 1949, to attend a Conference of the Women of Asia, first in history. In our international delegation were leaders of the women's peace movements of France, England, Holland, the U.S.S.R. and other countries. After we crossed the Soviet Union and reached the Chinese border we travelled for three days through Manchuria, and in every city and village there were immense, wildly enthusiastic crowds of women waiting for us with flowers, apples, songs, dances, with speeches of welcome. Sometimes they had been waiting for hours in the sub-zero temperature, but they seemed not to notice it, so eager were they to see for the first time representatives of those millions of women in the Western world who were with them in their fight for a decent life and for peace. Although we could-not speak their language, the clasp of hundreds of blue-cold hands at every station told us more than words could have of the strong bonds that unite women and mothers throughout the world.

We saw this unity dramatically demonstrated at the Conference itself, held under the golden roofs of Peking’s Forbidden City—the former home of the Manchu emperors. Delegates of fourteen Asiatic countries came together in a hall now called, appropriately, “The Place Where They Think About Humanity”. And Viet-Namese women, whose homeland was being ravaged by French troops, reached out to embrace their French sisters; women from Burma and Malaya and Iran similarly welcomed the British delegate; the Indonesians thanked the Dutch representatives for their efforts to prevent the sending of Dutch troops against their countrymen. And though American bombs were still being dropped on their cities by American planes, piloted by Chiang Kai-shek’s airmen, the Chinese women greeted their American sisters with love: There was an especial warmth in their welcome to the two American Negro women delegates, Mrs. Eslanda Robeson and Mrs. Ada Jackson, and they were moved when the latter declared: “As a Negro woman whose father and mother were born slaves, it is thrilling for me to see you, the people of China, who only yesterday were oppressed and had little or nothing to say in your government, who today are the government.” How can one describe this Conferenee of the Women of Asia?

It was·a long cry of suffering, of revolt. Buf in the end, it was a hymn to the future, to victory and to peace. Fact was piled on dreadful fact as the delegates from colonial countries succeeded each other on the rostrum.

Excerpt from: Betty Millard, Women on Guard—How the Women of the World fight for Peace

“On the Trans-Siberian Railway, smoking was not a convenient habit. Crossing the Ural mountains in the dead of night was cold. The windows of the train constantly fogged with droplets of moisture congealing to slip down the grimy windowpanes. Women opened and shut the doors to their compartments quickly to keep their warm breath and body heat from escaping. In the Mongolian steppes, colder still, smoking became a kind of punishment. Perhaps due to the frigid conditions, the three French leaders of WIDF rarely left their first-class compartments to walk back to the second-class compartments and mingle. Neither did their fourth companion in first class, Anezka Hodinova, a parliament member from Czechoslovakia, who said little, hunched over her notebooks during the day, wrapped in blankets.

One argument unfolded over several days of the journey, between two WIDF members who lived in the central offices of Paris. Jeannette Vermeersch was a member of the French parliament, the French Assembly, and a powerful member of the French Communist Party. Betty Millard was an American member of the Communist Party, and she had been working in Paris, coordinating activities, replying to international members’ mail, and editing the WIDF’s publications.” She mentioned the solitary, closed-off lives of the WIDF leaders in their first-class quarters. Jeannette came back to their quarters on the fourth day of the journey, perhaps in response to her criticism. But she didn’t answer it directly. “Smoking is a betrayal of the working class,” Jeannette Vermeersch declared on that fourth day. She settled into the compartment like a rebuke, and listed the reasons as if through the curling smoke from Betty’s cigarette.

Others pushed into the cabin to listen and share their opinions. Lillah may have watched Betty’s cool gaze grow flinty, hardened by the Frenchwoman’s arguments. Betty was also living in Paris; she worked with Jeannette at the same central offices of WIDF, writing and translating. Betty didn’t seem to mind in the least being in second class, sharing her compartment with Baya Allaouchiche from Algeria and the two comrades from Mongolia, Jsivigruydin Dulmavshav and Tamara Khanum. If Baya or Tamara didn’t like the smoke, Betty would have slipped out into the frigid corridors to enjoy her cigarettes, probably wearing her ankle-length fur coat with aplomb, gazing into the thickly frosted windows as she exhaled.”

Excerpt from Bury the Corpse of Colonialism, Elisabeth B. Armstrong

Third Conference of the UFA in Algiers, photographed in Alger Républicain, May 23, 1949

An offshoot of the Algerian Communist Party, the Union des femmes d’Algérie (Union of Algerian Women, or UFA) was established in the aftermath of North Africa’s liberation from the Nazi-collaborationist Vichy regime in 1944. But the UFA was not founded by Algerian women. Rather, the UFA was the product of white, European communist women who had settled in Algeria as petit colons (‘little colonists’), organising in ‘household committees’ to defend the liberation of North Africa and campaign against rising living costs. In the same year, in the neighbouring French Protectorates of Morocco and Tunisia, the communist-aligned and European-headed Union des femmes du Maroc (UFM) and Union des femmes de Tunisie (UFT) were also established. 

Yet none of these organisations were to remain demographically dominated by the white European women engaged in early party organising. From 1946 onwards, a shift in policy directed by the Algerian Communist Party emboldened a deliberate strategy of mobilising Muslim Algerian women into the UFA’s ranks. Their targeted recruitment methods proved fruitful. By the UFA’s third conference in 1949, Algerian women outnumbered European women in the party membership, and 400 of the 650 women members in attendance were Algerian. In the same year, Baya Allaouchiche was elected the UFA’s Secretary General and subsequently joined the Algerian Communist Party’s now almost entirely Algerian Central Committee.  >>> “Nous les mamans“: ‘European’ Communism, Cross-Cultural Encounters, and Women’s Anticolonial Resistance in French North Africa

Algeria

Maria Ramelson, British Woman in New China, 1949

Daniel Kupferstein: Baya, Video 54'

In her speech at WIDF’s 1948 Budapest Congress, Cai Cheng described the growing complexity of imperialism, between the older colonial nations and the rise of an American-led nancial imperialism marked by the dominance of the dollar and Wall Street. Both forms of imperialism agreed on military solutions to“wiping out every movement for national liberation” (WIDF 1948: 476). Cai reminded her audience that the United States was the true victor of World War II, gaining a hegemony won through its capital recon- struction loans to Europe and England. She linked movements in Africa, including labor struggles in the Gold Coast, to those in Asia, citing the oil workers’ strikes in Iran. She spoke about the food shortages in China that led to peasant uprisings against the Guomindang, and the starvation in India that fueled peasant resistance to large landowners in Bengal. All of these struggles included women workers on the land and in factories, exploited even more intensively than men by even lower wages and even longer hours. While Cai spoke about the exploitation of both women and men, her focus on women’s lives in colonialism was clear: working women’s demands should ground anticolonial demands, as the floor to change the oppressive living conditions for all. The intensity of working-class, rural, and urban organizing, alongside alliances with the progressive middle classes, finally gave the anticolonial movement around the world the strength it needed to win. Colonial powers’ use of violent force to retain colonial territories continued unabated after the war, if not fiercer than before. Economies of the Netherlands, England, and France still relied upon colonies’ wealth in resources, labor, and captive consumer markets—perhaps even more desperately in the war’s aftermath. But brute force and bad-faith agreements to share power no longer sufficed to hold onto power. The united front from below, one that linked landless agricultural workers to small farmers and the urban proletariat to intellectuals and progressive middle-class people, created the unity that anticolonial resistance needed to win. Cai’s analysis ended with three goals of women’s ongoing praxis: peace, self- determination, and a democracy that eradicated poverty and starvation to provide “the freedom to live under human conditions.”

Célestine Ouezzin Coulibaly, Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, Mikrinis Ubaydulasva 

A selection of documents from the Archives des luttes des femmes en Algérie [the archive of women's struggles in Algeria], Algiers, 2020. Image courtesy of Archives des luttes des femmes en Algérie. Photo by Hichem Merouche. >>>

“The Asian Women’s Conference was a massive undertaking for a new socialist country. It opened on December 10, 1949 and lasted for seven days. Delegates listened to speeches and country reports as well as attended ceremonies and performances. The conference was held in the elaborate Winter Palace of the Forbidden City, whose art and architecture were once only accessible to the elite and their servants. Cultural innovation was a vital part of the Chinese Communist Party’s revolution. The Asian Women’s Conference showcased an incredible range of artistic experiments in theater, dance, song and film. At a dinner hosted by Zhou Enlai, the Chinese premier, conference delegates listened to Chinese jazz and danced the lindy hop. Yu Xixuan, a famous soprano who had been featured in the film Spring in a Small Town (1948), gave a talk about Chinese revolutionary music. She described experiments with tone, harmony, instrumentation, and voice range that drew upon both the folk music of Chinese ethnic minorities and western music. Chen Bo’er, the revolutionary filmmaker, would later dedicate her film Daughters of China to the Asian Women’s Conference. Outside the conference room, the All-China Democratic Women’s Federation set up book tables and the National Art Academy exhibited work by revolutionary artists, mostly brightly colored nianhua drawings from the revolutionary Yan’an arts movement, that celebrated the victories of rural women under socialism: land rights, voting, holding elected offices, and education. One drawing portrayed rural land reform and women’s new right to hold property; the text read, “We have our land certificates—we must increase production. Better days are coming!”

The 1949 Asian Women's Conference in Beijing

“They included women from West Asia, such as Salma Boummi and Amine Aref Hasan (Syrian Arab Women’s Union), Victoria Helou (League for the Defense of the Right of Lebanese Women), Ruth Lubitsh and Ilanit Feyga (Association of Arab Women of Israel or Nahda) and Mahine Faroqi (from the banned Organization of Iranian Women). Delegates came from the six Asiatic Republics of the USSR, such as Naila Basanova from Kazakistan, Kulipa Toklomanbetova from Kirghizia, Acia Atapanova from Turkmenia, and Mikrinis Ubaydulasva from Uzbekistan, as well as delegates from Azerbaijan and Tadjikistan. Among the thirty-three fraternal (non-Asian) delegates, several came from the USSR and from one Eastern European socialist country—Czechoslovakia. Others came from Algeria, Cuba, England, France, Holland, Ivory Coast, Madagascar, and the United States. The delegate from Cuba was Edith García Buchaca, a member of the communist Partido Socialista Popular. MacArthur’s occupation of Japan denied visas to the delegation of the Japanese Democratic Women’s Council, so one Japanese woman who lived permanently in China stood in for them.”

“Many delegates from the Asiatic countries have risked their lives to come to the Conference, crossing ring lines and outwitting the watchfulness of secret agents and detectives to arrive at their destination.”

(Cai Chang)

Abidjan

La marche des femmes sur Grand-Bassam désigne un mouvement de contestation à l'initiative des femmes en Côte d'Ivoire, qui se rendent d'Abidjan à Grand-Bassam du 22 au 24 décembre 1949 pour demander la libération des responsables politiques emprisonnés par les autorités coloniales françaises

Marianne d’Erneville (Sénégal) >>> Festival mondial de la jeunesse et des étudiants pour la paix (Berlin) 

Kolkata

Founding of the National Federation of Indian Women 

Renée Farage (Guinée française)

>>> World Congress of Women, Copenhagen 

Despite the divisions, the goal of forming a continental women’s organization was still a possibility for women in Africa in the 1950s because of women and organizations such as Jeanne Martin Cisse and later PAWO, who wanted to see African nations liberated and women part of the formation of newly liberated nations. Jeanne Martin Cisse was a political active Guinean teacher during Guinea’s independence. Due to her politically activeness, Cisse was appointed the secretary general of the Union of Senegalese Women and was sent to a women’s conference in Asnieres, France, in 1954. In her autobiography, Cisse details the events that led to the foundation of PAWO, a women’s organization that would include women’s voices across Africa. Having said that, the conference at Asnieres was the fourth women’s gathering under WIDF.  Ouezzin Coulibaly, a woman from current-day Burkina Faso and based in Abidjan, Cote D’Ivoire, attended the WIDF meeting in Beijing and made sure more African women came to the next meeting at Asnieres in 1954 due to the important topics which were covered and included women; in an effort to include more African women in the conversations surrounding women, Cisse attended the meeting in 1954. The meeting in Asnieres acted as a location for women around the world to convene and speak on topics that they deemed important but were not being spoken of in the general public. The meeting was a space for women to discuss the challenges they faced in their daily lives and the women they represented and find solutions to some of those challenges outside often male-dominated spaces. The 1954 meeting went successfully, with the women deciding to meet again in Vienna for a Congressional meeting equipped with workshops to tackle more issues brought which were brought up.

Fourth Women’s Gathering under WIDF, Asnieres 

Ruth First becomes editor of Fighting Talk 

After the Peking Congress in 1949, the World Congress of Mothers in Copenhagen in 1953 and Lausanne in 1955 provided further opportunities for contact. In Dakar in 1956, a year after the Bandoung Conference, against the backdrop of the Algerian war and the independence of Morocco and Tunisia, at the founding meeting of the Union des femmes du Sénégal (Senegalese Women's Union) organized on the occasion of March 8th, the speakers took the floor to say that African women “join their companions from other continents to break the chains of slavery” and that they belong to “a women's movement [that] is becoming aware of the role it has to play”. They take up the pacifist slogan, justifying it by the participation of their “parents and husbands” in the Second World War, and also refer to the Thiaroye shootings. One activist mentions the struggle of “women in France” for peace in Algeria, “the return of young soldiers and the advent of the Front Populaire”, and adds that “women's participation in Senegal's political activities must lead to liberation from the colonial yoke”. >>>

Lillan Ngoyi was also a transnational figure who recognised the potential influence that international support could have on the struggle against apartheid and the emancipation of black women. With this in mind she embarked on an audacious (and highly illegal) journey to Lausanne, Switzerland in 1955 to particiapte in the World Congress of Mothers held by the Women's International Democratic Federation (WIDF). Accompanied by her fellow activist Dora Tamana, and as an official delegate of FEDSAW, she embarked on a journey that would see an attempt to stow away on a boat leaving Cape Town under "white names", defy (with the help of a sympathetic pilot) segregated seating on a plane bound for London and gain entry to Britain under the pretext of completing her course in bible studies. With Tamara, she would visit England, Germany, Switzerland, Romania, China and Russia, meeting women leaders often engaged in left wing politics, before arriving back in South Africa a wanted woman. At Lausanne, Ngoyi presided over the 2nd session of the conference, giving its opening address. Standing in front of assembled women and mothers from almost every continent, she declared: "The Federation of South African Women.... has joined hands with all organisations fighting for democratic rights, for full equality, irrespective of race of sex." >>> Lilian Ngoyi, Resources

July 1955 World Congress of Mothers, Lausanne 

>>> Véronique Bouesso (Congo-Brazza), Bintou Sidibé (Sénégal), Frumence d’Almeida (Côte d’Ivoire), Gisèle Rabesahala, Mélanie Ratompoarinosy (Madagascar).

Photographie de Madame Parker, Huisman et Françoise Leclercq, de la délégation française, s’entretenant avec des femmes de Madagascar et de la Côte d’Ivoire >>>>

Raya Dunayevskaya is one of the rare women who founded her own revolutionary organization and she did it at the height of Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunt of communists. She led News and Letters Committees from its beginning in 1955 until her death in 1987.

>>> News and Letters Committees

Funmilayo Ransome Kuti becomes vice-presidence of the WIDF in 1955.

Regardless of its size, international work was important to this small group of women from the very start: Mompati followed in Lilian Ngoyi’s footsteps by travelling around the newly independent states of west Africa in search of support. These trips were often organised by WIDF or the Pan African Women’s Organisation (PAWO, itself founded in Tanganyika in 1962). According to Mompati, the WIDF conference in the Soviet Union in 1963 put ANC women in touch with women from Angola’s MPLA for the first time, and these connections allowed Mompati and other ANC women to travel to west Africa to build networks with women there (this included an invitation from Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti). The ANC was a member of PAWO, which seems to have played an important role in building cross-nation solidarity among women on the continent. Nevertheless, these connections are yet to be examined. >>> 

Conférence mondiale des travailleuses (Budapest, 14-17 juin 1956) : Fatou Diarra (Sénégal), >>> Jeanne Martin Cissé (Sénégal), Marie Maillat Gazi (Sénégal), Aïssata Sow (Soudan français), Françoise Sant’Anna Olohou (Dahomey), Paulette Kassi Ebah (Côte d’Ivoire), Émilie Ngotoum (Cameroun).

Samia Lakhdari, Zohra Drif, Djamila Bouhired, Hassiba Ben Bouali

Ali [la Pointe] wanted to take a photo of all four of us there on the Belhaffaf's rooftop. Samia and I expressed our strong refusal, obsessed with the security rules and all that we had learned about clandestine living.
But Ali insisted, declaring that he was the happiest of brothers and the proudest of men since God could not have sent him more wonderful sisters than the four of us. Eventually we gave in. Like a child enthralled by his toy, Ali officiated. He distributed a weapon to each of us, instructing us how best to hold and aim them. He took the photo, happy as a kid. Facing the camera, Samia who hid her face behind the extended gun, couldn't stop ruminating throughout the following days about our incredible carelessness-especially that of our leaders.
Alas, fate would prove her right, because this picture would fall into the hands of the security services and help them to identify us. Before the photo betrayed us, nobody knew who we were, despite the arrests of brothers with whom we had worked. I tell the story of this photo because it expresses just how human, brotherly, and affectionate Ali la Pointe was.  >>> Zohra Drif: Mémoires d'une combattante de l'ALN, Zone Autonome d'Alger, Chihab editions, 608 Seiten, 2013. // English translation: Inside Battle of Algiers, Just World Books, 320 pages, 2017.

On the 9th of August 1956, together with Helen Joseph, Rahima Moosa and Sophia Theresa Williams de Bruyn, Lillian Ngoyi led the women's anti-pass march to the Union Buildings in Pretoria, one of the largest demonstrations staged in South African history. Holding thousands of petitions in one hand, Ngoyi was the one who knocked on Prime Minister Strijdom’s door to hand over the petitions

Algiers

>>> The Idea of sitting around the negotiation table

>>> Anticolonial Feminist Imaginaries: Past Struggles and Imagined Futures

Benares

Congrès syndical mondial (Leipzig, 4-15 octobre 1957) : Amina Sylla (Guinée française), Aoua Keita (Soudan français)

Conférence de solidarité franco-asiatique (Le Caire, 25-30 juillet 1957) : >>> Marthe Ouandié (Cameroun).

Frankfurt/Main, 2019

Presidential speech at the The National Federation of Indian Women—we are happy to have its third conference in Benares, 1959 ..... >>>

Forth Congress of the Women's International Federation (WIDF), Vienna, June 1958 

>> It was at the conference in Austria that Jeanne Martin Cissé met the following women, Dembele Bassata Djire, a teacher from French Sudan; Marthe Ouandie and Gertrude Omog from Union of the Peoples of Cameroon; and Margret Kenyatta, an activist from Kenya. The Vienna conference provided the space for these women to expand their horizons to how other countries were approaching the issue of women in social and political settings. ++ Rachel Razafindramisa (Madagascar).

The Women’s Union of Guinea-Ghana, established in November 1958 at the First Conference of African Peoples, held in Accra, was extended to Mali in 1961 and established contacts with Nigeria. That same year an initial conference, held in Conakry, was attended by representatives from UFOA, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Liberia, Morocco and Tunisia.

The First Congress of the Union des femmes de l’Ouest africain (UFOA) [West African Women’s Union], Bamako, Mali, July 1959  

An initial example of joint action taken to achieve continent-wide union was the Union des femmes de l’ouest africain [West African Women’s Union] (UFOA) established in 1959. Its founding congress was attended by representatives of women’s movements from Guinea, Senegal, French Sudan (now Mali) and Dahomey (now Benin) and enabled many activists to meet each other. Jeanne Martin Cissé was a member of the Guinean delegation and Aoua Keita attended on behalf of Mali.

>> Aoua Keita

>> Le destin de Aoua Keita 

The Women’s Improvement Society of Nigeria inaugurated a twelve-day congress at the University of Ibadan, August 1960

A strike organised by Dano textile workers in Hammarsdale, South Africa, 1982. Wits Historical Papers. >> Eddie Cottle: Fifty Years ago, women led the mass Durban strikes.