It is also clear that many of the leading women in the WIDF had met before and knew each other personally, not only from national contexts, but also from such contexts as the League of Nations, the 1936 Rassemblement Universel de la Paix/International Peace Campaign, the International Federation of University Women, or the international Communist movement. >>>
On 15 January 1919, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were murdered in Berlin by officers and soldiers of the counter-revolutionary Reichswehr units. >>>
TO CREATE CROWDS OUT OF SCATTERED FLOCKS....
LIBRETTO FOR CHRONOLOGIES OF ORGANISING, NEGOTIATING, GATHERING, STRUGGLING, SUBSISTING
NON-LINEAR WAYS OF READING, RELATING, CONTINUING
“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.”
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.
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)
Founding conference of the League Against Imperialism held in Brussels on February 10, 1927 >>> First International Congress against Imperialistic Colonisation
Willi Münzenberg, Jawaharlal and Kamala Nehru, Ernst Toller, Georg Ledebour, Henriette Roland-Holst, Edo Fimmen at the Congress.
Founding of the All-India Women’s Conference (AIWC) and Kamaladevi Chattopadhyayawas a founding member. >>> thesis : KAMALADEVI CHATTOPADHYAYA, ANTI-IMPERIALIST AND WOMEN'S RIGHTS ACTIVIST, 1939-41
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
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." >>>
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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. >>>
Soong Ching Ling dines with textile workers at their canteen during an inspection of Stare Cotton Mill No. 17 in Shanghai in October, 1958. >>> In Memory of Soong Ching Ling 1893-1981.
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).
First Pan-Pacific Women's Conference >>>
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
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
"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.
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)
In a short story about the war entitled “700 Calendar Days” one African American, Oscar Hunton, who wanted to go to Ethiopia explained his decision to fight for the Republican cause, quipping that Spain “ain’t Ethiopia, but it’ll do.” Hunton was one of the 80–100 African American soldiers who enlisted in the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, an international brigade that rallied against Franco. These men saw links between events in Ethiopia and Spain, which was captured in the communist slogan “Ethiopia’s fate is at stake on the battle fields of Spain.” So too did Paulette Nardal, Una Marson, and Eslanda Robeson.
The Italian invasion of Ethiopia and the Spanish Civil War prompted Nardal, Marson, and Robeson to work under the broad banner of anti-fascist internationalism that was also linked to other internationalisms. Nardal and Marson were both emotionally affected by the attack on Ethiopia and became important activists in Paris and London, providing humanitarian relief, raising funds, and inform- ing the public on the war. Their versatile activism saw them move in and out of republican, colonial, communist, women’s, Pan-African, academic, and Catholic networks. Rather than attaching themselves to one particular organization, they bridged political, gender, class, and religious divides, which enabled them to create overlapping, connected networks that expanded their anti-fascist, black, and Christian internationalism. In contrast, through travelling to various countries in Africa, Robeson contributed to the defense of not only Ethiopia but Africa as a whole, which strengthened her anti-colonial politics and black internationalism. Similarly, her sojourn to war-torn Spain in 1938 led to her standing in coalition with Republican Spain and playing a role in anti-fascist internationalism.
>> quoted from "The Italian Invasion of Ethiopia, the Spanish Civil War, and Anti-fascist Internationalism, 1935–1939" in: Race Women Internationalists by Imaobong D. Umoren
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. >>>
Fascism Now?
Inquiries for an Expanded Frame
Special Issue of CES Volume 7, Issue 1
>> The Anti-Imperialist Horizon
>> Colonial Fascism — A Syllabus
>>.....
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.’” >>>
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)
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.
Mahila Atmaraksha Samiti michhil in Burdwan town, 1940s. Photo via Ebong Alap. >>>
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. >>>
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
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
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.
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.
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. >>> & >>>
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
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.
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
Algerian women protestors, 1991
"The streets of Algeria light up every morning on our amnesias, our silences, our refusals . . . The context doesn’t change much. The battles are the same, then as now. They, the women of Algeria, women activists, had made these streets their space for expression, protest and dialogue. With these photos, Nazim Touati has captured these moments in our memories . . . in a story that is still to be written. That was yesterday. It could have been today." >>> Habiba Djahnine—Memory Bearer
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.”
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. >>>
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)
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.
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”. >>>
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).
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.
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).
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
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).
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.
