Jamaican Women and the World Wars by Dalea Bean

Author:Dalea Bean
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

Setting the Stage

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the move to grant women and other disenfranchised groups the right to vote was a global phenomenon, marred by long and sometimes violent struggles in many countries. Though the right was granted to women in New Zealand from as early as 1886 and in some states of the USA from 1897, the nineteenth century was an epoch of great efforts to include women more substantially in the political life of their countries. These movements were not only individual country struggles; there were great efforts to formalise an international women’s movement. Paris was the site of the first international women’s congress in 1878; the precursor to more recent and ground-breaking world conferences on women in Mexico (1975), Copenhagen (1980), Nairobi (1985) and Beijing (1995). The International Council of Women, founded in 1888, represented a transatlantic movement for women’s suffrage. Set up by Susan B. Anthony and May Wright Sewell, among others, the first convention of the Council was held in Washington, DC, and 49 delegates from Britain , India, France , Norway, Denmark, Canada, Finland, Ireland and the United States attended. In an attempt to have as wide a membership as possible, the Council did not specifically lobby for women’s suffrage and as a result, a void still needed to be filled. Enter Carrie Chapman Catt , then president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). Catt was passionate about the ideal of a global women’s suffrage movement . She viewed local nationalism as a myopic masculine phenomenon and her ideology was therefore centred on an opposing feminist standpoint of forward-thinking internationalism. From Catt’s and British suffragist Millicent Fawcett ’s efforts the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA) was born in February 1902.

The alliance was populated by Germany , Britain , the Netherlands, Sweden, the United States, Denmark, Norway, Canada, Hungary, Finland, Italy, Russia, South Africa and Switzerland among others. While World War I did much to further local suffrage movements, it somewhat diminished the momentum of the IWSA, as these women turned their attention to patriotic wartime service. There was some buoyancy after the war ended however, up to the end of World War II . In this period suffrage was granted to women in many of the affiliated nations, and their mandate and name changed to the International Alliance of Women (IAW).

In addition to these two organisations, mention must also be made of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) which, in 1915, grew out of the alliance, with the mandate of lobbying for peace, as the name suggests (Rupp and Taylor 1999).

As a result of the widespread global women’s alliance around the issue of suffrage, authors like Ramirez et al. (1997, 736) have argued that the vote for women was realised only in part by national struggles and the local mobilisation of women. As they argue, ‘from the outset, we believe, the battle for women’s suffrage was an international crusade drawing on universalistic principles’. However, the

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