Unflattering Portraits: Mediterranean Women and the International Alliance of Women, Berlin 1929

The International Alliance of Women for Suffrage and Equal Citizenship invited its members to celebrate its twenty-fifth anniversary at the Berlin Congress, to be held in June 1929. The call to congress declared that the organization’s new chief aim was interesting and educating women in the duties of citizenship, “whether or not they have or have not the vote.” This meeting would be a critical moment for members from Egypt, Italy, and Turkey. With authoritarian rule by antifeminist and suffrage-resistant regimes firmly entrenched by the end of the 1920s, the Alliance proved a necessary interlocutor and network for their activism. Following the Paris 1926 Congress, Huda Sha‘arawi, president of the Egyptian Feminist Union, became a member on the Alliance’s Executive Board, and the Turkish Women’s Union formally affiliated with the international organization. The Italian Suffrage Federation would attend the Berlin congress after a few years of domestic in-fighting and struggles with the Fascist regime. Even after years of interaction and exchange, many Protestant North Atlantic members of the Alliance held firmly entrenched biases towards and xenophobic views of “Mohammedan” and “Latin” women that Othered these activists within the broader movement. Through the lenses of congress attendance and members’ involvement on two particular committees–Nationality of Married Women and Legal Status of Women–I argue that to ensure success for their own goals in Berlin, these Mediterranean women worked to subvert the Alliance’s biases to achieve their own aims and build momentum for suffrage battles at home going into the 1930s.