The interwar period (1919-1939) presented tremendous possibilities and significant challenges for feminist activists as they faced both new social and political realities and lingering practices and concerns. The papers in this panel explore how women from both sides of the First World War, the Pan-African movement, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East collaborated with peers from around the world, navigating and critiquing geopolitical hierarchies and colonial practice. We will examine how their activism occurring in broader global networks disrupted, reimagined, and challenged traditional understandings of power.

Our panel presents new insights and observations to well-established movements that elevate voices often obscured or silenced. Two papers engage with the International Woman Suffrage Alliance. One explores how its European members from opposite sides of the First World War searched for reconciliation and rebuilding in the conflict’s immediate aftermath. The second articulates how Mediterranean members still faced marginalization from the Alliance’s North Atlantic core by the end of the 1920s despite years of engagement. Another paper explores the National Association of Colored Women’s under-examined contributions to the Pan-Africanist movement, including its critical work in saving Pan-African congresses held in Europe (1923) and the United States (1927). The final paper examines how Syrian women’s rights activists sought to cultivate relationships with American activists at meetings held in the United States in the 1930s-1940s to advocate for national independence and their own rights. These papers explore challenges within interwar feminist activist networks and how they can provide lessons for coalition-building today.