2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

The World Wars unleashed a new form of total war whose scale and targeting of civilians triggered mass population displacements that challenged concepts of individual and national identity. Debates about whether and how to incorporate refugees into potentially hostile societies focused on migrants’ ability to adapt to normative gender roles. This panel examines refugees as a category by emphasizing how gender shaped women’s experience of crossing both international and internal boundaries. Focusing on the gendered politics of inclusion and exclusion in Europe and the United States, the papers reveal that gendered debates about identity simultaneously complicated and facilitated migration. Because governments failed to reach unified views on migration issues, female refugees and activists in receiving countries made themselves leading participants in the politicized process of incorporation. Suzanne Orr examines how Russian-speaking refugees to the United States in the 1920s benefited from humanitarians’ belief that they opposed communist calls to nationalize women. Through the use of autobiography, Nupur Chaudhuri challenges the primacy of international migrants and urban centers as recipient sites by tracing the experiences of Alice NeuMeyer Wentzinger, an urban Alsatian woman internally displaced in rural France during World War II. Mark Crowley argues that female trade union groups shaped the debate about Jewish refugees in Britain during the Second World War. Taken together, they show that migrant women made alliances with civilian reformers and challenged government policies as they struggled to assert their own identities, care for their families, and contribute to their new homes in peace and war.