Library of Congress - individual and interpersonal experiences of international suffrage activism

Internationalism is a fascinating, yet often overlooked, dimension of the early twentieth-century women’s suffrage movement. My research meaningfully intervenes in existing scholarship on the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA), which tends to define institutional contours and thus limits its scope to high politics. My cultural-historical framing privileges individual and interpersonal experiences of international suffrage activism, optimally served by a microhistorical methodology. I begin with an intimate lens on individuals’ sensory, embodied, and emotional experiences. I then zoom out to focus on relations – sometimes affable, sometimes fraught – between international suffragists, which weathered the First World War, differential rates of enfranchisement, and ideological polarities. This enriched understanding of friendships and fallouts equips me to examine broader phenomena, namely how the IWSA negotiated the conflicting demands of nationalism and internationalism, imperial feminism and ‘global sisterhood’, and suffragism and feminism.
I emulate my subjects’ commitment to internationalism by triangulating between American, British, and German experiences. This International Fellowship will therefore be instrumental in allowing me to trace American suffragists’ transnational interactions, movements, and relationships. Moreover, access to the Library’s expansive archives (primarily in the Main, European, and Manuscript Reading Rooms) in tandem with expertise on Local History and Genealogy will enable me to explore the quotidian experiences of figureheads and rank-and-file IWSA members alike. Only by immersing myself in the Library’s exclusive source materials and collaborating with specialists will I grasp the intimate details of suffragists’ lives which are vital to the success of my PhD.
I will be the project lead.