ABSTRACT
Is there a particular affinity between the comparative method and the field of women’s history? I believe that there is and that this engagement has its own history. Feminists of the 1830s and 1840s, Bonnie Anderson tells us, saw the subjection of women as global and universal: instances of oppression in other lands provided analogies to their own situation; achievements of women anywhere were occasions for celebration and hope. They compared, in other words, in order to connect: examples from abroad were used to establish the commonality of women’s subordination and to strengthen cross-cultural sisterly ties.1 True, the rise of mass nationalism and imperialist rivalries blunted this early optimistic internationalism. By the late nineteenth century, Western feminists were as likely to compare in order to differentiate and rank-order, dwelling on the oppression of women abroad in order to demonstrate their own cultural superiority.2 But that international orientation, that tendency to look across the border in sympathy and hope, was never entirely lost. “As a woman, I have no country,” Virginia Woolf insisted in 1938, and although her countrywoman Eleanor Rathbone, with her eye on Hitler’s Germany, begged to differ,
she too admitted that she had trouble as a feminist “remembering or bothering about national distinctions.”3
