ABSTRACT
This chapter reveals the major debates that animated women’s organizing in the interwar period. In the colonizing nations of the North Atlantic, feminists debated whether to prioritize efforts to secure legal rights, such as the right to vote or own property, over those that would have guaranteed economic security and dignity for women workers. In the parts of the world struggling for national independence, the major debate among feminists was over whether to prioritize ending colonialism over fighting for women’s rights; a subsidiary debate emerged about how much to collaborate with women from colonizing nations to achieve their feminist and nationalist goals. These debates played out at a series of international women’s conferences hosted in the 1920s and 1930s, which are the focus of this chapter. Efforts to shape the emergent international women’s rights system at the League of Nations fueled new forms of global feminist organizing, which was more inclusive than cross-border feminist solidarity in the pre–World War I period.
