ABSTRACT
This article analyses Hungarian-born activist Rosika Schwimmer’s post-1918 experiences in Europe and the USA against the background of developments in international women’s movements in the aftermath of the First World War. Previous literature has blamed her growing isolation, and at times conscious exclusion, from cross-border feminist organisations promoting suffrage and peace on either her involvement in the hapless Ford Peace Ship expedition in 1915–16 or on her uncompromising determination, from 1914 onwards, to prioritise pacifism and anti-war campaigns over all other feminist and humanitarian concerns. However, this article offers a more comprehensive and nuanced account, one which demonstrates how the attributes that made Schwimmer such a central figure in pre-war European and worldwide feminist movements—her ‘exotic’ Hungarian-Jewish origins, her absolute rejection of violence, and her forceful stance against nationalism and ‘national’ interests—counted against her in the very changed world of international women’s activism after 1918.
