Professor Emerita Francisca de Haan gives a keynote speech on the World Women’s Committee Against War and Fascism

Francisca de Haan presents "Expanding Our Research Agenda: Women From the Region in the World Women’s Committee Against War and Fascism (WWCAWF, est. 1934)" as one of the keynote speakers at an international conference on "Feminisms and Politics in Interwar Balkans and East-Central Europe". The GENS Professor Emerita will present on November 28 at the University of Crete (Greece).

Francisca de Haan argues that the existing historiography on the WWC/CMF does not discuss all delegations of Western countries, although some of these were of considerable size. Nor does it discuss countries or member organizations from this region even though—according to the WWC/CMF’s own sources—its founding congress was attended by women from Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Hungary, Poland, Macedonia, Romania, Serbia, and Yugoslavia. In her lecture, she will first provide a short historiographical overview. What do we know of the WWC/CMF and its member organizations? Secondly, what can we find out about the WWC/CMF women and member organizations not yet included in the historiography? It will become clear that many of its participants were involved in well-known national and international women’s organizations, then or later. Rather than seeing the WWC/CMF as a sort of anomaly in the international women’s movement, as seems to have been the case until recently, she will argue that its history can help us better understand linkages between women’s organizations, connections between women activists across Europe and through time, as well as the formative role of anti-fascism for a lot of women’s activism. 

See the complete conference program and Professor Emerita Francisca de Haan's abstract here.