“New Perspectives on Global Women’s Organizing during World War II” Public Lecture by Francisca de Haan

Celebrating the 15th anniversary of the Department of Gender Studies and the 20th anniversary of CEU

 The Department of Gender Studies proudly presents the lecture series

 Voicing Genders, Engendering Voices

   “New Perspectives on Global Women’s Organizing during World War II”

A public lecture by

 Francisca de Haan

Professor, Department of Gender Studies

November 29, 2011, 6:00 pm, Auditorium

Regarding the Second World War, women’s historians focus on women as victims and perpetrators, their contribution to the war industry, military actions and the resistance, and/or on the question of whether and how this war has contributed to women’s emancipation.

World War II, however, has not been integrated in the historiography of trans/international women’s movements in the twentieth century, but is rather treated as a black hole in this research field: scholars either deal with the interwar period or with the post-war period, or they jump from 1939/1940 to 1945 and skip the period of the war itself.

Based on my ongoing research about the three main international women’s organizations of the post-1945 era (the International Council of Women, the International Alliance of Women, and the Women’s International Democratic Federation), I will argue that, rather than a “black hole,” the World War II era was a period of continuity in women’s transnational organizing, of unexpected and later unthinkable bedfellows, as well as a time of crucial new initiatives, some of which with an impact until today.  

Francisca de Haan is Professor of Gender Studies and a former Vice-President of the International Federation for Research in Women’s History. She published three monographs (in Dutch and English) and co-edited ten books (in Dutch and English). Her main fields of interest are modern European Women’s and Gender History, transnational women’s organizations, and varieties of women’s activism from a global perspective. She is founding editor of Aspasia: The International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women's and Gender History.

The Voicing Genders, Engendering Voices lecture series is a joint celebration of the Department’s 15th anniversary and the 20th anniversary of CEU. The lecture series shares our diverse faculty’s most recent research with the wider academic community and showcases the multiple and interdisciplinary ways in which our field contributes to the themes of CEU’s university-wide celebrations: disciplinary self-reflexivity and academia’s social responsibility. Thus our lecture series is intended to contribute to the larger intellectual debates initiated in celebration of CEU’s 20th anniversary.