Global and Comparative Feminisms in the Long C19th
Discussion from event published in Women's History Review
In January 2017, TORCH, in collaboration with the Centre for Gender, Identity and Subjectivity and the Centre for Global History hosted a symposium on ‘Global and comparative feminisms in the long nineteenth century: new perspectives’. This event, organised by Marilyn Booth, Kathryn Gleadle and Zoë Thomas, sought to explore how best to categorise the movements of female empowerment that began to crystallise and cluster across the globe during the c. 1870–1930 period.
The fruits of these discussions have now been published in Women’s History Review in an article authored by Kathryn Gleadle and Zoë Thomas, ‘Global Feminisms, c. 1870–1930: vocabularies and concepts - a comparative approach.’ Here, Gleadle and Thomas provide a synopsis of the papers and the debates they fostered, and argue for the importance of pragmatic conceptual frameworks to better understand women’s diverse empowerment strategies within a comparative lens.
2018 will see many acts of commemoration to celebrate the centenary of the partial enfranchisement of British women. This article reflects a key concern of the symposium - that these suffrage campaigns be more fully situated within the broader global projects of activism and discussion of which they formed a part.
The full article may be found here.
