Piecing together suffrage internationalism: Place, space, and connected histories of Australasian women's activism

Abstract

Over the past 20 years, suffrage historians have sought to reimagine their field—traditionally tethered to the nation—as an international one. The Australasian suffragists, who strove to overcome their perceived isolation by exchanging print, personnel, and ideas across borders, seem perfect candidates for such revisionist treatment. However, despite the invigorating push to destabilise the nation, which has rewired much of Australian and New Zealand historiography, the suffragists remain ensconced in national frames. Revisiting the rich Australasian scholarship on women, mobility, and cross‐border organisation, this article discusses the political and intellectual barriers that have impeded attempts to reconstruct suffrage internationalism. Yet documenting the suffragists' cross‐border interactions requires more than replacing monolithic national histories with revised internationalist versions. Instead, responding to debates about the digitally driven rise of connected histories, this article argues that historians should piece together suffrage internationalism as it existed in specific places—recovering often messy assemblages of transnational individuals, groups, and organisations. Such an approach will both illuminate colonial women's place in the networks that bound the fin‐de‐siècle world and provide a fresh perspective on the international women's movement.

Gender and Media in the Broadcast Age

“…In this facet of her work on radio, she drew on the already existing networks of the WSG, which in turn built on aspects of the League of Women Voters and the Women's Christian Temperance Union before them (Coltheart 2005). The template for the kind of feminist internationalism that Greenwood pursued in her long career as an activist emerged in the late 1930s in reference to these nineteenth-century feminist networks, built upon "Western imperialism and Christian evangelism" (Coltheart 2005: 182; see also Keating 2018), but she also used the medium of radio and the format of the talk to speak in new and inspiring ways to individual women listeners, who were in turn encouraged to see their own everyday lives as intimately connected to world events.…”