Feminism as if All People Mattered: Working to Remove the Causes of War, 1919–1929

2001 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 375-394 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jo Vellacott

This paper first looks briefly at the connections – personal, political, practical and philosophical – between pre-First World War British and European women's suffrage and feminist pacifism as it emerged after 1914. Two feminist approaches to postwar peacemaking are compared, and the underlying assumptions of the Paris Peace Conference of the Allied and Associated Powers are compared with those of the women gathered at Zurich in May 1919. The aspirations and achievement of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom between 1919 and 1930 are analysed less in terms of what the organisation did for women than in terms of the women's own intent, and what they hoped to do for the world. The article considers how they confronted the political disabilities they faced as women, and on occasion turned them to their advantage, and shall show how they saw their pacifism as integral to their feminism, although it frequently took them out of gender stereotypes, particularly in their insistence on moving into that most male preserve, international relations.

Author(s):  
James Muldoon

The German council movements arose through mass strikes and soldier mutinies towards the end of the First World War. They brought down the German monarchy, founded several short-lived council republics, and dramatically transformed European politics. This book reconstructs how participants in the German council movements struggled for a democratic socialist society. It examines their attempts to democratize politics, the economy, and society through building powerful worker-led organizations and cultivating workers’ political agency. Drawing from the practices of the council movements and the writings of theorists such as Rosa Luxemburg, Anton Pannekoek, and Karl Kautsky, this book returns to their radical vision of a self-determining society and their political programme of democratization and socialization. It presents a powerful argument for renewed attention to the political theories of this historical period and for their ongoing relevance today.


Author(s):  
Michele Nicoletti

Carl Schmitt’s thought on international relations appears from the outset to be profoundly informed by his reflections on the philosophy of history. In this the German jurist seems to be fully consonant with the climate of his time, of that generation which saw the 19th century ‘concert of Europe’ crumble beneath their feet into the great tragedy of European civil war which began with the First World War. The collapse of the world order thus almost inevitably leads him to question the meaning of history and to be influenced by the ideas of the end of the world and of history, and by the symbols and metaphors connected to this theme, which have been part of Western culture for centuries.


Author(s):  
Gregory A. Barton

After the death of Gabrielle Howard from cancer, Albert married her sister Louise. Louise had been pressured to leave Cambridge as a classics lecturer as a result of her pro-peace writings during the First World War. After working for Virginia Wolf, she then worked for the League of Nations in Geneva. Louise was herself an expert on labor and agriculture, and helped Albert write for a popular audience. Albert Howard toured plantations around the world advocating the Indore Method. After the publication of the Agricultural Testament (1943), Albert Howard focused on popularizing his work among gardeners and increasingly connected his composting methods to issues of human health.


Südosteuropa ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 68 (2) ◽  
pp. 274-281
Author(s):  
Dubravka Stojanović

AbstractThe author comments on the political and economic options in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic that started at the beginning of 2020. She revisits responses to the crises of the First World War, the Great Crash of 1929, and the Second World War, sorting them into ‘pessimistic’ and ‘optimistic’ responses, and outlining their respective consequences.


2016 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
JESSICA REINISCH

In 2005Contemporary European Historypublished a special issue on transnationalism, edited by Patricia Clavin and Jens-Wilhelm Wessels. The articles presented six examples of ‘transnational’ connections between Europeans from different countries, focusing primarily on contacts in the political and economic realms, and documenting a multitude of ties and links between Europeans at all levels from the end of the First World War to the early 1960s.


2020 ◽  
Vol 65 ◽  
pp. 309-314
Author(s):  
Kirill A. Solovyov

In the center of the article author’s attention is the book “Twilight of Europe” by G. A. Landau, which is sometimes regarded as direct predecessor of O. Spengler’s works. The article is devoted to G. A. Landau’s views on the nature of political, social, and legal processes in Europe after the First World War. The special attention is paid to the circumstances that Landau believed to be the signs of European civilization ill-being: the collapse of empires, nationalism, and the inclusion of the masses in the political life. Accordingly, the emphasis is placed on Landau’s evaluation of such concepts as “militarism”, “empire”, “nation”, etc.


Author(s):  
Benjamin Ziemann

It is a commonplace to see the First World War as a major caesura in German and European history. This article records the war years from 1914–1918 in Germany. Not least, such an interpretation can rely on the perceptions of influential contemporary observers. In Germany, as in other belligerent countries, many artists, intellectuals, and academics experienced the outbreak of the war as a cathartic moment. While it is straightforward to see the mobilization for war and violence as a major caesura for any of the belligerent countries, it is much more complicated to account for causalities and for German peculiarities. Difficult methodological questions arise, which have not always been properly addressed. While Germany was facing a ‘world of enemies’, as a popular slogan suggested, the semantics of the political shifted to an articulation of emotions, excitements, and promises, contributing to a dramatized narrative centered around the notions of sacrifice and fate. The effect of World War I concludes the article.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susanne Klengel

The radical aesthetic of the historical avant-garde movements has often been explained as a reaction to the catastrophic experience of the First World War and a denouncement of the bourgeoisie’s responsibility for its horrors. This article explores a blind spot in these familiar interpretations of the international avant-garde. Not only the violence of the World War but also the experience of a worldwide deadly pandemic, the Spanish flu, have moulded the literary and artistic production of the 1920s. In this paper, I explore this hypothesis through the example of Mário de Andrade’s famous book of poetry Pauliceia desvairada (1922), which I reinterpret in the light of historical studies on the Spanish flu in São Paulo. An in-depth examination of all parts of this important early opus of the Brazilian Modernism shows that Mário de Andrade’s poetic images of urban coexistence simultaneously aim at a radical renewal of language and at a melancholic coming to terms with a traumatic pandemic past.


Cliocanarias ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-43
Author(s):  
Miguel Ángel Perfecto García ◽  

The regime of general Francisco Franco imposed a nationalist model from two ideological sources: the nationalcatholicism, an antiliberal proposal of the Catholic Church that identified Spain with catholicism; and the anti-liberal and fascist alternatives born in the heat of the European political-social crisis and Spanish of the First World War. The political model was strongly centralist, authoritarian and interventionist around Castile and the Castilian language, rejecting the other nationalist models. At the social level, the corporate proposal stood out by means of the compulsory framing of workers and businessmen in the Spanish Organización Sindical, the unique trade union of Francoism led by the unique party Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las JONS


2017 ◽  
Vol 71 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 12-20
Author(s):  
Petr Kužel

Football, the most popular game all over the world, reached the territory of todayʼs Czech Republic in the last decades of the 19th century. In Prague districts and suburbs especially, many Czech and German sport associations started to engage in this sport activity originally born in Britain. The sudden and long-lasting interruption of a positive development due to the mobilization in summer 1914 along with significant political and social changes following the end of First World War, isolated pre-war events and made of them the unique relict environment which forms the main topic of this paper. Leaving sports results aside, the study describes the period after 1900 in which football clubs were established, the enthusiastic amateur transformed into a professional player, loyalty to different teams stemmed on the basis of nationality and social status and football moved from the suburbs’ playgrounds to newly-built, larger and better-quality arenas.


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