Women's Organisations and Female Activists in the Aftermath of WW1, Hamline University, St Paul, Minnesota, 26-28 May 2012‏

Contributions are welcome from any field or discipline, including literary
and cultural studies, sociology and social anthropology, women’s and gender
studies, peace and war studies, as well as history itself.
Please send abstracts (500 words) to Ms Ingrid Sharp i.e.sharp@leeds.ac.uk and Dr
David Hudson, dhudson@gw.hamline.edu by
December 15.

Call for papers.
Women’s Organisations and Female Activists in the Aftermath of the First
World War: Moving Across Borders.
An interdisciplinary, international conference to be held at Hamline
University, St Paul, Minnesota, USA
Memorial Day Weekend: 26th to 28th May 2012

Recent developments in the social and cultural history of modern warfare
have done much to shed new light on the experience of the First World War,
and in particular how that experience was communicated in popular and high
culture, and in acts of remembrance and commemoration after 1918. The
post-war period (ca 1918-1923) is distinctive, both within individual
nations and as a point of international comparison. It is characterised by
the often troubled transition from a wartime to a peacetime society,
continued conflicts over the repatriation of refugees and POWs;
revolutionary and counter- revolutionary violence in parts of central
Europe; and new ethnic and national conflicts arising from the collapse of
the former Russian, German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires, and the
cultural anxieties that surrounded these events. Within this context, the
role of organised women's movements and female activists in the post-war
period takes on a new importance.

The aim of this conference is to explore major comparative themes such as
citizenship, suffrage, nationalism, and women's desire to respond to
extremes of need in the post-war era (dislocation, internment, violence and
hunger) from a national, international and transnational perspective. It
will examine the work of organisations and individuals able to move across
international borders, such as the Women’s International League for Peace
and Freedom (WILPF) or the journalist Eleanor Franklin Egan, who reported on
social conditions throughout post-war Europe. The role of such women and
organisations in bringing about reconciliation and facilitating cooperation
between former enemy nations (cultural demobilisation, ‘the dismantlement of
the mindsets and values of wartime’—John Horne) will also be examined, as
will the role of nationalist women's organisations in perpetuating
discourses of war and in facilitating the rise of new forms of
ethno-nationalism and racial intolerance (‘cultural remobilisation’) during
the period 1918-1923.

This conference is the third in a series. The first conference, The Gentler
Sex: Responses of the Women’s Movement to the First World War, 1914-1919,
London, held in 2005, was followed in 2008 with Aftermaths of War: Women’s
Movements and Female Activists 1918-1923, Leeds. Publications arising from
the earlier conferences include special issues of Minerva: Journal of Women
and War and two edited volumes: Fell, A.S. and Sharp, I.E. (eds) (2007) The
Women's Movement in Wartime. International Perspectives 1914-1919. Palgrave
Macmillan and Sharp, I.E and Stibbe, M (eds) (2011) Aftermaths of War:
Women’s Movements and Female Activists, 1918-1923 (Brill).

The Hamline Conference builds on this work and is supported by a network
grant from the UK-based Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). It will
be followed by a fourth international conference in Budapest, Hungary with
an emphasis on Eastern and Central Europe. Two special issues of a
peer-reviewed journal and a volume of comparative essays are planned for
2014.

Attendees will be invited to visit sites and events of interest, including
Victory Memorial Parkway in Minneapolis (a boulevard and collection of
monuments dedicated in 1921 to the servicemen and nurses of Hennepin County
who died in the First World War) and the Memorial Day Program at Fort
Snelling National Cemetery.

Confirmed speakers include:

Keynote speaker: Susan R. Grayzel, Professor of History and Interim Director
of the Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies, University of
Missisippi. Author of Women's Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood, and
Politics in Britain and France during the First World War (University of
North Carolina Press, 1999), which won the British Council Prize from the
North American Conference on British Studies in 2000, and Women and the
First World War (Longman, 2002), a global history. She has two forthcoming
books: At Home and Under Fire: Domesticating the Air Raid in Britain from
the Great War to the Blitz (Cambridge) and The First World War: A Brief
History with Documents (Bedford St. Martins)

Dr Erica Kuhlmann, Director Women’s Studies Program, Idaho State University,
author of Of Little Comfort: War Widows, Fallen Soldiers and the Remaking of
the Nation after the Great War New York University Press (forthcoming 2012);
Reconstructing Patriarchy after the Great War. Women, Gender and Postwar
Reconciliation, Palgrave Macmillan 2008; Petticoats and White Feathers:
Gender Conformity, Race, the Progressive Peace Movement, and the Debate over
War, 1895-1919, Greenwood Press 1997 and co-editor (with Kimberley Jensen)
of Women and Transnational Activism in Historical Perspective Dordrecht,
Republic of Letters, 2010

Dr Kimberley Jensen, History and Gender Studies Program, Western Oregon,
Co-editor (with Erica Kuhlman) of Women and Transnational Activism in
Historical Perspective Dordrecht, Republic of Letters, 2010 and author of
Mobilizing Minerva: American Women in the First World War University of
Illinois Press 2008

Professor Matthew Stibbe, author of Germany 1914-33: Politics, Society and
Culture Longman 2010; British Civilian Internees in Germany: The Ruhleben
Camp Manchester University Press 1914-1918 and Co-editor (with Ingrid Sharp)
Aftermaths of War: Women’s Movements and Female Activists, 1918-1923 Brill,
2011

Dr Judit Acsády (Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest); Professor
Gabriella Hauch (University of Linz, Austria);
Ms Ingrid Sharp (Leeds, UK); Professor Olga Shyrnova (Ivanonvo State
University, Russia); Dr David Hudson (Hamline University, US); Dr Nikolai
Vukov (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia).

Proposals for papers and/or panels that deal with the work of women’s
organisations or female activists during the period under investigation are
invited, with particular interest in the following areas:

* cultural demobilisation and remobilisation;
* transnational organisations and activities, transcending the nation
state;
* peace-building and reconstruction: a discourse of human rights
* on-going campaigns for suffrage and women’s organisations
post-suffrage;
* revolutionary and counter-revolutionary violence;
* dislocation, disability, internment, social instability and poverty;
* cultural reflections of post-war society in art, literature and film
(NB: these may appear at a later date than the period under investigation)


Contributions are welcome from any field or discipline, including literary
and cultural studies, sociology and social anthropology, women’s and gender
studies, peace and war studies, as well as history itself.
Please send abstracts (500 words) to Ms Ingrid Sharp i.e.sharp@leeds.ac.uk and Dr
David Hudson, dhudson@gw.hamline.edu byDecember 15.