Recent debates have used the concept of “transnational history” to broaden research on historical subjects that transcend national boundaries and encourage a shift away from official inter-state interactions to institutions, groups, and actors that have been obscured. This approach proves particularly fruitful for the dynamic field of global gender and women’s history. By looking at the restless lives and work of women’s activists in informal border-crossings, ephemeral NGOs, the lower management of established international organizations, and other global networks, this volume reflects the potential of a new perspective that allows for a more adequate analysis of transnational activities. By pointing out cultural hierarchies, the vicissitudes of translation and re-interpretation, and the ambiguity of intercultural exchange, this volume demonstrates the critical potential of transnational history. It allows us to see the limits of universalist and cosmopolitan claims so dear to many historical actors and historians.

When Sir Humphrey Appleby warned his Prime Minister against making “courageous policy”, he could have been talking about venereal diseases. Many have considered misogyny, class conflict and racial paranoia as the drivers of venereal diseases control policy in the early twentieth century. In reality, such policy was inclined towards disease control in the most practical way, with the resources to hand, and in line with realistic outcomes. This book re-examines historical sources to reveal the unacknowledged complexity of determining public policy for the control of venereal diseases in two case studies, Edinburgh in Scotland and Adelaide in South Australia.

What can unfold from an engagement of feminist issues, concerns and practices with the geopolitical? How does feminism allow for a reconfiguration of how these two elements, the geo- and the -political, are understood and related? What kinds of objects can be located and put into motion? What kinds of relations can be drawn between these? What kinds of practice become valued? And, what is glossed or rendered absent in the process? In this thought-provoking and original contribution, Deborah P. Dixon cautions against the exhaustion of feminist geopolitics as a critique of both a classical and a critical geopolitics, and points instead to how feminist imaginaries of Self, Other and Earth allow for all manner of work to be undertaken. Importantly, one of the things they provide for is a reservoir of concerns, thoughts and practices that can be reappropriated to flesh out what a feminist geopolitics can be. While providing a much-needed, sustained interjection that draws out achievements to date, the book thus gestures forward to productive lines of inquiry and method. Grounded via a series of globally diverse case studies that traverse time as well as space, Feminist Geopolitics feels for the borders of geopolitical thought and practice by navigating four complex and corporeally-aware objects of analysis, namely flesh, bone, touch and abhorrence.

This open access book takes the biographical case of German feminist Käthe Schirmacher (1865–1930), a multilingual translator, widely travelled writer of fiction and non-fiction, and a disputatious activist to examine the travel and translation of ideas between the women’s movements that emerged in many countries in the late 19th and early 20th century. It discusses practices such as translating, interpreting, and excerpting from journals and books that spawned and supported transnational civic spaces and develops a theoretical framework to analyse these practices. It examines translations of literary, scholarly and political texts and their contexts. The book will be of interest to academics as well as undergraduate and postgraduate students in the fields of modern history, women’s and gender history, cultural studies, transnational and transfer history, translation studies, history and theory of biography.

Current histories seem to suggest that men alone have been capable of the development of ideas, analysis, and practice of international law until the 1990s. Is this the case? Or have others been erased from the collective images of this history, including the portrait gallery of notables in international law? Portraits of Women in International Law: New Names and Forgotten Faces? investigates the slow and late inclusion of women in the spheres of knowledge and power in international law. The forty-two textual and visual representations by a diverse team of passionate portraitists represent women and gender non-conforming people in international law from the fourteenth century onwards around the world: individuals and groups who imagined, developed, or contested international law; who earned their living in its institutions; or who, even indirectly, may have changed its course. This rich volume calls for a critical identification of the formal and informal institutional practices, norms, and rituals of (white) masculinities, both in the past and in the research of international law today. By abandoning reductive histories, their biased frames, and tacit assumptions, this work brings previously unseen glimpses of international law and its agents, ideas, causes, behaviour, norms, and social practices into the spotlight.

Karen Offen offers a magisterial reconstruction and analysis of the debates around relations between women and men, how they are constructed, and how they should be organized, that raged in France and its French-speaking neighbors from 1870 to 1920. The 'woman question' encompassed subjects from maternity and childbirth, and the upbringing and education of girls to marriage practices and property law, the organization of households, the distribution of work inside and outside the household, intimate sexual relations, religious beliefs and moral concerns, government-sanctioned prostitution, economic and political citizenship, and the politics of population growth. The book shows how the expansion of economic opportunities for women and the drop in the birth rate further exacerbated the debates over their status, roles, and possibilities. With the onset of the First World War, these debates were temporarily placed on hold, but they would be revived by 1916 and gain momentum during France's post-war recovery.