Peace on Our Terms: The Global Battle for Women's Rights After the First World War

Columbia Studies in International and Global History

by Mona L. Siegel

In the watershed year of 1919, world leaders met in Paris, promising to build a new international order rooted in democracy and social justice. Female activists demanded that statesmen live up to their word. Excluded from the negotiating table, women met separately, crafted their own agendas, and captured global headlines with a message that was both straightforward and enduring peace depended as much on recognition of the fundamental humanity and equality of all people―regardless of sex, race, class, or creed―as on respect for the sovereignty of independent states.

Peace on Our Terms follows dozens of remarkable women from Europe, the Middle East, North America, and Asia as they crossed oceans and continents; commanded meeting halls in Paris, Zurich, and Washington; and marched in the streets of Cairo and Beijing. Mona L. Siegel’s sweeping global account of international organizing highlights how Egyptian and Chinese nationalists, Western and Japanese labor feminists, white Western suffragists, and African American civil rights advocates worked in tandem to advance women’s rights. Despite significant resistance, these pathbreaking women left their mark on emerging democratic constitutions and new institutions of global governance. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Peace on Our Terms is the first book to demonstrate the centrality of women’s activism to the Paris Peace Conference and the critical diplomatic events of 1919. Siegel tells the timely story of how female activists transformed women’s rights into a global rallying cry, laying a foundation for generations to come.

Genres: History

344 pages, Hardcover

First published January 7, 2020

Reviews

[Eric · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing stories deftly interwoven with major developments

[Mike Clinton · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an exemplary work of academic research and analysis. It widens and deepens understanding of the global significance of the 1919 Paris Peace Conference as a catalyst for global movements for rights, similar to what Erez Manela's The Wilsonian Moment achieved in the context of colonial claims to national self-determination, in this case pertaining to women's claims to equality and rights (that also overlapped with colonial claims to national self-determination.) By rooting the narrative in the biographies of individual women of varied circumstances from around the world and through a masterful writing style that enhances the appeal of these life stories that unfolded amid dramatic events and encounters, Siegel's book will have an impact that goes beyond academic circles. Expect to see features about such previously obscure figures like Soumay Tcheng to begin appearing in world history texts, for instance, as well as citations of Siegel's book in academic works published in the near future and a long time after that touch in the least way on twentieth-century global feminism.

[Chris Jaffe · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is very much a book about leaders and the meetings between leaders. There isn't much sense of popular movements taking place. Even in the case of Egypt, where you had major demonstrations in 1919 by Egyptian women, you learn more about the backgrounds of the leading activists. The main focus on the book is on the Versailles peace negotiations, and how leading activist women tried to make their cause the cause of the peace terms - only to be largely rebuffed. You do see a women's peace movement emerge, and a women's labor movement emerge, but never quite the movement the leaders wanted in 1919. For me, it was too much focus on the leaders at the expense of a look at the movements themselves.