Ludwig Boltzmann-Institut LBI für Europäische Geschichte und Öffentlichkeit (Web)

Ort: LBI für Europäische Geschichte und Öffentlichkeit, Nußdorfer Straße 64, 1090 Wien
Zeit: Dienstag, 06.03.2012, 15:00-16:30 Uhr
– Petition gegen die Schließung des LBI für Europäische Geschichte und Öffentlichkeit –
The Women International Democratic Federation WIDF was the largest and possibly most influential international women’s organization of the post-1945 era, but has hardly been included in the historiography on transnational women’s organizations. In my talk I will first briefly introduce the WIDF and explain the reasons for the overwhelming silence about the Federation in most English-language scholarship about inter- and transnational women’s movements, reasons which all have to do with the Cold War.
The WIDF was established in the immediate aftermath of the WW2 and has been described as a women’s peace organization. In the second part of my talk I will ask how important “peace” was for the WIDF and its worldviews, and how the leadership saw the relationship between “women” and peace.
Francisca de Haan got her PhD in history at Erasmus University Rotterdam, and is professor of Gender Studies at the Central European University in Budapest. Her research focuses on inter/transnational women’s movements and activism. She co-edited the Biographical Dictionary of Women’s Movements and Feminisms. Central, Eastern, and South Eastern Europe, 19th and 20th Centuries; and is founding editor of Aspasia: The International Yearbook of Central, Eastern and South Eastern European Women’s and Gender History (Berghahn Books, annually since 2007). Her co-edited book Women’s Activism: Global Perspectives from the 1890s to the Present (with M. Allen et al) will appear with Routledge in 2013. She served as Vice-President of the International Federation for Research in Women’s History from 2005 to 2010.