Short Abstract

This panel examines African women’s international activism from 1920 to 1975. We ask: what does re-constructing this understudied period of African women’s history tell us about the history of transnational feminism, Pan-Africanism, as well as ideas about decolonization in Africa?

Long Abstract

This panel examines African women’s international activism and mobilizations from 1920 to 1975. This period precedes the UN Decade for Women (1975–1985), which historiography often identifies as a pivotal moment for women’’s transnational feminism and globally shared programs adopted at national levels to advance women’s rights worldwide. However, recent scholarship has demonstrated that African women engaged with international networks, institutions, and organisations long before the mid-seventies. From the early 20th century, African women joined or corresponded with existing international networks, and—by the mid-century—they also created new transnational spaces to address issues specific to their interests. How did African women’s international engagement reshape the frameworks, activities, and goals of international movements, organisations, or gatherings—whether feminist, Pan-Africanist, anti-imperialist, Afro-Asian or religious—on a regional and global scale? In turn, how did the international circulations of African women activists and their ideas transform the dynamics of women’s and mixed-gender mobilizations in Africa during the periods of colonization and in the early years of independence? Literature on women from the Global South is relatively well documented when it comes to Asian feminism in global history. In this panel, we aim to center the African experience within Afro-Asian, transnational and other Global South solidarity networks. What does the transnational history of connections and activism regarding political, economic, and religious rights look like when we investigate how African women shaped the world?

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