Daniel Laqua's Activism across Borders since 1870 is a major contribution to the history of individuals, groups, and organizations whose networks, collaborations, and activities transcended national boundaries. It provides a fascinating and wide-ranging account of how we might make sense of transnational activism. Transnational history is a rich area of empirical studies and methodological discussion that has shifted emphasis and focus on a whole range of connections and Activism across Borders is an important contribution to this.Footnote 1 The book provides fresh insights into transnational campaigns and campaigners by examining multiple causes and tracking “how different principles, objectives and forms of collective action intersected or collided”.Footnote 2 It examines in detail different patterns of interactions and asks how campaigners sought to create “bonds as part of their quest for political and social change”, including the inherent limitations of such ventures.Footnote 3
As the introduction notes, the book builds on many years of researching, teaching, and reflecting on the themes examined. Laqua uses this knowledge to unpick specific case studies and explore wide-ranging broader campaigns relating to anti-slavery and anticolonialism, humanitarian aid, pacifism, socialism and social justice, feminism and sexual equality, anti-racism, human rights, and environmentalism. Of key importance to this study is the format: “rather than focusing on the high tide of a campaign, or raising the question of their success, the approach has been to look at different forms of activism as parts of a wider phenomenon”.Footnote 4 In doing so, transnational activism is understood as a “thread running through European social, cultural and political history”.Footnote 5
Four analytical lenses are used in this study: connectedness; transience; ambivalence; and marginality. These categories of analysis provide important tools to map the intricacies of individuals, networks, and causes. Based on my own work at the intersection of women's history and labour history, I will offer some comments on what this book tells us about women, workers, and women workers,Footnote 6 suggesting how it might promote further discussion of these topics. In doing so, I will consider campaigns that forged partnerships and amplified voices, followed by an examination of women's transnational activism and national borders, and, finally, remarks on the divisions and differences among activists campaigning to improve working conditions.
Forging Partnerships and Amplifying Voices
One analytical lens used in Laqua's book is “marginality”. As the book highlights, transnational bonds enabled “actors who were being marginalized at the national level” to form partnerships that “amplified their voices”. Thus, “transnational activism had particular potentials and roles precisely because it was not confined to the national arena and its existing hierarchies”.Footnote 7 One of the case studies where this can be applied is the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA). As Laqua points out, the foundations of this organization lie in the reticence of the International Council of Women (ICW) “to engage in active campaigning on women's suffrage”.Footnote 8 This is not to say that members of the ICW failed to engage with this cause or that activists within the two organizations did not work together. Activism across Borders examines how activities by ICW members such as “information gathering could be a form of activism”.Footnote 9 Despite being separate organizations, there were many personal links between activists within the IWSA and the ICW, as Laqua notes with regard to activists such as Carrie Chapman Catt and Aletta Jacobs.
Laqua illustrates how “the suffrage cause sometimes overshadows other concerns that figured prominently in the women's movement”, engaging with work that has explored different facets of feminist campaigning.Footnote 10 The IWSA was a pro-suffrage organization from its formal foundation in 1904, but was already broadening its focus to consider other issues affecting women, including employment rights, prior to World War I. The book's emphasis on the role of transnational bonds in amplifying activists’ voices has particular relevance to the campaigns for equal pay, which I have explored in my own research. For example, members of the IWSA's “Equal Pay and Right to Work” committee provided summarized reports in the Association's journal, Jus Suffragii, on the employment position of women in different countries, bringing these to the attention of activists. They would highlight both general demands for equal pay and developments in specific areas such as in the teaching profession.Footnote 11 The purpose of this action, as noted by the committee, was “that wage-earning women, whose problems are so similar in so many countries, may gain strength by the exchange of this information”.Footnote 12 Congresses provided an important space for individual activists to share details of developments within their country to advance women's rights to an international network of campaigners, an exchange that could have mutual benefits. For example, in 1920, Hanna Tschikalenko Keller, the first Ukrainian woman to speak at the IWSA's International Congress, cited important developments in employment opportunities in her home country, noting that “[a]ll posts in the Civil Service are accessible to women, and we have the same pay as men have” and that women occupied several important posts in the Ministry of Public Education and other Ministries. She emphasized how: “The results obtained in the Ukraine must not be attributed to the efforts of Ukrainian women alone. It is one of those conquests the credit of which must be given to all women who have worked for our common ideal”.Footnote 13 In this way, creating a shared sense of solidarity between activists was linked to the exchange of information that in other spaces was more likely to be ignored. The lens of marginality put forward in Activism across Borders provides a framework to explore these interactions.
Women, Transnational Activism, and National Borders
Activism across Borders shows how we can relate the transnational to the national and how state borders have framed the women's movement. It notes that attendance at international congresses often went hand in hand with expressions of national loyalties, building on the formative work of Leila Rupp.Footnote 14 As Laqua highlights, “for many activists, recognition within the national sphere and the ability to speak the language of nationhood were vitally important”.Footnote 15 He considers how the divisions during World War I are a key example of this, and engages with Alison Fell and Ingrid Sharp's work, which has highlighted a diverse range of responses to the conflict from within the women's movement.Footnote 16 Laqua traces reactions to the war from activists in the IWSA and ICW, and considers the reactions of those who went on to establish the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF).Footnote 17 The rebuilding of transnational ties in the post-war world permits an exploration of how ideas of sisterhood, which had transcended national boundaries, were challenged during a time of world crisis, and the reaction of transnational activists to this. In so doing, the book adds an important dimension to work analysing how the transnational can be restricted by the government policy of individual states.Footnote 18
The book also acknowledges the “ever-more diverse landscape” faced by feminist organizations in the post-war world,Footnote 19 and considers key questions about the impact of this on transnational links among activists. The patterns discussed in Activism across Borders since 1870 can be mapped onto divisions between individual campaigners arising from changing priorities as equality legislation developed at different rates in different countries after the war. This analysis can be applied to, for example, the IWSA's post-war activism. In 1920, some activists within the IWSA had “hoped to merge it in various existing organisations, others wished to restrict its action to Women's Suffrage alone, to work only in unenfranchised countries, and only there until the vote was won. Both these wishes were frustrated […]”.Footnote 20 We can draw upon the book's approach to delineate discord as well as alliances among activists.
Moreover, Activism across Borders emphasizes connections between different causes. For example, it notes the role of WILPF as both a pacifist organization and part of the women's movement, engaging with the work of Sarah Hellawell, which examines gender, patriotism, and pacifism.Footnote 21 It also acknowledges the ambivalence in transnational activism. These were not necessarily inclusive exchanges. Here, the monograph examines various racist and anti-racist campaigns, and reflects on Rupp's work on the creation of collective identity that could privilege certain groups.Footnote 22
Divisions and Differences: Activism, Workers, and Working Conditions
Laqua presents an impressive analysis of divisions and differences arising within the international women's movement. This provides a framework to explore the complicated picture whereby activists crossed different ideological boundaries that were not necessarily complementary (e.g. feminism and socialism) whilst reminding the reader that “we must not assume a clear-cut dichotomy and instead need to appreciate the overlaps between different currents”.Footnote 23 The book brings debates by those such as Marilyn Boxer, who has challenged the “dichotomous notions of class and gender relationships”,Footnote 24 into its analysis, encouraging the reader to trace patterns and consider nuances in campaigners’ actions.
The book rightly notes that the International Labour Organization (ILO) “emerged as a target and tool” for activists.Footnote 25 On the one hand, campaigners for women's employment rights could “engage with the ILO by working with and through trade unions” to effect change.Footnote 26 On the other, the book stresses the ruptures this precipitated, noting that “some ILO measures on labour protection proved divisive: among women's activists, a controversy ensued between those who advocated legal equality and those who sought special protection for women”.Footnote 27
This raises thought-provoking questions about distinctions among different causes that often lay at the heart of these campaigns and the activists who pursued them. The importance of crossing national borders, as well as the challenges and obstacles that impede this, highlight central issues about translating causes into different national contexts. As Marcel van der Linden notes, “dramatic developments in one country may cause turbulence in other countries”.Footnote 28 The book's emphasis on potential divisions can be applied to the ILO's 1919 Convention concerning women's employment in night work. The Danish feminist and politician Elna Munch highlighted the divisive nature of this topic among campaigners, stating that:
For her own part she had some reservation, partly on account of the animosity from the side of many women against prohibition, partly because this special protection might become a drag on women. She referred to the discussion of the International Women Suffrage Congress in Geneva, which resolved that no special laws concerning women's work ought to be carried in countries where women opposed them.Footnote 29
This statement illustrates and corroborates Laqua's emphasis on “transience” in transnational activism, drawing attention to the fact that alliances and allegiances among activists change, sometimes ending in disagreement or dissent.
Activism across Borders since 1870 provides a tool kit for exploring the differences and divisions between activists as much as their connections. In my research on non-manual workers, I am particularly interested in activism among clerks. Activists within the International Federation of Commercial, Clerical and Technical Employees (IFCCTE) supported various measures for equality and protection of workers. For example, they pressed “for equal wages for male and female employees”.Footnote 30 But the position of these activists within the ILO and the wider labour movement was less clear. Members of the IFCCTE supported the ILO, regarding it “as a valuable forum in which to put forward the social demands of the non-manual workers”.Footnote 31 However, protagonists were frustrated and felt the ILO failed to acknowledge their causes in the same way it did with other groups of workers, noting “it took considerable time, and in many cases repeated efforts, before the machinery of the I.L.O. had so adjusted itself as to allow adequate time for the discussion and consideration of questions relating to non-manual workers”.Footnote 32
This can lead us to question whom we might regard as an “activist” and invites us to explore various perceptions as well as matters of inclusion and exclusion. In my work on the role of activists representing non-manual workers, the place they occupied within the labour movement was a point of contention that campaigners sought to address. Following an address given by G.J.A. Smit Jr – a Dutch trade unionist and General Secretary of the International Federation of Commercial, Clerical and Technical Employees – at the Federation's Congress in 1928, it was clear these activists did not feel adequately represented by the wider labour movement, nor their views fully taken into consideration. The resolutions after Smit's speech stressed that “the Labour Movement must be gradually converted into an organisation representing both the manual and non-manual workers”.Footnote 33 Various suggestions were put forward to address this including “a representative of the salaried employees should be elected on the Executive Committee of the International Federation of Trade Unions, in order that this body may always be kept well informed of the interests and views of salaried employees”.Footnote 34 It is here that we can return to arguments in Activism across Borders about changing alliances, the role of international organizations, and broader social, cultural, and political contexts in “shaping campaigners’ agendas and actions”.Footnote 35
Conclusion
Activism across Borders since 1870 is a rich study of the complexities of transnational activism, providing a detailed framework to interpret how activists “navigated, negotiated, contested and reshaped” understandings of causes across borders.Footnote 36 Daniel Laqua's approach and analysis demonstrate the importance of campaigns and campaigners that are active beyond individual nations, enabling the reader to ask questions about different forms of activism. A key strength of the book lies in the way it examines not just the connections, but also the divisions between activists, as it explores how individuals and groups engaged with multiple causes in various ways at different times. Activism across Borders merits praise for the fresh understanding it brings to the field.
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