Peace on Our Terms: The Global Battle for Women’s Rights After the First World War. By Mona Siegel

Peace on Our Terms is an ambitious effort to take a global snapshot of a watershed moment in world history: the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. This is hardly uncharted territory, but Siegel takes a novel approach. She wants to know what the conference looked like from the perspective of women’s rights activists around the world, both those who were in Paris and those who were watching from afar. To that end, she has composed six chapters that proceed chronologically throughout that year, each of which centers on a particular woman or pair of women. Siegel’s narrative travels from Paris to Egypt to Zurich to China to Washington, DC to Rome, with frequent returns to Paris. The main strengths of the book are Siegel’s biographical portraits in each chapter and her innovation in putting all these stories side by side. Siegel has researched her subjects extensively, and that work shows in the rich detail she provides about these women’s lives, their work, and their hopes for a better future.

Siegel’s argument is that women’s experiences in 1919 sparked a global feminist movement that inspired women around the world and led to a century of transnational activism. She does an excellent job of spotlighting those experiences, though she does not prove they had the impact she claims, nor does she prove that they were truly global. Much of the book centers on European and U.S. women. Chapter One offers a close-up view of the Inter-Allied Women’s Conference, organized by German feminist Marguerite de Witt Schlumberger, as a venue for Western women to advocate for women’s involvement in the peace process and for women’s suffrage around the world. Although the attendees won an audience with Woodrow Wilson and other delegates, they achieved little other than a clause in the treaty stipulating that League positions would be open to men and women equally. Chapter Two zeroes in on two African American women, Mary Church Terrell and Ida Gibbs Hunt, both of whom were in Paris during the peace conference. Terrell traveled there as part of an informal delegation of peace women led by Jane Addams; Hunt was in Paris to help organize the Pan-African Congress of 1919 and ensure that the “children of Africa” were represented at the peace tables. Both were disappointed by the peace conference’s failure to consider meaningfully the concerns of non-white people around the world. Chapter Four takes us to Zurich, where Jane Addams convened the second meeting of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. WILPF members articulated trenchant critiques of the Versailles Treaty and the League of Nations, but when they traveled to Paris to seek an audience with Wilson and others, they were shut out. And Chapter Six centers on the International Congress of Working Women, which met in Washington, DC in September 1919 to try to influence the structure and agenda of the new International Labor Organization (ILO). Delegates to the women’s congress wanted the ILO to ensure equal representation of men and women among its delegates, to support protections for pregnant women and new mothers, and to end women’s night work. They did not achieve the first goal, though they did the latter two.

The other two chapters incorporate the views of non-Western women. Chapter Three shifts the story to Egypt, where nationalist and feminist Huda Shaawari was galvanizing elite Egyptian women to join in widespread protests against British authority. Her disappointment with Egyptian leaders’ dismissal of women’s participation led her to found the Egyptian Feminist Union, which helped expand access to education for marginalized women. And Chapter Five sheds wonderful light on the little-known story of Soumay Tcheng, a Chinese feminist and nationalist who traveled to Paris in 1919 as part of the official Chinese delegation to the peace talks. There she channeled her frustration at the treatment of the Chinese and her inspiration from the revolutionary May Fourth movement into convincing her government to formally reject the Versailles Treaty.

Siegel contends that this activism in 1919 represented the origin of “global feminism,” which she defines as “the comprehensive, sustained, and overlapping transnational campaigns for women’s rights and gender equality across the world” (9). But it’s hard not to feel as though her arguments in this respect are overdrawn. Transnational campaigns for women’s rights can be traced at least to the 1840s, well before the post-WWI period. Siegel acknowledges this in a footnote, but asserts that “only after 1919 would international and transnational women’s rights campaigns become truly global.” (263n13) But the feminisms she explores here were not actually “global”; in these chapters there are no Latin American women, no African women, no South or Southeast Asian women. Siegel asserts that “from its inception, global feminism has had worldwide reach and a universal appeal” (9), but there is little evidence of that here, and countless scholars of women’s activism over the past century have proved that claim false. Siegel’s analysis would have been strengthened by a more nuanced approach.

Peace on Our Terms is, however, a compelling look at a key moment in world history. Siegel’s portraits of her subjects are lovely, and readers who don’t know much about the wide range of women’s activism in this period will find the book illuminating.