Aftermaths of War Women's Movements and Female Activists, 1918-1923 
Edited by Ingrid Sharp and Matthew Stibbe
Brill, Leiden, 2011
History of Warfare, 63
Hardback
384 pp.
€ 126.00 / US$ 179.00
ISBN: 978 90 04 19172 3

Readership: All those interested in women's studies, gender studies, the history of women's movements and the history of the First World War and its aftermath. 

Much of the recent literature on cultural demobilisation or remobilisation after the First World War has focused on men and masculinity. By contrast, this interdisciplinary volume of essays sets out to examine the importance of women’s movements and individual female activists to the shaping of post-war Europe at the private, communal, national and transnational levels. Key themes include the commemoration of the war dead; the renegotiation of gender roles; suffrage and political rights; and women’s contribution to the establishment of new visions of peace or national revenge and regeneration in the years 1918 to 1923. The eighteen chapters cover countries in Central and Eastern Europe, as well as Western Europe, and defeated as well as victorious nations, thus allowing for a more nuanced understanding of the deep impact of the war and its aftermath on the continent as a whole.

CONTENTS
Introduction: Women’s Movements and Female Activists in the Aftermath of War: International Perspectives 1918-1923
Ingrid Sharp and Matthew Stibbe 1

PART ONE
COMMEMORATION, REMEMBERING, REMOBILISATION
The aftermaths of defeat: the fallen, the catastrophe, and the public response of women to the end of the First World War in Bulgaria
Nikolai Vukov 29

The women’s suffrage campaign in Italy in 1919 and Voce nuova (“New Voice”): Corporatism, nationalism and the struggle for political rights
Emma Schiavon 49

Raps across the knuckles: The extension of war culture by radical nationalist women journalists in post-1918 Germany
Christiane Streubel 69

The Rhineland Horror campaign and the aftermath of war
Erika Kuhlman 89

PART TWO
THE RENEGOTIATION OF GENDER ROLES
From “Free Love” to Married Love: Gender politics, Marie Stopes, and middlebrow fiction by women in the early nineteen twenties
Ann Rea 113

The disappearing surplus: the spinster in the post-war debate in Weimar Germany, 1918-1920
Ingrid Sharp 135

After the vote was won. The fate of the women’s suffrage movement in Russia after the October Revolution: individuals, ideas and deeds
Olga Shnyrova 159

Women activists in Albania following independence and World War I
Fatmira Musaj and Beryl Nicholson 179

PART THREE
WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE AND POLITICAL RIGHTS
A bitter-sweet victory: Feminisms in France (1918-1923)
Christine Bard 199

Sisters and Comrades. Women’s movements and the “Austrian Revolution”: Gender in insurrection, the Rate movement, parties and parliament
Gabriella Hauch 221

Who represents Hungarian women? The demise of the liberal bourgeois women’s rights movement and the rise of the rightwing women’s movement in the aftermath of World War I
Judith Szapor 245

Soldiers, members of parliament, social activists: the Polish women’s movement after World War I
Sylwia Kuźma-Markowska 265

Political and public aspects of the activity of the Lithuanian women’s movement, 1918-1923
Virginija Jurėnienė 287

PART FOUR
RECONSTRUCTING COMMUNITIES/VISIONS OF PEACE
Diverse constructions: Feminist and conservative women’s movements and their contribution to the (re-)construction of gender relations in Hungary after the First World War
Judit Acsady 309

Elsa Brandstrom and the reintegration of returning prisoners of war and their families in post-war Germany and Austria 
Matthew Stibbe 333

“We stand on the threshold of a new age”: Alice Masarykova, the Czechoslovak Red Cross, and the building of a new Europe
Bruce R. Berglund 355

“Having Seen Enough”: Eleanor Franklin Egan and the journalism of Great War displacement
David Hudson 375

Britain in the Balkans: the response of the Scottish Women’s Hospital Units
Jill Liddington 395

 
Ingrid Sharp MA (1989) in German and Philosophy, University of Oxford, is Senior Lecturer in German at the University of Leeds and Head of the Department of German, Russian and Slavonic Studies. She has published on aspects of the women's movement in Germany in international perspective and is co-editor with Alison Fell of The Women’s Movement in Wartime: International Perspectives, 1914-1919 (Palgrave April 2007).
Matthew Stibbe, D.Phil (1997) in History, University of Sussex, is Reader in History at Sheffield Hallam University. He has published widely in the field of First World War studies and twentieth-century Germany, including Germany, 1914-1933: Politics, Society and Culture (Pearson, 2010).