This event, organised by the Interwar Histories Working Group, marks the centenary of the founding of the Women's World Committee Against War and Fascism (Comité Mondial Contre la Guerre et le Fascisme).
In the context of today's rising far-right ideologies and threats to global peace, this meeting will consider the relevance of antifascism as a vital force in modern political life. Welcoming Isidora Grubacki as the guest, the event will give special attention to the contributions of Yugoslav feminists in the 1930s, whose activism within the Committee helped transform feminist politics into a broader antifascist movement in Yugoslavia.
The year 2024 marks the 90th anniversary of the establishment of the Women’s World Committee against War and Fascism (Comité Mondial des Femmes contre Guerre et Fascisme) in 1934 Paris. The CMF, which has only recently begun to catch the attention of historians, had a global reach in the second half of the 1930s. As recently shown by historian Jasmine Calver, the organisation functioned mainly through its two congresses (1934 in Paris and 1938 in Marseille) and through global, national, and European campaigns initiated through its journal.
This presentation looks at the CMF from the perspective of Yugoslav women and their connections with the organization, and argues for the centrality of this organization in the political transformation of feminism in Yugoslavia in the 1930s into a broad, antifascist left feminist movement. Through the cases of the CMF and the Yugoslav feminists, the talk will raise broader questions of the entanglement of feminism and antifascism in the 1930s, as well as the role of women globally and locally in the Popular Front alliances of the second half of the 1930s.
Isidora Grubacki is a historian focusing on contemporary European history, specialising in the fields of transnational women’s history and the intellectual history of feminism in the interwar period. She works as a research assistant at the Institute of Contemporary History in Ljubljana and is currently a member of the ERC project The History of Feminist Political Thought and Women’s Rights Discourses in East Central Europe 1929–2001 (HERESSEE), hosted at the University of Vienna.
Image Source: Les Femmes dans l'action Mondiale, No. 1 (1934), 4, Gallica, Bibliothèque nationale de France, https://gallica.bnf.fr.
Please register to get a seat.