Nasser, Anna (2024) "Our aspirations went beyond our borders." French Women’s Organizations, Women’s Rights and Empire during Decolonization (1944-1963). [Tesi di dottorato]

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Abstract

The research investigates the role of French women’s organizations activism during the decolonization of the French Empire, between 1944 and 1963. It focuses on two women’s organizations – the Association des Femmes de l’Union Française and the Union des Femmes Françaises – and on the international networks in which they were active – the International Council of Women and the Women’s International Democratic Federation. As the end of the Second World War had opened a period of reformism, which also led to the creation of the French Union and the establishment of the French Fourth Republic, this paved the way for a reassessment of the social relationship in the Empire and for a growing participation of women and women’s organizations which considered the empire one of their spaces of intervention for promoting women’s rights. This study then discusses imperial reformism and social policy in their gendered forms as well as women’s activism in the French Empire and in the international setting by looking at two main dimensions. Firstly, the expansion of these organizations within the empire and internationally by focusing on the different networks that they created and engaged with as tools to promote their activities in a plurality– the national, the imperial and the international. Secondly, women’s organizations’ activities and claims by focusing on how women’s rights discourses and demands were framed and articulated in the imperial space and how became intertwined with other projects, such as imperial and anticolonial engagement. In this way, the research suggests that decolonization was a process shaped, negotiated, and countered by various actors within the French Empire and beyond its borders. It further shed lights on the tensions between imperialism, feminism and anticolonialism as due to the different understandings of women’s rights and rights in general in the space of the French empire. Moreover, it presents women’s organizations as actors of imperial reformism and anticolonialism and their activism as resulting from negotiation and articulation processes at the crossing of imperial and internationalist politics.

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