2025/05/02 by Connie Shemo · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Asian American and Pacific Histories #Labor Movements and Unions #Australian History and Society
paper · doi:10.1093/dh/dhaf035
openalex publication_date 2025/05/02 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
Rumi Yasutake begins and ends The Feminist Pacific with discussions of the Pan-Pacific Women’s Conferences (PPWC) which first took place in 1928 in Hawaiʻi and continued through the 1930s, and gave rise to the Pan-Pacific Women’s Association (PPWA) in 1930. Much more than a history of these conferences and associations, however, this book addresses issues central to the study of international women’s organizations more broadly. In the 1990s scholars such as Ian Tyrrell with his study of the Worlds Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WWCTU) and Leila Rupp with her study of “the making of an international women’s movement” emphasized both the ideologies of transnational sisterhood and cross-cultural communication that animated these organizations, and the ways that imperialism permeated relationships in these organizations.1 These works made connections between the history of foreign relations and women’s and gender history, seen by many at the time as disparate fields. Many works on international and transnational women’s organizations have followed, including Yasutake’s 2004 Transnational Women’s Activism, about the WWCTU in Japan.2 This book stood out for its emphasis on the shifting power relations in the transnational encounters, especially the way that WWCTU missionaries adapted to Japanese nationalism.