British women were deeply invested in foreign policy between the wars. This study casts new light on the turn to international affairs in feminist politics, the gendered representation and experience of the Munich Crisis, and the profound impression made by female public opinion on PM Neville Chamberlain in his negotiations with the dictators.

This book serves as an introduction to the extraordinary diversity of women’s activism. Paula Bartley's original research is supported by a range of writing to provide a powerful impression of the actions taken by groups of women from across the social and political spectrum, making the book invaluable to both students and interested readers. These women set out to make a difference to their locality, their country and sometimes the world. The story of women’s activism embodies stimulating accounts of progress and reversals, of commitment and uncertainty, of competing rights and challenging wrongs. The story of women’s activism is not tidy or well-ordered. It is messy and unorthodox. And full of surprises.

The first cross-disciplinary history of women's international thought, analysing leading international thinkers of the twentieth century.

'I'm not a woman. I'm a Conservative.' Edwina Currie's startling claim is in sharp contrast with another Tory woman's view: she too was a Thatcher supporter but precisely because 'women are stronger than men and have a different approach'. The voices of 'iron ladies' like these ring out everywhere, trenchant, anxious, determined, dutiful. The issues that concern them - sex and morality, law and order, defence, education, the family - are widely thought to unite them. Yet is there a representative Tory women's view? Tracing back to the first women active in party politics, Beatrix Campbell describes how the female members of the Primrose League, established in 1883, canvassed and campaigned so vigorously for their men that they were often thought 'unwomanly'. And through the inter-war years to the present day they've continued to work tirelessly for a party at once dependent on their dedication and support yet resistant to their asserting a clear agenda for themselves within it. Theirs is a state of responsibility without power. It is this issue which lies at the heart of Beatrix Campbell's exploration of Tory Party women - living under a politics of paternalism which appears to give women and their concerns a central place but denies them the possibility of real change.

In 1871 Paris was a city in crisis. Besieged during the Franco-Prussian War, its buildings and boulevards were damaged, its finances mired in debt, and its new government untested. But if Parisian authorities balked at the challenges facing them, entrepreneurs and businessmen did not. Selling Paris chronicles the people, practices, and politics that spurred the largest building boom of the nineteenth century, turning city-making into big business in the French capital. Alexia Yates traces the emergence of a commercial Parisian housing market, as private property owners, architects, speculative developers, and credit-lending institutions combined to finance, build, and sell apartments and buildings. Real estate agents and their innovative advertising strategies fed these new residential spaces into a burgeoning marketplace. Corporations built empires with tens of thousands of apartments under management for the benefit of shareholders. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Parisian housing market caught the attention of the wider public as newspapers began reporting its ups and downs. The forces that underwrote Paris’s creation as the quintessentially modern metropolis were not only state-centered or state-directed but also grew out of the uncoordinated efforts of private actors and networks. Revealing the ways housing and property became commodities during a crucial period of urbanization, Selling Paris is an urban history of business and a business history of a city that transforms our understanding of both.

In historical writing the interwar years are often associated with the rise of extreme forms of nationalism. Yet paradoxically this period also saw significant advances in the development of internationalism and international-mindedness. This collection examines previously under-researched aspects of the role played by women’s movements and individual female activists in this process. Women campaigners contributed to, and helped to (re)define, what constituted international work in myriad ways. For some, particularly those coming from a radical pacifist background, the central theme after 1919 was the eradication of war and the preservation of world peace. Yet others were more interested in the sharing of medical knowledge across borders, in the promotion of new causes such as physical fitness or the cultural assimilation of immigrants, or in finding fresh and innovative ways of battling for old causes, such as female suffrage and women’s access to education. It was even possible for nationalist women to use the language and practices of internationalism to further their own conservative, illiberal or anti-communist agendas, or to argue for revision of the peace treaties of 1919-20. The volume addresses these different kinds of activism, and the many links between them, by way of particular examples. This book was originally published as a special issue of Women’s History Review.

What is fascism? Is it an anomaly in the history of modern Europe? Or its culmination? In Anti-Colonialism and the Crises of Interwar Fascism, Michael Ortiz makes the case that fascism should be understood, in part, as an imperial phenomenon. He contends that the Age of Appeasement (1935-1939) was not a titanic clash between rival socio-political systems (fascism and democracy), but rather an imperial contest between satisfied and unsatisfied empires. Historians have long debated the extent to which Western imperialisms served as ideological and intellectual precursors to European fascisms. To date, this scholarship has largely employed an “inside-out” methodology that examines the imperial discourses that pushed fascist regimes outward, into Africa, Asia, and the Americas. While effective, such approaches tend to ignore the ways in which these places and their inhabitants understood European fascisms. Addressing this imbalance, Anti-Colonialism adopts an “outside-in” approach that analyses fascist expansion from the perspective of Indian anti-colonialists such as Jawaharlal Nehru, Subhas Bose, and Mohandas Gandhi. Seen from India, the crises of Interwar fascism-the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, Spanish Civil War, Second Sino-Japanese War, Munich Agreement, and the outbreak of the Second World War-were yet another eruption of imperial expansion analogous (although not identical) to the Scramble for Africa and the Treaty of Versailles. Whether fascist, democratic, or imperialist, Europe's great powers collectively negotiated the fate of smaller nations.

The British Fascisti, the first fascism movement in Britain, was founded by a woman in 1923. During the 1930s, 25 per cent of Sir Oswald Mosley's supporters were women, and his movement was 'largely built up by the fanaticism of women.' What was it about the British form of Fascism that accounted for this conspicuous female support? Gottlieb addresses these questions in the definitive work on women in fascism. This book continues to fill a significant gap in the historiography of British fascism, which has generally overlooked the contribution of women on the one hand, and the importance of sexual politics and women's issues on the other. Gottlieb's extensive research makes use of government documents, a large range of contemporary pamphlets, newspapers and speeches, as well as original interviews with those personally involved in the movement. This new edition includes a preface analysing the current affairs of the last 20 years, reframing the book according to contemporary context. Here, Gottlieb looks at the resurgence of populism, the rise of women as leaders of far-right parties across Europe and North America, and the normalisation of fascism in fiction and political discourse.

This volume examines how the British Conservative Party has appealed to women, the roles that women have played in the party, and the tense relationship between women’s activism on the Right and feminism. Covering the period since the early 20th century, the contributions each question assumptions about the reactionary response of the British Right, Margaret Thatcher’s party, to women’s issues and to their political aspirations. How have women been mobilized by the Conservative Party? What kind of party appeals has the British Conservative Party designed to attract women as party workers and as voters? Developing successful strategies to attract women voters since 1918, and appealing to certain notional women’s issues, and having produced the only two women Prime Minters of the UK, the Conservative Party has its own special relationship with women in the modern period. The shifting status of women and opportunities for women in politics in modern Britain has been garnering more scholarly attention recently, and the centenary of women’s partial suffrage in 2018 and Astor 100 in 2019 has done much to excite wider attention and public interest in these debates. However, the role of Conservative women has too often been seen as problematic, especially because of general assumption that feminism is only allied to leftist movements and political positions. This volume explores these themes through a range of case studies, covering the period from the early 20th to the 21st century. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal, Women’s History Review.

The millennium has sharpened perspectives on the history of women in twentieth-century Britain. Many features of the contemporary gender order date only from the last decades of the century – the expectation of equal opportunities in education and the work-place, sexual autonomy for the individual and tolerance of a variety of family forms. The years dominated by the two World Wars saw real advances towards equal citizenship and legal rights, and a growing sense of the impact on women of 'modernity' in its various forms, including consumerism and the mass media. But values inherited from the Victorians were still reflected in the class hierarchy, the policing of sexuality and the male-breadwinner family. This anthology of original sources, accompanied by a state-of-the-art bibliography, illustrates patterns of continuity and change in women's experience and their place in national life. An introductory survey provides an accessible overview and analysis of controversial issues, such as the relationship between 'first', 'second' and 'third' wave feminism.