National Sovereignty and Female Equality: Gender, Peacemaking, and the New World Orders of 1919 and 1945

At the end of both world wars, gender relations and identities were critical to attempts by the victor states to regain a social equilibrium within each nation, at the same time as contributing to attempts to bring about a perpetually peaceful international „new world order“. In 1919 international efforts were focused on the principle of nationality and the creation of the League of Nations; in 1945 „human rights“ and the creation of the United Nations international organisation were regarded as critical for tackling the forms of chauvinism that nurtured belligerence. In both contexts, peacemaking involved the conceptualisation of a new world order that would guarantee lasting peace by ensuring more democratic arrangements among nations internationally as well as within them. Gender was a key aspect of those arrangements in a number of related ways. This chapter examines the intersections between conceptions of national, human, and women’s rights in the international sphere, and the contiguities and shifts in representations of sexual difference and gender norms and their impact on ideas of peace and the processes of peacemaking.