Historian Susan Zimmermann brought to scholars’ attention a 1942 protest statement issued by the Liaison Committee of Women’s International Organisations (LCWIO) in which they protested Nazi violence and abuses. Zimmermann characterized the protest statement as a “public and united stand” taken by the leading women’s organizations. The phrasing of the protest was unusual in its attention to the “extermination” and “spoliation” of the lives, culture, and property of those victimized. I analyze the significance of this women-authored anti-atrocities document in historical context using archival sources. I argue that two refugee women instigated this legally oriented protest statement and that the statement was part of a modestly larger pattern of anti-atrocities campaigns. Rather than being united, as women’s groups later claimed, evidence points to divisiveness, challenges building networks of allies to respond to war crimes, and difficulty in making themselves heard once they decided to act collectively on a gender-specific analysis of atrocities. This research bridges the fields of the history of feminism and Holocaust history.

From 1758 to 1781, 1,085 women took out advertisements in Madrid’s daily newspaper, the Diario (The Daily). Each of these women sought employment as a wet nurse but described their work in very different ways. Few studies about wet-nursing in early modern Europe have considered what these ads provide: the voices of the wet nurses themselves. Scholars have focused instead on the opinions and recommendations found in anti-wet-nursing literature, centering the perspectives of male, educated elites. What we know about breastmilk and, subsequently, early modern bodies shifts significantly when we consider the words and knowledge of the wet nurses of Madrid. Instead of anxieties about corrupt milk, social status, and religion found in prescriptive literature, I argue that through the inclusion of specifically chosen words in the advertisements in which they self-presented as effective breastmilk producers, nursing women resisted attacks on their profession and reassured parents about their breastmilk’s suitability.

This study focuses on women and colonial courts in Abeokuta, southwestern Nigeria, in the early decades of the twentieth century. It examines the effects of colonial intervention on women and marriage. Examining case volumes of the Ake, Abeokuta, Native Court from 1905 to 1957, the study demonstrates that unique circumstances of the twentieth century—colonial intervention and the establishment of the native courts—led to the increase of divorce rate accelerated by the phenomenon of wives leaving matrimonial homes, establishing new unions of their choice, and approaching the court to end earlier unions and legalize the new ones. The study argues that, despite the negative connotations that might be associated with wives leaving matrimonial homes and requesting divorce in colonial courts, these women made use of the new circumstances to redefine marriage, inserting modifications reflective of women’s choices and preferences, as evidenced through their claims collected from the court records.

This article traces the rhetoric used by reformers in Vienna, Austria, to transform attitudes about single mothers and their children during the turn of the twentieth century. An emotional community of doctors, statisticians, feminists, Catholics, and charity organizers shamed city systems and sympathized with women who bore children out of wedlock. The practice of normalizing these women and their children was accelerated by the crisis of war and the creation of a new welfare policy in the 1920s by the Social Democratic Workers’ Party. The young nation of Austria experienced political instability, economic uncertainty, and a population imbalance, all of which contributed to changing mores regarding unmarried mothers and a new value for all children. Ultimately, a process and an event collided in Vienna: emotions mobilized by activists were transformed into new policies justified by the losses following World War I.