Women’s Associations and International Relations during the Interwar period in Estonia

• In Event: Baltic Women's Stories / Women's Roles and Agency in Baltic Societies

Abstract

The end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century saw the birth of many inter- or transnational organisations run exclusively by and for women, International Council of Women and International Federation of University Women are two examples. In 2005 Susan Zimmermann drew attention to the issue that these organisations struggled with the problem of multinational empires. The organisations tended to accept as members associations representing self-governing nation states or federal states. After many of the multinational empires disintegrated, the unions still required the women to organise into local associations, as individual women were not accepted as members. Whatever the struggles, it was still attractive enough so that Estonian women met all the criteria and were accepted as members to many of them.
Christine Oertzen has written a fascinating study (2012) on the role of these organisations for the German women during the interwar period and the Second World War. Inspired by many of the issues Oertzen raised, this presentation will investigate how Estonian women’s organisations and women themselves participated in these inter- or transnational unions in order to understand the potential role and merits provided by this collaboration for a newly established small nation state and which potential limitations its young age, peripheral location and relatively small population size set. I will try to establish in which organisations and how extensively Estonian women were able to participate and that will in turn characterise the extent to which the Estonian women were integrated into transnational women’s networks.

Short Bio

Janet Laidla is Lecturer of Estonian History at the Institute of History and Archaeology. Her early research (including the PhD thesis) concentrates on the early modern period (chronicle writing, history of knowledge); her more recent research concentrates on history of science of the modern period and early educated women in Estonia.

Author

• Janet Laidla, University of Tartu