2001 Presentations (Communicative Events)

Women Anti-Appeasers in the 1930s

Pedersen, Susan G.

This lecture explores the thinking and activism of four women -- League of Nations activist Blanche Dugdale, Liberal activist Violet Bonham Carter, and the Members of Parliament Eleanor Rathbone and the Duchess of Atholl -- about the challenge to democracy posed by the rise of fascist states in the 1930s. Although often overlooked by the men around them, these women insisted on their responsibility for the actions of their government and their country and in essence used their own marginality or their specifically female forms of access to challenge the policy of appeasement.