Workshop: discussion of Nicole de Silva's paper, “From the Kitchen Table to the Peace Table: Women's Internationalist Organizations and the Consumer Politics of Postwar Planning, 1939–1945”

Event Date: 

Saturday, February 26, 2022 - 11:00am to 12:30pm

Event Location: 

  • Zoom - See Related Link

Event Price: 

Free

Event Contact: 

On Saturday, February 26, from 11 am to 12:30 pm, the Center for Cold War Studies and International History (CCWS) and the Cold War Working Group (CWWG) will host a workshop. We will be reading and discussing a paper, “From the Kitchen Table to the Peace Table: Women's Internationalist Organizations and the Consumer Politics of Postwar Planning, 1939–1945,” by Nicole de Silva, a doctoral candidate in the UCSB history department.
 
Nicole's paper explores civic activism during World War II. As the conflict raged, some women activists believed that active participation in the war effort on the home front entitled them to a voice in planning out the postwar world. Others saw women's participation in postwar planning as a responsibility, casting feminine voices as capable of bringing a more peaceful world into being. This paper follows a transatlantic network of women's internationalist and peace committees that organized conferences, developed postwar plans, and lobbied policymakers to give their ideas a place on the agenda at major peace planning conferences. Using archival sources from the US, Britain, and Continental Europe, it focuses in particular on the expansive thinking of American and British women activists as they painted, in broad strokes, a conception of human rights that included a kind of "right to consume"—that is, to have access to healthy, safe food and other essential goods at reasonable prices. Even so, "the consumer" was never a race-blind or universal category that could be lifted out of his or her cultural or national context. Debates about how to improve access to goods became a site for conversations about intersectional bars to market and commodity access. Though some of their visions verged on the utopian, many of these plans for a more activist international government were carefully considered culminations of three decades of women's thinking and activism around consumer rights, duty, and access.
 
Workshop attendees are encouraged to read Nicole's paper in advance. They may gain access to it, and receive other information about the event, by contacting Addie Jensen at addisonmjensen@ucsb.edu
 
Doctoral candidate Nicole de Silva
Graduate student Nicole de Silva