Abstract
This article brings together transnational feminism, intersectionality, and militarized occupations by recovering Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom’s (WILPF) 1920s intersectional conversation. Mary Church Terrell, Helen Curtis, Addie Hunton, Jane Addams, and Emily Balch negotiated WILPF’s stance on two occupations: the controversy over the French use of colonial troops in its occupation of Germany, and the US occupation of Haiti. My argument is that through the evolving intersectional conversation, WILPF came to understand the necessity of weaving racialized sexual politics into its analysis of and activism around the politics of militarized occupations. To develop the argument, I construct and apply an ideal type of an intersectional conversation that incorporates a notion of unbracketing substantive inequalities during the conversation. I conclude with some implications for today about what we can learn in the twenty-first century from a moment in an early twentieth-century genealogy of intersectional transnational feminism.
