Discovering Internationalist Practices of "Women of the Whole World"
Reflections from the IISG Amsterdam Archive on Afro-Asian Entanglements during the Cold War
Tamalika Roy
As researchers, what do we expect out of archives? Is it answers to all of our research questions? Is it the sheer curiosity and delight of discovering something new? Or even the apprehension that whatever we are hoping this archive will have will not be there at all? — I was thinking about all of this as I was walking towards the International Institute of Social History, IISG Archive in Amsterdam at 9 a.m. on a particularly cold and rainy winter morning in November 2023. I had been in Berlin for the last three weeks, just starting work on my project on women and Afro-Asian entanglements during the Cold War. Within the larger CRAFTE project, my research is interested in discovering women’s networks through women’s organizations functioning during the period of the Cold War and how through them women from Asia and Africa met, built friendships, solidarities, participated in international politics and continued their lifetime work as activists in their own countries. Due to my location, my research is largely based in India, on Indian actors and their practices of Afro-Asianism with a focus on women. As my case study, I have taken WIDF— Women's International Democratic Federation, an international women’s organization established in Paris in 1945, which later moved to East Berlin in 1951. As the biggest post-1945 international women’s organisation in terms of membership, it brought together a lot of women from Asia and Africa.
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My research traces WIDF’s organisational practice in terms of internationalism and intersectionality as well as the individual lives of a few notable women activists from India and Africa, who were part of WIDF, their ways of doing activism, practising internationalism and how they also shaped local women’s movements. At that point, I was just starting out on this quite large project. So, I went to IISG to understand WIDF as an organization and hoped to find clues and names of women from India and African countries, who had been to Berlin as WIDF members. ​​
Fig. 1: Reception area at IISG Amsterdam. 29.11.2023. Amsterdam, photo Tamalika Roy.
I started with the WIDF journal Women of the Whole World published in six languages and distributed all around the world. I had already requested for it previously on the website of the Archive and when I reached the next day, the stack of magazines were already laid out for me behind the big area in the reception. I gave my name and just mentioned which material I had requested for and within a minute I was seated with a huge stack of magazines, although it was barely one fourth of the whole collection. I sat down with them in front of a huge glass window and in front of me the canal flew as the rain kept falling. Well, I couldn’t complain about the work view at all.
As I began, what struck me most about the magazines was the covers— bright red, blue, green, orange, grey, peach cover pages, with photographs or paintings of women and children. Reading through the covers over the months and years, one can see how the initial years mostly featured photos of children of different races, succeeded by photos of individual or collective women of different nationalities, woman and child together, and eventually later issues from the late 1970s-1980s featuring mostly abstract art or images of mass women’s protests and marches. Featuring images of women of different countries and races felt like an attempt to uphold a sense of internationalism or give readers an idea of “women of the whole world”. Children of different races also suggested mothers of different races. It was creating a visual representation of intersectionality in one sense, although problematic and fraught with tensions. The international nature is also reflected in the contents of the magazine— reports of the international conferences organised by the WIDF, speeches of WIDF President Eugenie Cotton and other delegates from different countries, reports of various national conferences by women’s organisations in different countries attended by members of the WIDF. I was surprised and also elated to find a big two-page photograph of a women’s protest rally in 1954, in Calcutta, my hometown in India, in the magazine.
Fig. 2: A View from the IISG Reading Room. 27.11.2023, Amsterdam, photo Tamalika Roy.
​Due to the space of the magazine being more informal, such reports were different than just being minutes of meetings; they provided subjective perspectives of the people involved, excerpts of what the women who were participating said, including women from Asia and Africa. There were more informal photographs of the delegates, and I could really see Indian and African women in interaction with each other, or posing for a photograph, or even talking or laughing together. These in-between spaces of the conferences and gatherings showed me historical evidence of Afro-Asian entanglements suggesting that there is more to uncover.​
Fig. 3: A page from the Women of the Whole World journal, Issue 83, October, 1954. 27.11.2023. Amsterdam, photo Tamalika Roy.
The journal also featured writings by WIDF members on their experience of visiting a country, finding out about women’s issues there and reporting on their local women’s organisations. I was intrigued to find descriptions of the Indian WIDF representative Geeta Mukherjee’s visit to Accra, Ghana. The magazine included such writings, opinion pieces, photo stories, sections showcasing lives of women in different parts of the world mostly in Africa or Asia, a section on ‘fashion’ displaying the traditional dresses of women from different countries, and even a section on recipes from different parts of the world! There was also a recurring section called ‘Women Write to Us’ featuring feedback from readers from different parts of the world on the magazine. Not all of them were what I was expecting a political journal to have: especially sections on fashion and cooking. It was fascinating to learn once again that women’s activism, how women negotiate with the domestic and carve out their space in the public political sphere is never one-dimensional; women’s approach to the idea of activism, what they did to mobilise more women towards political action had many strategies, like a “women’s” magazine such as this circulating worldwide.
Fig. 4:. Glimpses of the WIDF Collection at IISG. 29.11.2023, Amsterdam, photo Tamalika Roy.
Fig 5: Women of the Whole World journal, Issue 7/8, July/August 1955. 29.11.2023. Amsterdam,, photo Tamalika Roy.
​​As I kept rifling through the black and white pages, these journals started revealing a time and world, through photographs, reports, writings, discussions and stories. What these journals were telling me was not the official history of WIDF or just showing a list of names of women involved with them. They were showing me how these women were perceiving the times they were living in, what they were thinking, which issues were important to them and how they were talking about it. It provided not only the historical, but the cultural and social landscape they were working in. In the aftermath of the World Wars and the ongoing Cold War, it was evident that their main concern was peace and nuclear disarmament all over the world, but the magazine was showing in exactly which way they were envisioning this anti-war and peaceful world, how they were also including Africa and Asia and how African and Asian women participated in it. ​
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The issues of the journal occupied most of the four days I had in the archive, interrupted only by cups of free coffee and lunch in the cafeteria downstairs where the man behind the counter was kind enough to give me free lunch more than once!
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I also looked at the archival materials in their WIDF collection. Along with some WIDF papers, it has a wonderful array of grey literature— news bulletins, pamphlets, posters, invitation cards, conference programmes and many such things. It was really exciting to find actual material evidence of WIDF’s practices which till then I was only imagining. All these materials showed how the WIDF practiced its politics and how the organization also shaped the cultural field of the time, whereby the presence of African and Asian women played a very important role.
I remember I felt grateful and hopeful every day, as I walked back from the archive after a day's work to views of the sunset or a greying sky. It felt like a hopeful start to my research. I had limited time there, but the people at the archive were so warm and helpful that I covered most of the materials within the period of my stay in Amsterdam. There were four slots in a day for ordering more materials and anything I asked for was ready for access within 30 minutes when the ordering slot ended. Coming from my experience of working in Indian archives, that was truly a delight! At the end of the four days, I only wished I could be there longer. I could be there forever.
Fig 6: A View of the IISG Collections. 29.11.2023. Amsterdam, photo Tamalika Roy.
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Fig 7: View from the steps of the IISG at 5 pm. 29.11.2023. Amsterdam, photo Tamalika Roy.
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Button Cover Image: View of IISG Amsterdam Building. 27.11.2023, Amsterdam, Tamalika Roy.
Author: Tamalika Roy
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Affiliation: Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi & Leibniz-Zentrum Moderne Orient (ZMO), Berlin
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Date: 20.08.2024
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​​Cite as: Tamalika Roy, "Discovering Internationalist Practices of 'Women of the Whole World': Reflections from the IISG Amsterdam Archive on Afro-Asian Entanglements during the Cold War." Crafting Entanglements: Afro-Asian Pasts of the Global Cold War, No. 3 (August 2024): 4 pp.
https://doi.org/10.58144/20241205-006
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