Metaphors of the Schoolroom: Women Working the Mandates System of the League of Nations
sp2216{at}columbia.edu
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Abstract |
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International women's organizations greeted the establishment of the League of Nations with enthusiasm, pledging their support for its social reform efforts and urging that women be appointed to its committees and commissions. This essay examines the work of the two Scandinavian women who served on its Permanent Mandates Commission, the body charged with overseeing the administration of the Ottoman and German territories seized during the war and distributed under League of Nations mandate among the allied powers. Anna Bugge-Wicksell and Valentine Dannevig worked hard in their role as (serially) the sole woman member of the commission, criticizing the inadequate educational and social services for women and children in many mandated territories and urging better provision. Yet, as this essay shows, they also shared the assumptions about civilizational hierarchies and the incapacity of many peoples for self-government on which the mandates system was based, and joined with their fellow commissioners to defend the mandatory Powers from nationalist claims and local rebellions. Their views and activities contrast sharply with those of another woman internationalist and League enthusiast, Winifred Holtby, whose late novel Mandoa, Mandoa! satirized the paternalism inherent even in humanitarian interventions and who tried to work out in her own life an alternative political practice.