Twenty years of Worlds of Women: Leila Rupp's impact on the history of U.S. women's internationalism

Abstract

Since its publication in 1997, Leila Rupp's Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women's Movement has been hailed as a ground‐breaking work of scholarship on women's internationalism. This essay considers its impact for U.S. historians in particular, examining how it has led to new studies of U.S. women internationalists and of U.S. women's engagement with women around the world. It has also furthered efforts to globalize the history of the United States, to reperiodize the field of U.S. women's history, and to diversify the field of U.S. foreign relations.

Piecing together suffrage internationalism: Place, space, and connected histories of Australasian women's activism

“…Sandwiched between Mineke Bosch and Annemarie Kloostermann's () intimate history of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA) and Leila Rupp's groundbreaking Worlds of Women (), Suffrage and Beyond () presaged a sea‐change in western feminist history. In the 1990s, a generation of scholars, led by Rupp, “laid the cornerstone for what has become the dynamic field of women's internationalism” (Threlkeld, , p. 1). New histories documented the proto‐feminist dialogue nurtured within mid‐nineteenth century transatlantic friendship networks and the fin‐de‐siècle crystallisation of these nodes into formal organisations, like the IWSA and the International Council of Women (ICW) (Anderson, ; Holton, ; McFadden, ; Offen, ).…”

“…In this endeavour, it is vital to marry collective biography—a standard tool for historians interested in illuminating the lives of historically overshadowed women—with “unfashionable” organisational history (Caine, , pp. 45–65; Threlkeld, , p. 7).…”