The Feminist Pacific

As competing American, European, and later Japanese imperial and colonial ambitions spread across the ocean in the nineteenth century, Honolulu emerged as a transnational hub for the exchange of ideas. Rumi Yasutake reveals the pivotal role of womens organizing in this era of rapid globalization, tracing how diverse movements intersected and converged in Hawaiiwith worldwide consequences. The Feminist Pacific examines transnational networks in Hawaii beginning in 1820, with the arrival of American missionary wives, and through the rise of womens internationalism in the interwar years. It follows an array of suffragists, missionaries, maternalists, and antiwar activists in their international campaigns for peace and social justice that culminated in the formation of the Pan-Pacific Womens Association (PPWA) and subsequent conferences. Yasutake explores how these movements radiated from Honolulu and branched out to the United States, Japan, and China. She illuminates their contradictions, showing how womens striving for collective power went at once in the face of and hand in hand with globalization, settler colonialism, and imperialism. Yasutake underscores how the PPWA and the movements that formed it wrestled with the dichotomies of their world: home and public, domestic and foreign, native and settler, white and nonwhite, feminist and antifeminist. Bridging nineteenth-century Protestant churchwomens evangelism with twentieth-century feminist internationalism, this book recasts womens global organizing from the perspective of the Pacific.