A fascist triangle or a rotary wheel: The Sino-Japanese war and the gendered internationalisms of Sylvia Pankhurst and Carlos Romulo

Huckestein, Erika; Reeves, Mark

Abstract

In comparing the political discourses of two newspaper publishers, politically and geographically worlds apart, this chapter seeks to understand how gendered visions of the world directly influenced geopolitical analysis. The disparity in responses to the out-
break of the second Sino-Japanese War in 1937 from a British socialist and former suffragette, Sylvia Pankhurst, and an upper-class, center-right Filipino, Carlos Romulo, reveal how their gendered political imaginaries shaped their ability to offer solutions
to war and envision a new world order. Both Pankhurst and Romulo interpreted the significance of the Sino-Japanese War from the perspective of their own gendered forms of internationalism; Pankhurst was inspired by an anti-fascist feminist international-
ism, and Romulo embraced a masculinist socially elite internationalism. Though both wrote sympathetically about China’s plight in the face of Japanese aggression, their reasons for sympathy and their proposals for restoring order diverged along the lines of
their gendered internationalisms.

• Online Publication Date: Mar 6, 2017
• Publication Date: Mar 16, 2017
• Deposit Date: Feb 20, 2023
• Publicly Available Date: Feb 22, 2023
• Publisher: Brill Academic Publishers
• Pages: 77-106
• Edition: 1st
• Book Title: Gendering the Trans-Pacific World
• Chapter Number: 5
• ISBN: 978-90-04-33609-4; 978-90-04-44562-8
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004336100_006
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/10464334
• Publisher URL: https://brill.com/display/book/9789004336100/B9789004336100_006.xml