Feminist perspectives on the history of humanitarian relief (1870-1945)

Taking a Feminist perspective as a starting point, this introductory piece seeks not only to integrate women as the main agents within the history of humanitarian relief, but also to understand their assistance to victims, from the Franco-Prussian War to WWII, as a type of situated knowledge which was broadly associated with the notion of care through the implementation of practices such as dressing wounds, vaccinating, feeding and clothing vulnerable populations. This political and epistemological position allows us to analyse the agency of women humanitarians as a caring power involving strong gender, class, religious and colonial power relations within the history of Western Empires. Furthermore, our Feminist approach enables us to deconstruct the essentialist vision through which women humanitarians have frequently been depicted as compassionate mothers or loving angels, as well as to contextualize their contrasting experiences of complicity with Western Empires and resistance to male delegates and political and medical representatives. Far from heroic representations, women humanitarians had to navigate through complex global hierarchies although this did not necessarily come into conflict with their dreams about female emancipation.