WomenhuNET: Women's Transnational Humanitarian Networks. Anti-Fascist British Women and Europe Refugees (1900-1950)

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British women played a vital but largely overlooked role in saving anti-fascist activists and European refugees in the 1930s and 1940s.However, the existing historiography tends to understand these women solely within the British context and not within thetransnational, European networks in which they operated. Yet we argue that British women's humanitarian activism was configuredas a network, had a transnational dimension and brought together the postulates of early 20th century feminism and 1930s antifascism.Accordingly, WomenhuNET focuses on analysing the trajectories of British women who mobilised to help refugees fleeingfascism, with the aim of reconstructing the women's transnational humanitarian networks in which their activism was inserted. Thisapproach will also help us better understand the origins of the European Union, and the place of the UK in these beginnings, which inpart grew out of the anti-fascist tradition and the defence of democratic values. This project will address three main questions: whatsocial and political pathways led British women to become involved in anti-fascist refugee relief campaigns and what was thetransformative impact of their actions and rhetoric?, which transnational networks they were part of during their anti-fascisthumanitarian activism? and what identities, power and authority they developed during and after their humanitarian experience andhow gender and the transnational action shaped them? Following a methodology of micro-historical and transnational analysis, wewill work with a large corpus of primary sources scarcely explored to date, deposited in archives of the UK, Spain, France, Switzerland,Netherlands and the US. The results will be disseminated in a variety of ways, notably through an international conference, an articlein high-impact journals and a book submitted to a major university press.