About the Book

The Feminist Pacific examines transnational networks in Hawai'i beginning in 1820, with the arrival of American missionary wives, and through the rise of women's internationalism in the interwar years.

Book Synopsis

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 women's organizing in this era of rapid globalization, tracing how diverse movements intersected and converged in Hawai'i--with worldwide consequences.

The Feminist Pacific examines transnational networks in Hawai'i beginning in 1820, with the arrival of American missionary wives, and through the rise of women's 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 Women's 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 women's 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 churchwomen's evangelism with twentieth-century feminist internationalism, this book recasts women's global organizing from the perspective of the Pacific.

Review Quotes

A rich and important book...the work is a unique and major contribution.-- "H-Diplo"

The Feminist Pacific makes an important contribution to transnational feminist history through its focus on international women's networks from the 1820s to the 1940s. From the locus of Hawai'i, Yasutake explores the gendered and often contradictory processes of imperialism, settler colonialism, nationalism, and internationalism. This project takes the form of 'reimagining' women's history in Asia and the Pacific.--Vera Mackie, coauthor of Remembering Women's Activism

What better place than Hawai'i to explore the ways that women from different places and cultures came together to work to better their lives? Rumi Yasutake's focus on a multicultural society struggling with imperialism allows us to see a new dimension of transnational women's activism.--Leila J. Rupp, author of Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women's Movement

About the Author

Rumi Yasutake is a professor emerita at Konan University in Kobe, Japan. She is the author of Transnational Women's Activism: The United States, Japan, and Japanese American Immigrant Communities in California, 1859-1920 (2004).