Contested territories in the short twentieth century: Sarah Wambaugh (1882-1955), plebiscites, and gender

Wernitznig, Dagmar (author)

This article deals with Sarah Wambaugh’s life and work concerning global territorial questions of border disputes and nationalities as well as minorities issues. Trained at Radcliffe College in the disciplines of international law and political science, Wambaugh engineered a somewhat unprecedented career for herself in diplomatic circles after the First World War, achieving a worldwide reputation as the foremost expert on plebiscites, especially in areas of post-war conflicts. By looking at three case studies, this contribution particularly emphasizes Wambaugh’s role as an extra-governmental analyst of these referenda at the intersections of gender and universal suffrage. Within the context of geographic demarcations, aspects of citizenship, national belonging or affiliation, and minority rights, palpably, were paramount. While integrating these parameters into her theoretical discourses, Wambaugh went a step further by also adding the element of the franchise for women as an imperative coefficient regarding the drawing of borderlines. Hence, the female voting corpus – in most cases of quantitative significance during the aftermaths of wars, due to the substantial decimation of the male population on battle fields – attained a pertinent part in referenda-based rights to self-determination, and Wambaugh paid credit to this fact in her activism and writings.

• Language: English
• Keywords: plebiscites, interwar, gender, borderlands, League of Nations
• Work type: Article
• Typology: 1.01 - Original Scientific Article
• Organization: FF - Faculty of Arts
• Publication status: Published
• Publication version: Version of Record
• Publication date: 01.01.2022
• Year: 2022
• Number of pages: Str. 983-1002
• Numbering: Vol. 50, issue 5
• PID: 20.500.12556/RUL-141224
• UDC: 929Wambaugh S.
• ISSN on article: 0090-5992
• DOI: 10.1017/nps.2021.108
• COBISS.SI-ID: 122600195
• Publication date in RUL: 26.09.2022

Record is a part of a journal

• Title: Nationalities papers. ǂthe ǂjournal of nationalism and ethnicity
• Shortened title: Natl. pap.
• Publisher: Taylor&Francis
• ISSN: 0090-5992
• COBISS.SI-ID: 25998848

Licences

• License: CC BY 4.0, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
• Link: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Description: This is the standard Creative Commons license that gives others maximum freedom to do what they want with the work as long as they credit the author.
• Licensing start date: 07.06.2022

Secondary language

• Language: Slovenian
• Keywords: plebiscit, medvojno obdobje, obmejni prostor, Liga narodov

Projects

• Funder: EC - European Commission
• Funding programme: European Commission
• Project number: 742683
• Name: Post-war trasistions in gendered perspective: the case of the North-Eastern Adricatic Region
• Acronym: EIRENE