Canal-U

Marion Röwekamp - A parallel legal world. Women formulating international law (1878-1914)

The process of women formulating international law started with congresses held by the transnational women's movement. Here female specialists met, exchanged legal knowledge, collected and compared law, wrestled over formulations, and, starting from national rights, sought to find an overarching approach to the problem that in all legal families especially the legal situation of married women was tied to that of their husbands, exposing them to severe legal disadvantages. They established a parallel network in the phase of the beginning of the male-written international law, in order to find common ground in constant international exchanges. Starting from national rights they initiated legal reform at the global level and intended to formulate a supranational legal order. Eventually these proposals found their way also into international "male" bodies. The paper will show that women´s participation is indispensable to the process of the emergence of international law but has so far seldom being picked up as an object of research in the history of international law.