Workshop: Motivations behind Women's Humanitarian Commitment in the Twentieth Century

In The Need to Help (2015), anthropologist Liisa H. Malkki explores the motivations that have led volunteers – namely female agents – to join humanitarian missions. Far from presenting a heroic vision, she lists – amongst other impulses – a feeling of boredom, as well as a desire for danger and adventure. Taking Malkki’s reflections on the humanitarian commitment of women in our contemporary world as a departure point, this lecture seeks to provide a long-term perspective which could allow us to comprehend the reasons, emotions and experiences which have moved a plethora of female actors to help distant others from the beginnings of the humanitarian movement. By using the concepts developed in gender history, the history of emotions and the new history of experience, I will analyse a series of stories starring female relief agents to challenge essentialist interpretations which have explained women’s humanitarian engagement through their alleged compassionate nature. This theoretical framework will enable us to understand how the humanitarian movement has allowed women to participate in international politics by claiming their citizenship, struggling against class inequalities, racial segregation and sexual discrimination.

About the speaker

Dolores Martín-Moruno has been Swiss National Science Foundation Professor at the Institute for Ethics, History and the Humanities at the University of Geneva’s Faculty of Medicine (Switzerland). This year she will join the Milà y Fontanals Institution for Research in Humanities (Spanish National Research Council, Barcelona) as a senior researcher to pursue her work at the crossroads of Gender history, humanitarian medicine and global health. She has published widely on the history of humanitarianism, the histories of medicine and care, as well as the histories of emotions and experience.