What do the Inter-Allied Women's Conference and the Pan-African Congress in Paris, the “Ladies’ Protests” in Cairo, and the International Congress of Working Women in Washington have in common? What was the Chinese revolutionary Soumay Tcheng's part in preventing the Chinese delegate from signing the Treaty of Versailles? How did organized women contribute to the content of Woodrow Wilson's famous Fourteen Points? These are some of the questions that Mona L. Siegel answers in her sweeping and captivating monograph Peace on Our Terms. Published as a part of Columbia Studies in International and Global History, the book will be an equally informative and engaging read for historians in various specialties as well as for a broader readership.

Using the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 as a focal point, the author succeeds in telling an absorbing tale about the global battle for women's rights in the immediate post-war period. As Siegel argues, the Paris Peace Conference “unleashed an unprecedented wave of female activism, drawing women from far-reaching corners of the world onto the international stage in a simultaneous and spirited defence of democracy, peace, and women's rights” (2). Primarily by bringing forward the personal trajectories of eight women with various geographical, ideological, and social backgrounds, the author crafts a narrative that beautifully bridges the personal and biographical with the political and the global. Essentially, the author demonstrates that for many of the women involved, the Paris Peace Conference was a “catalyzing event” (71) for their personal political engagement and, furthermore, that their activism(s) set the firm foundations of “global feminism” (9) for decades to come.

Six chapters offer a diversity of different perspectives on early post-World War I women's activism. The first chapter begins with a letter that French philanthropist and suffragist Marguerite de Witt Schlumberger sent to then-American President Woodrow Wilson in January 1919. Siegel uses the letter to tell a story about the Inter-Allied Women's Conference, which ran parallel to the Peace Conference in Paris. In Chapter 2, we learn about African American activists Mary Church Terrell and Ida Gibbs Hunt—whose struggle for racial justice and gender equality contributed to the forging of black women's internationalist awareness after the First World War. Chapter 3 takes us to Egyptian nationalist feminist Huda Shaarawi, who in March 1919 organized the “Ladies’ Protest” against the British Protectorate in Cairo, and in 1923 participated in forming The Egyptian Feminist Union, becoming its first president. In Chapter 4, Siegel focuses on the 1919 Congress of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom in Zurich under the leadership of Jane Addams, which challenged the Versailles Treaty and aimed for bridging the divide between the Allied and the defeated nations. Chapter 5 studies the connection between the Chinese May Fourth Movement and women's rights by focusing on the Chinese peace delegate to Paris, Soumay Tcheng, and her contribution to the official stance of China during the 1919 peace negotiations. Finally, Chapter 6 explores the labor activism of Jeanne Bouvier and Rose Schneiderman, adding worker's rights and social justice to the broad horizon of organized women's struggles in 1919. Finishing with a brief snapshot of the 1923 Congress of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance in Rome in the epilogue, the author circles an exceptionally well-researched narrative about women's hopes and disillusionment, as well as empowerment and radicalization in the period following the First World War.

Through these chapters, the main contribution of Peace on Our Terms to existing historiography is in its global approach to women's rights activism in 1919. The “global” here refers not solely to the many places that the author takes us to: Paris and Cairo, Washington and Beijing, Zurich and Madagascar. More importantly, it also refers to the incipient global worldview of women activists after the First World War, and, more specifically, to the emerging global consideration of the various issues in question, including female suffrage and women's rights, (anti-)imperialism, racism and racial justice, nationalism and self-determination, maternity benefits, and working women's rights and wage equality. Second, Siegel's research substantially contributes to overcoming the “longstanding bias that holds ‘women's issues’ apart from the serious work of ‘real’ politics” (14) and illustrates not only how women themselves organized in the post-war period, but also the different ways in which women contributed to peacebuilding after the Great War.

Among the major strengths of the monograph is also the author's use of an inspiringly rich array of sources. Carefully exploring documents from fifteen archives in four countries, Siegel engaged with personal documents and letters, passports and photographs, memoirs, conference proceedings, numerous newspapers, and magazines. The analysis of such a variety of sources allows Siegel to shed a different light on many familiar stories. A good example is the case of Soumay Tcheng, whose role in motivating China's rejection of the Versailles Treaty has been overlooked because, as Siegel suggests, historians have been “most comfortable with relying on primary sources, which are rare in this case” (183); an attentive analysis of memoirs and newspaper interviews was necessary to uncover Soumay Tcheng's role. As Siegel's skilful analysis and her occasional reflection on the sources remind us, getting out of traditional historiography's comfort zone is sometimes necessary in order to bring women's contributions to politics to light.

Finally, a monograph such as this one would not have been possible without an expanding body of historiography on women's movements and feminisms written over the previous couple of decades, which Siegel expertly built on. Now a century since the foundations of “global feminism” have been set, the historiography has sufficiently grown such that global histories, Peace on Our Terms now inclusive, can begin to be written. Yet this is only the beginning. While the book's geographical and thematic scopes are fairly broad, it still, like many other books on transnational and women's history, largely neglects to include other relevant perspectives. In the context of the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, the most notable absence is that of Eastern Europe. Accordingly, for the field to move further, global historians of women's and gender history can build on pioneering work like Siegel's to explore “less popular” contexts and historiographies to help create an ever richer field.