Daria Dyakonova
Dr. Daria Dyakonova is a research fellow at the the Gender Centre of the Geneva Graduate Institute. She teaches at the International Institute in Geneva. In 2024-2026 she was an MSCA postdoctoral research fellow jointly affiliated with Sapienza University in Rome and the University of Glasgow. Her current research focuses on the international Communist Women’s Movement during the interwar period, with particular attention to transnational activism.
Her doctoral dissertation, completed at the University of Montreal, analyzed the transnational history of the Young Communist League of Canada. She is currently adapting it into a monograph. Dr. Dyakonova's research expertise spans left-wing youth and women’s movements, the transnational history of communism, and Soviet history and gender history. Her recent publications include a co-edited documentary collection on the Communist Women’s Movement (Brill, 2022 / Haymarket, 2023) and a few scholarly contributions on Canadian communism’s international connections and the Communist Women’s Movement during the interwar years in edited volumes and the Journal of Women's History.
Geneva Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies
Session
This paper examines the anti-imperialist efforts of women workers in China, Korea, and Japan, which targeted British, American, and Japanese imperialism in the 1920s. Aligned with the Communist International (Comintern) and the Soviet Union, which supported a united front between China’s nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), communist women organized globally through the Communist Women’s Movement (CWM, 1920–35). The CWM promoted working women’s emancipation and developed specific policies for “women of the East,” aiming to integrate Asian women into economic, social, and political life.
In Korea and Japan, the CWM faced severe repression and operated illegally, limiting its strength, though local communist women’s groups remained active. In colonial Korea, the movement aligned with anti-colonial resistance, while in “semi-colonial” China, the CWM was stronger: it collaborated with the KMT’s women’s movement until 1926 and later became a major force in CCP-controlled areas. Across all three contexts, gender, class, and ethnicity intersected with anti-colonial struggle.
Using CWM archives and its journal Die Kommunistische Fraueninternationale this paper analyzes how the CWM’s radical program was implemented in three distinct Asian settings. It argues that the movement's general positions on women’s emancipation were distinctly adapted within each national and colonial context.