Bury the Corpse of Colonialism: The Revolutionary Feminist Conference of 1949
Elisabeth B. Armstrong, University of California Press (2023)

Book review by Nick D.

In 1949, two hundred revolutionary women from across Asia and the world gathered “in the bitter cold of the People’s Great Hall in China” as delegates to the Asian Women’s Conference. 

Over one week in December, this conference – organised by the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) – brought together militant women from the frontlines of anti-colonialism to share their knowledge and develop “…feminist internationalism as a praxis, a theory of women’s organising against imperialism”. 

In her 2023 book Bury the corpse of colonialism: the revolutionary feminist conference of 1949, Elisabeth Armstrong retells the story of this momentous conference, its disappearance from historical memory and its enduring value today. 

The Two-Pronged Strategy of Anti-Imperialism 

It is immediately clear in Bury the corpse of colonialism, that the Asian Women’s Conference is largely absent from our “memories of mid-century women’s activism”. One cause of this historical amnesia is the Cold War erasure of socialist women’s movements and organising. 

Referencing Dutch Historian Francisca de Haan, Armstrong asserts that “Cold War historiography in Europe and the United States…[is] the primary silencing mechanism that has erased communist and socialist women from the historical record of women’s transnational movements in the twentieth century”.

A second factor is more complex and seems related to the concrete strategic resolutions of the conference. Armstrong explains that the 1949 Conference saw the crystallisation of a two-pronged approach to feminist anti-imperialism:

“On the inside of colonial powers, women sought to grind the war machine to a halt by refusing to allow family members to enlist or permit ships to load armaments and soldiers bound for counterinsurgency warfare in the colonies. On the outside of imperial centres, women took up arms, built fortifications, passed intelligence, hid insurgents, doctored the wounded, harvested the crops and fed the frontlines, all to strengthen the fight against occupation. Together they sought to bury colonialism”.  

The theoretical basis for this strategy lies in the Marxist-Leninist understanding of imperialism as the “highest stage of capitalism” – which results in the division of the world into exploiter and exploited countries. Based on this, a central task of anti-imperialist socialists inside exploiter countries is to carry out consistent resistance against their “own” ruling class as well as ceaseless work in support of forces inside exploited countries. 

At the 1949 conference, Cai Chang – a member of the Communist Party of China since 1923 – explicitly raised Lenin’s argument (evident in works such as The Right of Nations to Self-Determination) that a nation which oppresses another cannot itself be free. She told the conference: 

“The women of Holland must ceaselessly demand the cessation of the colonial war, and the recall of the troops from Indonesia. This slogan must also be adopted by women of the other imperialist countries, above all those of the United States. They must help their sisters not only because they are moved by a sentiment of justice, but because the struggle of the women in the dependent countries against the oppressors is part of the fight for peace and democracy. Our American sisters must demand the retreat of the American troops from South Korea”. 

Armstrong suggests that in the years following the 1949 Conference, “the inside/outside organising strategy for women’s internationalism” – a strategy that accentuated differences depending on one’s location in the world – was increasingly replaced with a more universal framework for women’s anti-imperialist organising. She describes this as, “…a rhetorical strategy that sought to build global linkages through radical motherhood”.

 “[T]he story of the Asian Women’s Conference disappeared from the WIDF’s own record of its activism, and as a result, from the archives,” Armstrong writes. From my own reading, it was not completely clear when this occurred nor why. However, Armstrong’s third chapter seems to suggest that the shift to more universalist propaganda was seen by WIDF members in Europe and the United States as a way to win over more women to their campaigns. 

For example, Armstrong highlights some discomfort among delegates – particularly those from Sweden and the United States – during the WIDF’s 1948 Budapest Conference and at a WIDF Council Meeting held in Moscow a month before the conference in Beijing.

At the Budapest Conference, Sweden’s representative, Andrea Andreen, explained to her comrades, “…we may perhaps change our propaganda a little, not condemn the West so categorically…If there were an equal percentage of members in the Western countries now to that of the Eastern countries, our resolutions would be formulated with more prudence than they are made now”.

Stories of Conference Delegates

Throughout the book, Armstrong tells the inspiring individual stories of conference delegates such as Celestine (Macoucou) Ouezzin Coulibaly – leader of the anti-colonial struggle in French West Africa and co-founder of the African Democratic Assembly (RDA) – as well as Indian revolutionary Gita Bandyopadhyay.

A very memorable chapter is The Journey to the Conference. Here, Armstrong recalls how Southeast Asian delegates travelled to the conference in Beijing on foot. She writes, and it is worth quoting at length:

“Some, like Ho Thi Minh from her communist autonomous zone of Northern Vietnam, began their journeys six months before the planned meeting date, walking on foot through landmines, aerial strafing, and colonial patrols. They sought to gather with their Asian sisters to make anew a world after global war, to imagine a world with no war, at the very moment they carried guns filled with live ammunition, ready for use. They left their places, the rural and urban locations of their birth as well as their uprooted locations in the colonial centres of European power. They brought with them the lessons of their struggles, some held in common with each other, some particular to their place. They gathered in Beijing with their wealth of lessons learned to bury the greed and class warfare of capitalism for good”. 

In this chapter, we also learn of delegates from Madagascar, China, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, France, Czechoslovakia, the United States, Algeria, Mongolia, Russia and elsewhere who caught the Vladivostok Express to Beijing after attending the WIDF board meeting in Moscow. 

The going-ons on board this train are captured by Armstrong, such as when French Communist Party leader Jeannette Vermeersch scolded Betty Millard from the Communist Party of the United States for smoking – a supposed “betrayal of the working class” – after the latter criticised her French comrade for travelling first class. 

This incident was observed by Indonesian communist Lillah Suripno. Originally from Palembang, Lillah became a member of Perhimpunan Indonesia (PI) in the 1930s before joining the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI). She lived in Amsterdam with her brother Brenthel Soesilo and was involved in organising Indonesian migrant workers. Lillah and Brenthel then joined the anti-fascist Dutch resistance to fight, “…a fascism they knew only too well in Indonesia” (64). 

In August 1943, after performing the Tangkuban Prahoe dance at a fundraiser for the Dutch underground she was arrested by the Gestapo, charged with “aiding the underground movement” and sent to the Vught concentration camp. Armstrong writes of her arrest, 

“Those charges left out her many crimes in the eyes of fascists: her communism and her anti-imperialism, her fervour as a saboteur, anti-fascist propagandist, protector of Jewish people, daughter of nationalists, and dancer for the people. She survived. And they failed to subdue her commitments, especially now when she had so little to lose”.

Armstrong’s account highlights the forms of anti-imperialism that Lillah expected of women from imperialist countries. Her approach contrasts with activists such as Andrea Andreen who intervened in Budapest about alienating women inside imperialist countries: “Peace, Andrea thought, should be more even-handed as an appeal… Lillah disagreed. In her experience, soft-pedalling imperialism had never won freedom movements anything”. Rather, the kind of anti-imperialism that Lillah supported most was that practised by Dutch communist women:

“At the docks of Ijmuiden on the banks of the English Channel, the women shouted “Houses not barracks!” and “Bring the troops back from Indonesia!” Their actions forced armaments back to their trucks. Alongside dockworkers, they laid their bodies across the road, forcing trucks to turn around. They kept the barges empty of bullets, machine guns, bombs, and other counterinsurgency hardware. The Dutch communist women took their blows for anti-imperialism”.

Summing Up 

Armstrong’s ability to weave together analysis and storytelling – a storytelling that brings militant women like Lillah Suripno to life – will appeal to socialists today who draw inspiration from the historic struggles of Global South revolutionaries.  

Further, the conference’s appeal for a two-pronged strategy raises important questions about the different tasks of socialists inside and outside the imperialist core today. Although our goals are the same, the paths we take will depend on our proximity to the fault lines of global capitalist-imperialism.

What is also clear is that our struggle against imperialism will only win on a global scale. The need to collaborate with revolutionaries across the world is as true in 2023 as it was in 1949.