This paper analyses how women in sectors of the international feminist movement prior to 1939 developed and deployed aspects of comparative education as feminist strategy of social and political emancipation (Albisetti et al 2010).

The paper begins by examining the purposes, ambitions (Dale 2015) and uses (Nóvoa and Yariv-Mashal, 2003) of comparative education within sectors of women’s international organizations, which are viewed, following Tamboukou (2015) as educational institutions, and following Whitehead (1929b) as ‘vital’, ‘living’ entities. The paper frames the practice of comparative education as a transnational endeavour (Siegel, 2005), as process, as creative activity, and as an ‘adventure’ of education (Whitehead, 1929a). But it also explores how power relations within the discipline of comparative education (Dale, 2015), focussed around gendered authorship and authority and ethnicity/colonialism, entangled with women’s location and practice as comparative educationists (author, 2002) and inter-related with the solidarities, tensions and ambitions of the women’s international organisations. These relations are analysed via an approach that makes connections between dispositif, assemblage and process philosophy (Tamboukou 2015), and is attentive to how flux and permanence knit together in terms of macroscopic and microscopic processes (Whitehead 1929b).

The second section of the paper focuses on two comparative education texts by women: On National Education, compiled by Scottish geologist Marie Ogilvie Gordon, published by the International Council of Women in 1910; and L'enseignement Secondaire Des Jeunes Filles En Europe (Paris: J. Lebègue & Cie, 1934), which the Hungarian teacher, Amélie Arató researched under the auspices of the International Federation of University Women. It explores the entanglement of comparative research in education as political tool, as method of investigation, and as historical journey, as well as shifts around what Nóvoa and Yariv-Mashal (2003) term ‘‘knowing the ‘other’” and “understanding the ‘other’”. Analysis in this section focuses on the meshwork (Ingold, 2011) of lines of knowledge about education that were located in, and circulated between, local, national and international contexts and took on symbolic (written/published) and political form as comparative knowledge oriented towards social change.

In analyzing women’s development and deployment of comparative education as strategy of social and political emancipation, the paper points to the ‘mattering’ of knowledge (Barad, 2007) that links with theories of relativity in ways that have the potential to provide an alternative lens on the notions of time and space that underpin many approaches to comparative education as they engage with the complexities of transfer, borrowing and reception (Sobe, 2013) in order to bring about social and political change.