Dreams of Global Feminism

Abstract

Women’s history is traditionally written from local or national perspectives. In recent years, however, women’s and feminist historians have increasingly incorporated regional, transnational, and international approaches into their research. Lucy Delap’s Feminisms: A Global History provides a useful synthesis of some of this newer scholarship. By adopting a global approach, Delap offers readers “alternative starting points and new thinkers” because “[t]hese perspectives help challenge the assumed priority of European feminisms,” which have dominated much of the existing historical literature (16). Delap demonstrates that the fight for “gender justice” has long been global and “cannot be located only within single nation states, regions or empires” (26, 18). Ultimately, Delap argues for a “useable history” that “must be non-doctrinaire and open-ended, shaped but not determined by the encounter between past and present” (23). While the book suffers from problems typical of synthetic studies, Feminisms is nevertheless an ambitious and readable book that...