Review of Second World, Second Sex: Socialist Women's Activism and Global Solidarity during the Cold War by Kristen Ghodsee (Duke University Press)

Abstract

Kristen Ghodsee’s Second World, Second Sex recovers the historical legacy of women from the Eastern bloc and post-colonial Africa as political activists for women’s rights and diplomats for socialist and non-aligned nations during the UN Decade for Women, 1975-1985. Second World, Second Sex challenges the conventional wisdom of three-wave feminist history by documenting the critical interventions made by women in service of a vision of equality that was always already intersectional, and that refused to separate women’s issues from questions of neo-colonialism, racism, and economic re-distribution. It offers a helpful and instructive reminder of socialist feminism’s rich and global history of organization and action, a history that was created and fought for in large part by alliances of women from non-aligned and socialist countries during the Cold War and whose memory is all too often erased from dominant Western histories of the women’s movement.