The Geopolitics of Women’s Issues: The “Private Sphere” Goes Global

Abstract

Kristen Ghodsee’s revisionist take on the importance of socialist women’s activism was researched and written before the Covid-19 pandemic upended the world, but her observations seem even more compelling now. The Cold War rivalry of the late twentieth century fostered alliances between women from socialist countries and women from recently decolonized nations to advocate for a political economy that promoted social welfare and ecological sustainability. Between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s, as women increasingly bore the brunt of the structural adjustment policies and neoclassical economic paradigms that obliterated social services and prized efficiency over social and environmental health, women from socialist countries offered another option—one in which state policies supported working parents and provided for basic needs such as health care and housing. Ghodsee clearly challenges the U.S.-centered liberal feminist depiction of this period, challenging the dismissal of state-sponsored women’s organizations and showing the many ways that the United States and rest of the NATO crowd lagged behind socialist countries on basic issues such as universal childcare and mothers’ pensions. But Ghodsee also challenges the narrative from postcolonial scholars such as Devaki Jain and Amrita Basu who focus on this period as a turning point for Third World feminists, without recognizing the important role of their alliances with Second World activists. Throughout the book, Ghodsee engages the extant scholarship, clarifying the stakes of her interventions into the historiography. Two more recent books, Joanne Meyerowitz’s A War on Global Poverty and Dorothy Sue Cobble’s For the Many, offer further evidence of how much historians gain by looking more closely at these collaborations across geopolitical divides.