This book provides a path-breaking study of the genesis, growth, gains, and dilemmas of women's movements in countries throughout the world. Its focus is on the global South, where women's movements have engaged in complex negotiations with national and international forces. It challenges widely held assumptions about the Western origins and character of local feminisms. The authors locate women's movements within the terrain from which they emerged by exploring their relationships with the state, civil society, and other social movements. This fully revised second edition contains six new chapters by leading scholars of women and gender studies, on both individual countries and on several major regions of the world? Europe, Africa, Latin America, and the Maghreb. This balanced coverage enables readers to identify regional patterns and also learn from in-depth case studies. Women's Movements in the Global Era is essential reading for anyone interested in the global scope and implications of feminism.

The spread and consolidation of the women's movement in North and South over the past thirty years looks set to shape the course of social progress over the next generation. Peggy Antrobus draws on her long experience of feminist activism to set women's movements in their changing national and global context.

Using 150 years of women's history, this book details how women have organized into global movements which have shaped and challenged how international organizations consider gender. It argues that traditional ways of analysing international relations have ignored women's contributions because their tools are gender-exclusive. After developing a gender analysis, this book brings to light many contributions from women's movements especially related to the League of Nations and United Nations, and puts these in the context of changes in the global political economy.

A powerful and essential anthology that sheds light on the status of women throughout the world Hailed by Alice Walker as “one of the most important human documents of the century,” this collection of groundbreaking essays examines the global status of women’s experiences, from oppression to persecution. Originally published in 1984, the compilation features pieces written by a diverse set of powerful women—journalists, politicians, grassroots activists, and scholars—from seventy countries. Author Robin Morgan, a champion of women’s rights herself, expertly weaves these inspiring essays into one comprehensive feminist text. These compelling “herstories” contain thoroughly researched statistics on the status of women throughout the world. Each chapter focuses on a different country and includes data on education, government, marriage, motherhood, prostitution, rape, sexual harassment, and sexual preference. Sisterhood Is Global transcends political systems and geographical boundaries to unite women and their experiences in a way that remains unequalled, even decades after its first publication.

Explores the social and political developments that have energized movements of global feminism Increasingly feminists around the world have successfully campaigned for recognition of women's full personhood and empowerment. Global Feminism explores the social and political developments that have energized this movement. Drawn from an international group of scholars and activists, the authors of these original essays assess both the opportunities that transnationalism has created and the tensions it has inadvertently fostered. By focusing on both the local and global struggles of today's feminist activists this important volume reveals much about women's changing rights, treatment and impact in the global world. Contributors: Melinda Adams, Aida Bagic, Yakin Ertürk, Myra Marx Ferree, Amy G. Mazur, Dorothy E. McBride, Hilkka Pietilä, Tetyana Pudrovska, Margaret Snyder, Sarah Swider, Aili Mari Tripp, Nira Yuval-Davis.

Worlds of Women is a groundbreaking exploration of the "first wave" of the international women's movement, from its late nineteenth-century origins through the Second World War. Making extensive use of archives in the United States, England, the Netherlands, Germany, and France, Leila Rupp examines the histories and accomplishments of three major transnational women's organizations to tell the story of women's struggle to construct a feminist international collective identity. She addresses questions central to the study of women's history--how can women across the world forge bonds, sometimes even through conflict, despite their differences?--and questions central to world history--is internationalism viable and how can its history be written? Rupp focuses on three major organizations that were technically open to all women: the broadly based and cautious International Council of Women, founded in 1888; the feminist International Alliance of Women, originally called the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, founded in 1904; and the vanguard Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, which grew out of the International Congress of Women that met at The Hague in 1915. The histories of these organizations, and their stories of cooperation and competition, shed new light on the international women's movement. They also help us to understand the different but connected story of the second wave of international feminism that emerged from the ashes of World War II.

Since the early 1980s Ecuador has experienced a series of events unparalleled in its history. Its “free market” strategies exacerbated the debt crisis, and in response new forms of social movement organizing arose among the country’s poor, including women’s groups. Gendered Paradoxes focuses on women’s participation in the political and economic restructuring process of the past twenty-five years, showing how in their daily struggle for survival Ecuadorian women have both reinforced and embraced the neoliberal model yet also challenged its exclusionary nature. Drawing on her extensive ethnographic fieldwork and employing an approach combining political economy and cultural politics, Amy Lind charts the growth of several strands of women’s activism and identifies how they have helped redefine, often in contradictory ways, the real and imagined boundaries of neoliberal development discourse and practice. In her analysis of this ambivalent and “unfinished” cultural project of modernity in the Andes, she examines state policies and their effects on women of various social sectors; women’s community development initiatives and responses to the debt crisis; and the roles played by feminist “issue networks” in reshaping national and international policy agendas in Ecuador and in developing a transnationally influenced, locally based feminist movement.