Global Feminism in a Conservative Age: Possibilities and Pieties Since 1980

In 1980, Ronald Reagan's election brought the New Right to Washington. For feminists, it was the culmination of a series of devastating setbacks. The new administration gave the green light to an anti-feminist agenda that the Moral Majority, the Hyde Amendment and Phyllis Schlafly's Stop-ERA had already advanced. In the drastically altered climate, with the rightward turn affecting states and municipalities as well, feminist legislative and policy initiatives collapsed. Who truly spoke for the masses of women? Anti-feminists now insisted that they did. Faced with blockage at home, one response of American feminists was to reorient their political ambitions to women's movements abroad. A flourishing international women's movement looked to be a hospitable venue for American energies and ideas.