Abstract

This article examines the politics of state feminism during the Clinton Administration as practiced by foreign service officers at the State Department Office of International Women's Issues (OIWI), the First Lady and her White House staff, and the Ambassador to Vienna and her Embassy staff, who collaborated to organize the "Vital Voices: Women in Democracy Conference" in July 1997. Tracing the origins of the conference and the formation of the new women's policy agency, the OIWI, to the end of the Cold War transformations in U.S. foreign policy making and new attention to women's human rights and their role in civil society building globally, this article addresses theoretical and practical issues of employing insider-outsider strategies when organizing for global feminist change.

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