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Global Feminisms since 1945 (review)
- Journal of World History
- University of Hawai'i Press
- Volume 14, Number 3, September 2003
- pp. 426-427
- 10.1353/jwh.2003.0037
- Review
- Additional Information
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Journal of World History 14.3 (2003) 426-427
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Global Feminisms since 1945. Edited by Bonnie G. Smith. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Pp. xii + 319. ISBN 0-415-18490-8 (cloth), 0-415-18491-6 (paper).
"You can only get the real taste of dried fish and women," according to a Korean proverb, "if you beat them once every 3 days" (p. 121). This typifies the appalling cultural, social, political, and economic obstacles women have faced, even in very recent times, around the world. In this book Bonnie G. Smith has drawn together fourteen chapters that explore the various ways in which postwar feminisms have emerged to confront these challenges. The contributions, all of them reprinted from earlier journal articles, edited collections, or monographs, appear in four parts. After Smith's brief introduction, Part I focuses on feminism and "nation-building." Margot Badran begins by examining the complex interplay of feminism, nation-building, and Islam in nineteenth- and twentieth-centuryEgypt. MaryAnnTétreaultthenlooksat womenand revolution inVietnam, and the section ends with Zengie Mangaliso's brief chapter on women and nation-building in South Africa. Part II, "Sources of Activism," follows. Here, Yvonne Corcoran-Nantes stresses the complexity with which Brazilian women have developed a political consciousness. Wilhelmina Oduol and Wanjiku Mukabi Kabira next offer their study of women's groups and individual activists in Kenya, followed by Miriam Ching Yoon Louie's assessment of South Korean feminism, which has emerged as part of the broader minjung undong, or mass populist movement.
Part III features three chapters on women's liberation. In an excerpt from her book Born for Liberty, Sara Evans provides a brief but comprehensive account of American feminism in the 1960s. This is followed by one of the most interesting chapters, in which Alkarim Jivani explores the history of British gays and lesbians in the 1960s and early 1970s. Vera Mackie concludes this section by investigating feminist politics in postwar Japan. In the final and largest section, "New Waves in the 1980s and 1990s," Linda Racioppi and Katherine O'Sullivan See analyze the women's movement in post-Soviet Russia, paying particular attention to the legacies of the Soviet era. Modernity and feminism in twentieth-century Iran is the theme of the second piece, by Zohreh T. Sullivan. The last three chapters survey the realm of international organization. Saba Behar seeks to explain the limits of Amnesty International's effectiveness in promoting human rights when it comes to domestic violence; Sabine Lang examines the "NGO-ization" offeminism in reunified [End Page 426] Germany; and Mallika Dutt discusses the intersection of feminism and race at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing (1995). This volume has its flaws. It suffers from some editorial sloppiness, including well over a dozen typographical errors. Smith's introductory material is odd at points, especially in its tendency to understatement. This ranges from the relatively harmless—the lives of women living under communism "left much to be desired" (p. 4)—to the obnoxious —Japan"became involved in conflicts in Asia and the Pacific between 1937 and 1945" (p. 180). The prose, while serviceable, occasionally becomes dry. And most important, the collection could definitely have used a concluding essay that extracts overarching themes from the chapters, or compares and contrasts the points they make. Far more noteworthy, however, are the book's strengths. The first of these is its basic approach. As the title suggests and as Smith argues at the outset (p. 1), the plural term "feminisms" deserves emphasis; to speak of a single global feminism is absurd. Second, one can further appreciate this diversity because of the book's admirable geographic coverage: in addition to international organizations, all major regions of the world, as well as both developed and developing countries, are represented. Third, even novices will find the chapters accessible; the essays are empirical rather than theoretical, keep jargon to a bare minimum, and with two exceptions include notes, bibliographies, or both, which will serve nonspecialists well. Fourth and finally, the essays explore the inextricable linkages between feminism and a series...