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  • Feminist Engagements with Transnational Issues and Activism
  • Karen Garner (bio)
Sylvanna M. Falcón. Power Interrupted: Antiracist and Feminist Activism inside the United Nations. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016. xiv + 244 pp.; ill. ISBN 978-0-295-99525-0 (cl); 978-0-295-99526-7 (pb).
Kristen Ghodsee. Second World, Second Sex: Socialist Women's Activism and Global Solidarity during the Cold War. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. xviii + 306 pp.; ill. ISBN 978-1-4780-0139-3 (cl); 978-1-4780-0181-2 (pb).
Katherine M. Marino. Feminism and the Americas: The Making of an International Human Rights Movement. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2019. xii + 354 pp.; ill. ISBN 978-1-4696-4969-6 (cl); 978-1-4696-4970-2 (ebook).
Ann Oakley. Women, Peace, and Welfare: A Suppressed History of Social Reform, 1880–1920. Bristol, UK: Policy Press University of Bristol, 2018. x + 442 pp.; ill. ISBN 978-1-4473-3256-5 (cl); 978-1-4473-3262-6 (pb); 978-1-4473-3260-2 (epub); 978-1-4473-3261-9 (Kindle).

These four rich texts shine their bright lights on women and their transnational feminist activist projects spanning the period from the late nineteenth century into the first decade of the twenty-first century. The women, their projects, and their organizations that are the subjects of these studies, as well as the authors who researched and analyzed these endeavors, crossed national, institutional, ideological, disciplinary, and methodological borders, literally and figuratively, in pursuit of feminist, anti-imperialist, antiracist, and humanitarian goals. Each of these thoroughly documented studies, drawing on multinational archival sources and, in all cases but one, on multiple language sources, provide models for state-of-the-art transnational feminist research practices. These studies are not casual inquiries but are the products of their authors' passion projects. They each represent years of careful research into broad and deep bodies of work. Future scholars will use these studies as reference works and will most certainly mine them for source materials as they build their own [End Page 137] work on these strong foundations. While these studies share the qualities mentioned here, they are also unique in the specific topics they address and the scholarly contributions they make.

To begin at the chronological beginning and methodologically at the most traditional approach, Ann Oakley's study, Women, Peace, and Welfare: A Suppressed History of Social Reform, 1880–1920, illuminates the lives of well over three hundred (!) Western women and their often-unacknowledged contributions to developing social policy and expanding the field of social science with new theory, data, and research methods during the Progressive Era. Although white, Anglo-American women's leadership in many of the social welfare, labor, peace, and suffrage campaigns underway in Western nations during the Progressive Era may seem like well-trod territory on the surface, the scope of coverage here is impressive, including not-so-well-known biographical details about many individual researchers and reformers. And while it may appear that this work does not fit neatly as a study of transnational feminism, these women from the Global North did not see themselves as saviors of their disadvantaged "sisters" in the Global South. In contrast, the women under study here were trying to save everyone in their own flawed societies and were especially opposed to a hegemonic masculinity that dominated the realms of domestic and foreign policy making and that tried to exclude them from the production of scientific knowledge. These "difficult women" (as their male contemporaries labeled them) were battering the gates of patriarchy with a sense of urgency to reform their flawed societies, as Oakley explains in the first chapter of her text. Her book is an "empirical retrieval" project that is "needed," she argues, "as a corrective to historical amnesia" (5).

Oakley also explains her personal reasons for taking on this study in chapter one: her father, Richard Titmuss, became the head of the social welfare academic department at the London School of Economics in 1950, and the personnel changes that he directed swept women from the department ranks and installed male social policy-focused researchers in their places. Even as a child, Oakley recalls, she knew...

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