The Internationalism of Socialist State Feminism

When a history of successful social activism is erased, the strategies once employed by those social activists are also lost. In the case of socialist women’s organizations and their vast international networks of progressive women seeking to win state power, almost a century of state feminist achievements have been systemically disregarded. A persistent fetish for grassroots, independent women’s organizing has devalued the real gains made by women working within the corridors of power, women who fastidiously embedded women’s rights in the constitutions and legal codes of their respective countries while simultaneously building global solidarities to support and expand their commitments to both socialism and feminism.

About the Creator

Elisabeth Armstrong is a Professor in the Program for the Study of Women and Gender at Smith College. She’s written three books on the praxis of organizing. Her forthcoming book, Bury the Corpse of Colonialism: The Revolutionary Feminist Conference in 1949, (University of California Press, 2023), is about the leadership of revolutionary women from anticolonial movements around the world. Her book about leftist feminist organizing in India is called Gender and Neoliberalism: The All India Democratic Women’s Association and Globalization Politics (2013), and one addresses the US context of feminist organizing called The Retreat from Organization: US Feminism Reconceptualized (2002). She is a member of the feminist collective of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, and on the editorial board of Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism & Kohl: a Journal for Body and Gender Research.