Document Type
Article
Publication Date
Winter 2016
Publication Title
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society
Abstract
The 1949 Conference of the Women of Asia held by the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) amplified a new anti-imperialist solidarity movement for women in the global South. Leftist feminists emerged from anticolonial movements to organize mass-based women’s groups, a process that created new alliances between regional women’s groups. In India, and across Asia, most groups concentrated their efforts on rural women embedded in the agricultural economy. This article looks at the forms of solidarity and the ideologies of anti-imperialist women’s activism that turned the charity model of Western feminist internationalism on its head. Before the celebrated Bandung Conference of 1955, Asian and African WIDF members emphasized a solidarity of commonalty as well as one of complicity in the international women’s movement to fight colonialism and neocolonialism in the new postwar order.
Volume
41
Issue
2
First Page
305
Last Page
331
DOI
doi.org/10.1086/682921
Rights
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Recommended Citation
Armstrong, Elisabeth, "Before Bandung: The Anti-Imperialist Women's Movement in Asia and the Women's International Democratic Federation" (2016). Study of Women and Gender: Faculty Publications, Smith College, Northampton, MA.
https://scholarworks.smith.edu/swg_facpubs/1
Comments
Archived as published.