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This article sketches the historical field of transnational feminisms and women's movements as it has developed since the mid-1990s. It outlines the field's main contributions and shortcomings, identifying as the latter its strong focus on white, Western, liberal, "gender-only" feminism. Subsequently it discusses some of the contributions of the progressive Women's International Democratic Federation (WIDF, established in Paris in 1945) and of women and men from Second and Third World countries to the international domain of women's rights-largely overlooked in mainstream historiography. The article ends by emphasizing the scholarly and political importance of including the WIDF, left feminist leaders such as Eugénie Cotton, Pak Chong-ae (internationally known as Pak-Den-ai), and Claudia Jones, and a broader definition of feminism in our historical research of transnational feminisms and the global women's movement.
The transnational turn in the discipline of history has had an enormous impact on the study of women's movements and feminisms, with a number of key books and new approaches appearing from around the mid-1990s. In this brief essay, I will first, in broad strokes, sketch the his- torical field of transnational feminisms and women's movements as it has developed in the last fifteen to twenty years. My emphasis will be on the contributions of the main books and publications in this field-on what we have learned from them.
In the second part, I will change the focus by identifying some of the conceptual limitations of the existing historiography. In very concrete terms, these limitations have led feminist historians to overlook, or briefly and inadequately mention, the largest and most influential international women's organization of the post-1945 era: the left-feminist Women's In- ternational Democratic Federation (WIDF).1 However, the issue is broader than that, because the question is not only who or what was excluded, but what worldview was constructed as a result. Historical narratives and theory "also play a role in the construction of the world order."2 The erasure of the WIDF and its contributions is part of a larger process of constructing white, Western, liberal feminism as hegemonic. Whereas the Western inter- national women's organizations that the literature focuses on self-identify as "politically neutral" and the historical literature similarly purports to be objective and "politically neutral," neither these organizations (or their individual representatives)...