Feminist in Actions if Not Name

Abstract

The Women’s International Democratic Federation, the Global South and the Cold War is the first comprehensive study of the WIDF. The organization was founded in Paris, in 1945, and for decades, it had been cast as an agent of the Soviet Union. Among the reasons for this characterization were the role of the Komitet sovetskikh zhenshchin (Committee of Soviet Women, KSZh) in its creation and leadership, and its vocal criticism of US foreign policy and comparative leniency toward Soviet militarism. The US government went so far as to declare the Federation a “foreign agent,” to disband its US member organization, the Congress of American Women, and to place the WIDF under Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) surveillance. Historians, meanwhile, assumed that “organizations that were communist could not have been feminist”—whether state socialist ones like the KSZh or ones with leftist proclivities like the WIDF.1 It did not help that they avoided calling themselves “feminist,” believing that this signaled too narrow a focus on individual rights and equality of opportunity. In her intervention into the “rediscovery” (193) of the WIDF, Gradskova follows several recent developments in gender history. One of these has established that the Federation was a feminist organization and was far from monolithic in its ideas and membership.2 Another strand of research has been detailing the opportunities that participation in state socialist organizations