New Histories of Global Feminism

New Histories of Global Feminism Francisca De Haan (bio) Lucy Delap. Feminisms: A Global History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. 256 pp. ISBN 9780226754093 (cl.); 9780226754123 (ebook). Mona M. Siegel. Peace on Our Terms: The Global Battle for Women's Rights After the First World War. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020. 344 pp. ISBN 9780231195102 (cl.); 9780231195119 (pb.); 9780231551182 (ebook). Dorothy Sue Cobble. For the Many: American Feminists and the Global Fight for Democratic Equality. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021. 584 pp. ISBN 9780691156873 (cl.); 9780691220598 (ebook). Elora Shehabuddin. Sisters in the Mirror: A History of Muslim Women and the Global Politics of Feminism. Oakland: University of California Press, 2021. 416 pp. ISBN 9780520342514 (cl.); 9780520402300 (pb.); 9780520974647 (ebook). Recent years have witnessed what we might call a small wave of monographs offering global master narratives in the field of women's and gender history, and especially the history of feminisms. Examples include books by Maria Bucur (2018) and Bonnie Smith (2019) and Smith with Nova Robinson (2022), as well as the four books under review here by Lucy Delap, Mona Siegel, Dorothy Sue Cobble, and Elora Shehabuddin.1 Perhaps the publication of all these studies within a relatively short period indicates that the field of women's and gender history has reached a new stage in which feminist historians collectively have created so much scholarship that such overarching projects are now possible.2 I have read the four books with four questions in mind: first, which feminists and feminisms are discussed and how (or "who's in," in historian Leila Rupp's apt words)?3 Second, with "global" as the only key word the four titles have in common, how do the authors understand the term global and how does a "global perspective" inform their works? Third, in addition to "who's in," Rupp also asks, "who's out"?4 Who are out here? And finally, taken together, what can we learn from these books, how do they change our understanding of the history or histories of global feminisms, and what remains on our wish list? The first book is Lucy Delap's Feminisms: A Global History. Published by the University of Chicago Press and also by Penguin, it is clear that this book is intended to reach a broader audience. Feminisms is mainly based on the author's wide reading of feminist historical literature and of some printed primary sources. Immediately striking End Page 139 is the title: Feminisms, in the plural. Although feminist historians have been making the point of feminism's plurality for some time now, Delap's book brings it home strongly, for several reasons.5 The first is that it is the short main title of Delap's book. In addition, the book's content and structure clearly convey Delap's understanding of feminisms as "mosaic" (her main metaphor) or intersectional, hence plural. According to Delap, all feminists "share the insight that being a woman means disadvantage vis-à-vis men, and that this can be addressed through struggle" (3). But this is only the starting point; feminisms always develop in relation to specific historical contexts, with all their characteristics. Therefore, they take many forms. Delap has made effective choices to counter what she calls "the hard-to-shake European and North American dominance of many existing accounts," and her Feminisms provides a wide panorama of different women's struggles for a variety of intersecting issues and in different times and places (334). The book's structure is innovative. Organized not chronologically but thematically, its eight chapters center around the following: Dreams, Ideas, Spaces, Objects, Looks, Feelings, Actions, and Songs. Each chapter starts in an earlier era and goes on to discuss more contemporary cases under the rubric in question. To give an example, the chapter on Ideas includes, in this order, Josefa Amar y Borbón, Charles Fourier, 'Rosa Marina,' Nísia Floresta Brasileira Augusta, August Comte, Lewis Henry Morgan, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Olive Schreiner, August Bebel, Clara Zetkin, Eleanore Rathbone, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Jin Tianhe, He-Yin Zhen, Kate Millett, Mary Daly, Julia Kristeva and Hèléne Cixous, Assia Djebar, Frances Beal, Claudia Jones, Patricia Hill Collins...