Bury the Corpse of Colonialism: The Revolutionary Feminist Conference of 1949. Elisabeth B. Armstrong

Armstrong describes a global feminist meeting that she believes has been underappreciated in U.S. feminist liberation movements.Armstrong credits this meeting, which was organized by the Women's International Democratic Federation (WIDF) and held in the PRC six years before Bandung, with telling a story of "a theory of anti-colonialism and internationalism that women built" (8).Over a week, December 10-17, 1949, it produced, again according to Armstrong, a women's internationalist praxis created by women for women, an internationalist alternative to civil rights feminism in the U.S. and its satellites and Western Europe.The contributors' organizing efforts had unfolded in India, Paris, Indonesia and Vietnam over the two previous years.Congress organizers travelled but unlike delegates during the preparatory years of the United Nations women's Beijing Conference in the 1990s, the WIDF promoted anti-imperialist, united front coalitions across nationalist women's groups.Armstrong's rationale for writing this book is to recover what the various women in this movement achieved, because, in her telling, they have been completely "erased" from the "official history of transnational feminism" (56).Chapter one, "The 1949 Asian Women's Conference in Beijing (People's Republic of China)," sets the scene and introduces the players, major and minor.Chapter two, "The Journey to the Conference," gives sample histories of individuals and groups of internationalist women who travelled to the meeting, some at enormous physical suffering, to the meeting.What delegates shared, along with varying commitments to socialism, was that the women "shared movements that "did not regard women's emancipation as secondary to national liberation" (82).This argument constitutes one of the book's major achievements.It highlights the existence of massive projects in which women's emancipation was the measure of national liberation or had been inextricably fused into the definition of liberation as such.In chapter three, "An Anatomy of Revolutionary Women's Praxis," Armstrong argues that the movement and the congress inverted "western ideas" by enabling Asian women to show that their participation in anti-colonial resistance was a demand for women's rights.