East–South Women Internationalism at the Cold War Periphery: Coming Together in Tashkent, Havana, and Beyond by YuliaGradskova. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2025. 292 pp. 117. 00. ISBN 978‐1‐66694‐343‐6

Women during First-Wave Feminism found their way to each other to share ideas, develop a language to promote their cause, participate in public life, and forge networks for cooperation. As Yulia Gradskova details in this book, the same was so of women in the Communist East and the Global South during the 1950s through the 1980s. The context was different of course, encompassing the rise of the jet age, the fall of European empires, and ideological rivalry on a global scale. The concerns motivating women also differed, dominated not by suffrage but by raising their status and securing child well-being. Exploring these issues as they intersected with decolonization, Gradskova traces how encounters through foreign travel, international conferences, outreach initiatives, and educational programs normalized collaboration among women in the East and South leading up to and during the Second Wave. Anchoring her study in Tashkent and Havana, she also broadens understanding of the “Second World” vision of female emancipation by illuminating its multivocal character and multilinear path. Women “coming together and solving problems” is well illustrated through a succession of international gatherings on education (p. 215). The first, a seminar for African and Asian women in Tashkent (1962), was linked to United Nations agendas but provided Soviet hosts a forum to tout socialism, and guests to discuss their challenges when outlets for them were lacking in their own countries. As these meetings shifted to Khartoum (1970) and Almaty (1975), Gradskova indicates that attention to foundational issues like basic literacy and training women increased. The Tashkent seminar marked what Gradskova aptly refers to as the “(re)internationalization” of the city, as well as the blossoming of Central Asia as a showpiece for overcoming colonial legacies and patriarchal constraints (p. 120). While the plans and resources for this strategy emanated from Moscow, she demonstrates that women in the region were not merely socialist tokens. They advocated for reviving their culture after Stalinism and actively maintained relationships with foreign women (for example, through the Uzbek Society of Friendship). Like their counterparts in Central Asia, Cuban women also attended meetings abroad and hosted visitors, largely through the Federation of Cuban Women. In addition, they shared their professional expertise on missions to Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and as instructors at a school for Latin American women in Havana. As in the East, Gradskova shows that these endeavors enabled some women for the first time to participate in conversations of political importance. Indeed, alongside imparting knowledge about medicine and education, Cuban women on internationalist missions conveyed a “vision on development, rights, gender equality, and solidarity” (p. 166). Regarding the Havana school, notwithstanding its emphasis on spreading Communism (if undergirded more by Pan Americanism than by Soviet directives), the curriculum included topics like international female activism. As in her 2021 book on the Women’s International Democratic Federation, Gradskova does not conceal fractures among women. Significantly, while the birth control pill promised reproductive freedom to all, wider discussions correlating high birth rates and poverty generated tensions across the developed North and developing South, and even across the East and South as Soviet women circumvented the kind of instruction on contraceptives occurring in Cuba. Gradskova suggests that racial differences could also undercut solidarity. However, her treatment of this subject is sometimes convoluted and her conclusions tenuous, as in her overview of the writings of Lily Golden. Born to an African-American father and a Jewish-American mother who emigrated to the Soviet Union in the 1930s, in her coverage of the 1950s, Golden describes the xenophobia of the Stalinist antisemitic campaign extending to the repression of “foreign ‘friends’ of the USSR” (p. 100). It does not follow though, as Gradskova asserts, that persecution under Stalin—directed also at Russians, including in the Soviet center of Moscow—“destroys” the image of Soviet racial tolerance and elucidates “the hidden contexts of international South-East gatherings” in subsequent decades (p. 100). Her claim about racial “similarity” is also unsubstantiated, namely, that Cuban women were closer than Soviet ones to women in the South because of their likeness in “appearance to the Black and Brown communities they were helping” (p. 172). While incongruities in human experience and silences in the sources complicate assessment of the implications of race, greater engagement with the existing scholarship would have enriched the analysis. For example, discussing the work of Masha Kirasirova might have bolstered comparison of representations of Central Asia across the interwar and postwar periods. This could also have yielded interesting conclusions about how the region was presented to women instead of men. For instance, was its (re)internationalization accompanied by “feminization”? On a different note, this book is grounded in impressive transnational research, which demanded that Gradskova replicate some of the journeys her subjects made. Thematically, it enhances current findings on female tourism and correspondence, while contributing to the history of collaboration across the Communist and decolonizing world. Overall, in detailing how women in the East and South exchanged views and fostered personal connections amid the ideological absolutes propounded during the Cold War, it enriches the portrait of activists still largely peripheral to our knowledge of the Second Wave. The book also whets the appetite of scholars of international feminism to learn more about them. The eBook version is available in Open Access from the publisher’s website.