Review of Second World, Second Sex

[W]e ought to acknowledge the contradictions and complexities of the formerly socialist world, rather than shallowly disregarding it as a monolith of un-freedom. Second World, Second Sex challenges the conventional wisdom of three-wave feminist history by documenting the critical interventions made by these [socialist] women in service of a vision of women’s equality that was always already intersectional, and that refused to separate women’s issues from questions of neo-colonialism, racism, and economic re-distribution. Ghodsee’s book offers a helpful and instructive reminder of socialist feminism’s rich and global history of organization and action, a history that was created and fought for in large part by alliances of women from non-aligned and socialist countries during the Cold War, and whose memory is all too often erased from Western histories of the women’s movement during the “American century.”
— Steven Gotzler, Lateral 9.1 (2020).