New Review of Second World, Second Sex

“Drawing upon sources amassed on three continents, [Second World, Second Sex] also provides a template for navigating transnational history and studying women in marginalized parts of the world. Interrogating why the activities of women in countries with strong states promoting gender equality should be deemed inauthentic vis-à-vis those in democracies that perpetuate patriarchal norms, alongside rendering the Cold War as a battle between not just capitalism and communism but also competing visions of feminism, Second World, Second Sex is essential reading for anyone in any field interested in women’s activism in the twentieth century.”
— - Christine Varga-Harris in Slavic Review, Winter 2019

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).