Review essay on global and world histories of feminism and gender struggle

This review essay examines three recent works about global or world histories of feminism and gender struggle, considering their methodological frames and epistemological reflections, their approaches to temporality and periodisation, how they define what count as feminisms in their studies, their geo-cultural breadth and temporal depth, the authorial or editorial process that informed them, and the purposes of their histories in relation to feminist agendas. The three works are considered here together because they all tackle in differing ways the same important problem of how to write global and world histories of feminism and gender—addressing questions of how to make breadth coherent, how to include subjects who are under-represented in the archives, and how to bridge conceptual differences in how gender struggle has been understood in diverse historical contexts. The word ‘feminist’ became globalised only in the early twentieth century, so how can historians trace forms of challenge to gender power that occurred prior to this time or in cultures that had no engagement with the Western political movement of women’s rights? All works discussed provide a variety of ways of addressing these challenges, in addition to advancing the still-unusual adoption of world and global approaches to historical inquiry in considering multiple different cultures and their relations to one another. All three works provide important answers to the questions of how gender struggle became necessary, possible to imagine, and able to take so many forms.