Socialist women have been erased from the history of the international women’s movement. When we write them back in, and center Asia in the process, we arrive at a richer, more complex, and more accurate understanding of global feminisms.
This is the common argument of two new books by Elisabeth B Armstrong and Suzy Kim. “Anti-communism has stolen this story of women’s internationalism,” writes Armstrong. Kim concurs, “the exclusion of socialist women from the history of the international women’s movement has resulted in a lopsided history that privileges the West and liberal feminists as principal actors in the international women’s movement.”

In Bury the Corpse of Colonialism, Armstrong spotlights the women of South, Southeast, and East Asia who helped shape the political agenda of the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF). This influential leftist organization was behind the 1949 Asian Women’s Conference, which was convened in Beijing. In four briskly written chapters, Armstrong chronicles the movement-building that preceded the 1949 Conference, the physical movement that brought people to Beijing for the Conference, the political commitments articulated at the Conference, and the relationships and political action that grew out of the Conference. Throughout, Armstrong tracks the formation of an anticolonial feminist coalition that bridged the divides between women of the Third World and women of the United States and Europe.
The book is readable, almost novelistic at times, and provocative. Armstrong argues, for instance, that propaganda constitutes valuable source material, and she often writes in the register of propaganda herself, unabashedly celebrating and romanticizing her subjects. Here, for instance, is a passage from chapter two, in which Armstrong follows women hailing from Asia, Africa, the Americas and Europe as they travel to Beijing via the Trans-Siberian Railway.
Essie Robeson and Ada Jackson, both well-known activists in anti-racist movements from America, were also on the train. They grasped the necessary depth of solidarities… Essie repeated the Asian women’s slogan in her diaries of the conference as well as her journalistic articles after it ended. “Colonialism is dead, all that remains is for us to bury the corpse.” Perhaps [Indonesian communist] Lillah could imagine digging that grave alongside Essie, both of them powered by an undercurrent of rage as the racialism of fascism at home and imperialism abroad, a rage that woke with the morning and barely slept at night.”
Armstrong echoes this sloganeering, which inspired the book’s title, in the subsequent chapter. “At its best,” she writes, “anticolonial solidarity across the Third World could dig the grave for colonialism” while “Western women’s staunch rejection of their own nations’ imperialism could help bury it for good.” What puzzles me, though, is where exactly the slogan “bury the corpse of colonialism” comes from. Armstrong characterizes it as an “Asian women’s slogan”, but her citation of Essie Robeson is the only attribution. Perhaps it is Robeson herself who credited Asian delegates with the coinage. This is unclear and symptomatic of Armstrong’s larger tendency to center what Asian women stood for (anticolonialism and militancy) without always centering Asian women as social beings with recorded histories.
But for Armstrong, it is the slogans that are ultimately important and not the social historical contexts from which they emerged. For her, “reading propaganda revealed more about emergent praxis developed by peasant, working-class, and middle-class leftist women activists than literate activist’s diaries, and even than interviews with peasant women revolutionaries, could.”

In some ways, Suzy Kim’s Among Women across Worlds picks up where Armstrong leaves off, with a WIDF fact finding mission to Korea during the Korean War. But Kim has a more expansive chronology and a historically grounded methodology. Interested in both transnational solidarities and North Korean women specifically, the issue for Kim is not the limitations of conventional social historical sources but their absence. “While scholars of China have the fortune to work with local archives and oral histories to uncover women’s ingenuity,” writes Kim, “there are no comparably accessible sources for [North] Korea.” Kim chronicles North Korean women’s participation in the international arena of the 1950s and 1960s partly because this is where the sources lie, and partly because the perspective of international activism sheds fresh light on North Korean sources and histories. Kim challenges, for instance, “previous scholarship on the National Mothers Congress” which “tends to view it as state cooptation of the women’s agenda,” arguing instead that “the Korean Mothers Congress was part of the international movement to valorize maternalism.” Indeed, both books attend to the mobilization of motherhood for political purposes.
Among Women across Worlds unfolds over six chapters divided across three sections. Part I traces the leftist transnational women’s movement of the 1950s, with a focus on Korean women’s participation. The WIDF is again a focus of inquiry, though so too is the North Korean counterpart, the Korean Democratic Women’s Union (KDWU), which published the periodical Chosŏn Nyŏsŏng [Korean Women]. Part II charts the vicissitudes of the movement in the 1960s, a decade that witnessed the rising clout of the Third World and the foreclosing of some transnational solidarities in the context of the Sino-Soviet Split. The section also examines the women’s movement within North Korea. It argues that North Korean women demanded recognition for their productive and reproductive work; they were not silenced by Party or patriarchy. Part III explores the transnational networks and North Korean women’s activism as expressed through cultural production, with a focus on dance and drama. A conclusion brings the book full circle.
The conclusion circles back to the introduction, in part, through discussion of a “WIDF delegation to Vietnam in February 1966,” which evoked “eerie parallels” to “observations made by the 1951 WIDF delegation in Korea.” If there is a through line linking US military intervention in Korea and Vietnam, there is also continuity in the activism of leftist women who exposed and decried the horrific excesses of those interventions. If that activism has been forgotten, it is because of intentional efforts to dismiss the contributions of socialist women to global feminist movements.
The historical erasure of socialist women’s internationalism continues into the present, as demonstrated by Kim’s analysis of the privately-operated website internationalwomensday.com. The website publicizes a timeline with a jarring gap from 1917 to 1975. Why is this gap a problem? According to Kim,
… the first suggestion and the subsequent work to designate 1975 as International Women’s Year to launch the International Women’s Decade (1975-1985) came from the WIDF, and socialist women were instrumental in the development of a women’s agenda within the UN for the three decades between 1945 and 1975. And yet we know relatively little about them … erasing the complexities of feminisms and international women’s activisms in these years.
I visited the influential but murkily organized website of internationalwomensday.com (it has no “About Us” page and it is registered through “Domains By Proxy, LLC”). I scrolled through the photos of women hugging themselves (the website’s 2023 theme is #EmbraceEquity). I read the bland slogans like “Equity isn’t just a nice-to-have, it’s a must have.” I noted the John Deere advertisement in the sidebar (“We Run for All – Proud partner of International Women’s Day”). And I suddenly felt more sympathetic toward Elisabeth B Armstrong’s methodology, which admittedly irked me because of my deep admiration for social historical studies of rural Chinese women of the Mao era, studies that Armstrong criticizes without citing.
Suzy Kim’s deeply-researched book has valuable insights for historians of feminist internationalism, the Cold War, and North Korea. Armstrong’s book is an effective piece of counter marketing, published on International Women’s Day, and accessible to a general reader. Both are valuable.
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