ABSTRACT
Throughout the world in the 1960s and 1970s, women’s challenges to their subordinate status seemed to explode in struggles involving issues of equal rights, social conventions of femininity and heterosexuality, reproductive self-determination, violence, poverty, anti-racism, and anti-colonialism, among others. While very visible, this period was not unique. At earlier points in modern history, women’s movements in many locations across the world allied with nationalist, anti-colonial liberation movements, and labor activism to promote changes in women’s social status and political rights. In this section, we assemble a group of readings that encourage readers to question what they know about past feminist movements. Picking up different strands of conversation occurring simultaneously, the readings tell different stories that elaborate the myriad connections and conversations that comprise contemporary feminist theory (Barkley Brown 1992). While destabilizing the conventional representation of feminist genealogies (first, second, third waves), we also contextualize the feminist theoretical conversations and debates through a genealogy of core feminist concepts.
