Introduction

In its most general sense, the word “feminism” refers to political activism by women on behalf of women. The term originated in France in the 1880s. It combines the French word for woman, “femme,” with the suffix meaning political position, “ism,” and was used in that time and place to refer to those who defended the cause of women. Feminist theories, like other political philosophies, provide intellectual tools by which historical agents can examine the injustices they confront and build arguments to support their particular demands for change. The global feminisms Basu identifies emerge from the linkages, networks, and alliances between a diverse array of organizations, movements, and issue-based campaigns that have developed within global civil society. Since the late 1990s, unrelenting globalization has come to frame the local and the global in new and expanding ways. Globalization refers to the “social, economic, cultural, and demographic processes that take place within nations but also transcend them”.