ABSTRACT
For more than two centuries, feminists in almost every country have worked to ensure that women have access to good lives complete with safe housing, sufficient food, adequate healthcare, comprehensive educations, freedom from violence, a flourishing environment, and rights to participate in the institutions that govern their own lives. Winning the right to vote, ending violence against women, stopping war, overcoming the social costs of disease, protecting the environment, and, more recently, fighting to assure the provision of clean and plentiful water supplies have been the important targets of feminist organizing everywhere. Addressing these and other issues has often led feminists to create or participate in international organizations ranging from nineteenth-century anti-slavery campaigns to various women’s suffrage organizations in the early twentieth century to contemporary environmental groups. Feminist activism at the League of Nations and later the United Nations has led to positive changes in the lives of men, women, and children around the world.
