ABSTRACT
The first wave began in the 1840s, as women from France, Germany, the United States and Canada began to trade ideas and strategies in order to overcome the formidable forces opposing women's right to vote. By the 1930s, while remnants of this first wave still persisted, it was in tatters as a genuinely international coherent movement. Part of the success of the emergent second wave of international feminism has been to put women's lives and feminist questions onto the formal agendas of the foreign policy establishments of dozens of state regimes and international agencies. Alternatively, 'gender' is used as if it referred only to the crafting of, and enforcement of standards of acceptable femininity. The contributions brought together, so provocatively cultivated and edited by Louise Olsson and Torunn L. Tryggestad should provide a valuable antidote to the worrisome presumption that 'gender' is intellectually bland.
