Review of Second World, Second Sex

January 14, 2020 Kristen Ghodsee

[W]e ought to acknowledge the contradictions and complexities of the formerly socialist world, rather than shallowly disregarding it as a monolith of un-freedom. Second World, Second Sex challenges the conventional wisdom of three-wave feminist history by documenting the critical interventions made by these [socialist] women in service of a vision of women’s equality that was always already intersectional, and that refused to separate women’s issues from questions of neo-colonialism, racism, and economic re-distribution. Ghodsee’s book offers a helpful and instructive reminder of socialist feminism’s rich and global history of organization and action, a history that was created and fought for in large part by alliances of women from non-aligned and socialist countries during the Cold War, and whose memory is all too often erased from Western histories of the women’s movement during the “American century.”

Steven Gotzler, Lateral 9.1 (2020).