This Special Issue explores the complicated relationship between women's rights and global socialism during the Cold War. This Introduction describes how the articles deal with this relationship in three, partly overlapping, periods. The first set of articles looks at how the ethos of the Popular Front resonated among women's movements in Asia, Latin America, and Europe, and examines the connections between interwar anti-fascist and anti-imperialist feminisms and those that re-emerged after World War II. The second set of articles focuses on the role and development of the Women's International Democratic Federation (WIDF) and its model of internationalism in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and China in the early Cold War. The final articles centre on the challenges faced by the WIDF from the 1960s, exploring issues such as the anti-apartheid struggles in South Africa, the Portuguese wars of decolonization, and the United Nations Decade for Women (1976–1985). Together with this process of decolonization, this Special Issue also examines how the consequences of postsocialism, in particular for women's rights (the loss of social rights, material security, and substantial challenges to reproductive freedoms), have triggered renewed debates about the history and legacies of communist women's liberation movements in the former socialist world.

The Comité mondial des femmes contre la guerre et le fascisme (CMF) was an international organization formed under the direction of the Communist International in 1934 in response to the threat of Nazi fascism. However, it did not restrict its activities to tackling issues in Germany; it expanded its remit to confront many of the crises that marked the mid- to late-1930s across the globe. This article analyses the CMF's work to aid civilians and refugees during the Second Sino-Japanese War. It discusses how the predominantly European committee perpetuated some essentialist and imperialist assumptions in its work and how they utilized violent and emotive language in the “Warphans” child sponsorship fundraising scheme. However, the committee also provided spaces for Chinese women to vocalize their experiences to women in the West, creating an effective humanitarian aid strategy.

This article explores the transnational dimension of women's mobilization in twentieth-century Chile and the connections they established with women's international non-governmental organizations, particularly the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) and the Women's International Democratic Federation (WIDF). It sheds light on the political choices women made when forging transnational alliances to expand and make their activism more effective, together with the material and ideological dynamics that shaped their collaboration. The article analyses this topic by focusing on key but little-explored figures of women's activism in Chile – especially, but not solely, feminist academic Olga Poblete – and their personal communications with the leadership of women's organizations in the US and Europe. The article contends that, although both the WILPF and WIDF shared strengths and weaknesses in promoting their ideas and establishing links with activists in Chile, the alliances that Chilean women chose to pursue were mostly defined by their own political priorities and local contexts.

This article analyses the interactions between the Women's International Democratic Federation (WIDF) and its Mexican and Cuban national chapters and affiliated organizations. Focusing on the National Bloc of Revolutionary Women, the Democratic Union of Mexican Women, and the Democratic Federation of Cuban Women, this article studies the ideological foundations these organizations defended and the action programmes they used to materialize them. One of its main contributions is to argue that Mexican and Cuban socialist and communist women contributed to the struggle for women's emancipation within the Eastern Bloc through grass-roots contributions that did not simply emulate European communist organizations, but drew on, and were informed by, national contexts, material conditions, and historical backgrounds. The increasing number of requests, demands, and proposals emerging from Latin America, and more specifically from Mexico and Cuba, ultimately fostered a steady process of decentralization that broadened visions of women's progress within the global leftist feminist movement during the early Cold War.

This article analyses five years of the magazine Asszonyok (Women) the main forum for discussing women's rights between 1945 and 1949 in Hungary. The magazine was published by the Magyar Nők Demokratikus Szövetsége (the Hungarian Women's Democratic Federation), an umbrella organization created mostly by women from the communist movement. This analysis is centred around the idea of internationalism and how it became a means for socialist women's emancipation, proof of the political power of the new women's organization, and a platform of political education. It also symbolized the new era of peace after the war, peace becoming one of the slogans of the socialist women's movement globally. The broadening international platform of transfers became a terrain where political languages about race, class, and gender were slowly but steadily taking shape. Solidarity with women across the globe became one of the main tenets of communist women in Hungary. However, solidarity had its limits. As is shown here, identification with the right political agenda was even more important than aspects of race and class. This was one of the most important ways in which socialist women's rights and feminism were diverging from each other, despite the broad spectrum of shared elements on their agenda.

This article investigates Chinese women labour models (or labour heroines) of the early 1950s as actors and symbols of socialist transformation. It centres on the example of Shen Jilan (1929–2020), who was one of the most prominent women labour models of the time. Shen rose to fame through her struggle for equal pay for equal work in her native village, became a delegate to China's National People's Congress, and even participated in the Third World Congress of Women in Copenhagen in 1953. The article critically engages with the concept of “state feminism” and proposes a shift in focus from state–society relations to work as a means to understanding the transformation of women's lives under socialism. Socialist society was a society of producers and work shaped people's daily lives; it was central to identity formation and constituted the regulating mechanism of social relations. Indeed, women labour models, together with related categories of working women, came to typify the new Chinese woman, who was integral to and symbolic of socialist modernity. They epitomized communist theory about women's participation in production being the mechanism of their liberation. The article has three main parts, each of which addresses a different level (local, national, international), different constellations of actors and agency, and different aspects of the relationship between working women and socialist transformation. By tracing Shen Jilan's activities in various contexts, the article reveals the complexity, contradictions, multilayered nature, and also incompleteness of socialist transformation.

The primary aim of this article is to problematize the WIDF's interpretations of the rights of women from (post)colonial countries and its tactics in working for and together with these women. It shows that, in the context of rapid geopolitical changes – the growing anti-colonial struggle and Cold War competition – the WIDF had to change its ideology, ways of working, and communication strategies in order to keep its leading position in transnational work for women's rights and to maintain the sympathies of women from countries outside Europe. The main focus is on the contradictions, negotiations, and adjustments inside the WIDF with respect to the new political situation and the demands of women from Africa and Asia, in particular, during the highest period of anticolonial transformation (1950s to early 1970s). This article also pays attention to Soviet ideas on the emancipation of women and, in particular, to the influence of Soviet experiences of emancipating women from non-Slavic (Eastern and Southern) parts of the USSR on the WIDF's perception of and policies for the improvement of the situation of women in Asia and Africa. This article is based primarily on analysis of the WIDF's archival documents preserved in the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF) in Moscow, along with the WIDF's official publications.

South Africa's anti-apartheid struggle reflected an ideal of heroic masculinity that ignored and depreciated women as active political agents. This has contributed to a post-apartheid social order that accepts formal gender equality but that perpetuates gender inequality by discounting women's experiences. This article examines the little-known and short-lived Yu Chi Chan Club (YCCC) and National Liberation Front (NLF). Tiny Cape Peninsula-based breakaways from the Non-European Unity Movement – an African National Congress rival – the YCCC and NLF were exceptional amongst early 1960s underground groups in their systematic attempts to theorize guerrilla struggle and assess its applicability to South African conditions and, in the NLF's case, to build a cell structure through political education. Although the NLF's idealized notion of revolutionary life was premised on an abstract individual with traits then associated with public and vocal male activists, nonetheless women participated as equal abstract individuals. The NLF's relatively horizontal cell structure, small cell size, and lack of hierarchy made participation easier for both women and men, allowing women to operate equally within the political space. From their gendered upbringing and early experiences in hierarchical organizations to their brief experience of equality within the YCCC and NLF, the women were then forced into a prison system with an extremely rigid and unequal gender divide. Subjected to the state's regendering project, the political space available to the NLF's women prisoners shrank far more than it did for their male comrades, whose prison experiences became the measure of anti-apartheid politics.

This article recovers the history of the transnational women's movement that arose during Portugal's colonial wars (1961–1974). This movement connected women in Portugal and its colonies and operated independently of the PCP, MPLA, PAIGC, and FRELIMO. Most research on women's activism in Portugal, Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Cabo Verde, and Mozambique begins with their relationships to the male-dominated organizations that operated within national frameworks. In contrast, by examining the international connections of these women's groups, this article illuminates their political activities outside national organizations led by men. It shows that women created transnational solidarity networks struggling against the Portuguese Estado Novo and the colonial wars and, in doing so, promoted their own emancipation.

This article explores the juncture between historical time and space in the context of socialist feminism, primarily through the memoir of an Indian woman activist who spent four years in East Berlin as the Asian Secretary at the Women's International Democratic Federation. This primary source material is drawn from a longer history of Indian leftist women's participation in political mobilizations and organizational work, the literary tradition of travel writing, found especially in Bengal, and academic histories of socialist feminism.