As women mobilized outside of the Western world during the twentieth century, they faced very different situations than did white women in the United States and Europe. For much of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, the predominant issues — colonialism, racism, national independence, poverty, development, political oppression, and sometimes revolution — were not directly related to gender. Women were affected by and engaged with all of these efforts and were welcomed by nationalist and communist leaders, mostly men, who needed their support. But once independence or the revolution was achieved, the women who had joined those movements often were relegated to marginal positions.

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The different conditions within developing countries sometimes generated sharp criticism of Western feminism. To many African feminists in the 1970s and later, the concerns of their American or European sisters were too individualistic, too focused on sexuality, and insufficiently concerned with issues of motherhood, marriage, and poverty to be of much use. Furthermore, they resented Western feminists’ insistent interest in cultural matters such as female genital mutilation and polygamy, which sometimes echoed the concerns of colonial-era missionaries and administrators. Western feminism could easily be seen as a new form of cultural imperialism. Moreover, many African governments and many African men defined feminism of any kind as “un-African” and associated with a hated colonialism.

Women’s movements in the Global South took shape around a wide range of issues, not all of which were explicitly gender based. In the East African country of Kenya, a major form of mobilization was the women’s group movement. Some 27,000 small associations of women, an outgrowth of traditional self-help groups, had a combined membership of more than a million by the late 1980s. Members provided support for one another during times of need, such as weddings, births, and funerals, and took on community projects, such as building water cisterns, schools, and dispensaries. In one province, for example, women’s groups focused on providing permanent iron roofing for homes. Some groups became revolving loan societies or bought land or businesses. One woman testified to the sense of empowerment she derived from membership in her group:

I am a free woman. I bought this piece of land through my group. I can lie on it, work on it, keep goats or cows. What more do I want? My husband cannot sell it. It is mine.13

Elsewhere, other issues and approaches predominated. In the North African Islamic kingdom of Morocco, a more centrally directed and nationally focused feminist movement targeted the country’s Family Law Code, which still defined women as minors. In 2004, a long campaign by Morocco’s feminist movement, often with the help of supportive men and a liberal king, resulted in a new Family Law Code, which recognized women as equals to their husbands and allowed them to initiate divorce and to claim child custody, all of which had previously been denied.

In Chile, a women’s movement emerged as part of a national struggle against the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, who ruled the country from 1973 to 1990. Because they were largely regarded as “invisible” in the public sphere, women were able to organize extensively, despite the repression of the Pinochet regime. From this explosion of organizing activity emerged a women’s movement that crossed class lines and party affiliations. Human rights activists, most of them women, called attention to the widespread use of torture and to the “disappearance” of thousands of opponents of the regime, while demanding the restoration of democracy. Poor urban women by the tens of thousands organized soup kitchens, craft workshops, and shopping collectives, all aimed at the economic survival of their families. Smaller numbers of middle-class women brought more distinctly feminist perspectives to the movement and argued pointedly for “democracy in the country and in the home.” This diverse women’s movement was an important part of the larger national protest that returned Chile to democratic government in 1990.