Among Women across Worlds: North Korea in the Global Cold War

by Suzy Kim

Overview

In Among Women across Worlds, Suzy Kim excavates the transnational linkages between women of North Korea and a worldwide women's movement. Women of Asia, especially those espousing communism, are often portrayed as victims or pawns of a patriarchal Confucian state. Kim undercuts this standard analysis through detailed archival work in the international women's press, and finds that North Korean women asserted themselves in unexpected places from the late 1940s—just before the official beginning of the Korean War—to 1975, the year designated by the UN as International Women's Year.

By centering North Korea and the "East," Kim defies convention to offer an entirely new genealogy of the global women's movement. Women of the Korean Democratic Women's Union (KDWU), as part of the global left women's movement led by the Women's International Democratic Federation (WIDF), insisted family and domestic issues must be part of both national and international debates, highlighting how race, nationality, sex, and class connect to form systems of colonial and capitalist exploitation. Their intersectional program claimed that there is "no peace without justice," that "the personal is the political," and that "women's rights are human rights" many decades before activists of the West embraced such agendas. Among Women across Worlds is an archaeology of forgotten movements and ideas that became the foundation for those that have come to define our era.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501767302
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	02/15/2023
Pages:	348
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.19(d)

About the Author

Suzy Kim is Professor of Korean History at Rutgers University. She is the author of Everyday Life in the North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Decolonial Genealogies
Part 1: War and Peace
1. Women Against the Korean War
2. Anti-Imperialist Struggle for a Just Peace
Part 2: Third World Rising
3. Struggle Between Two Lines
4. Women's Work Is Never Done
Part 3: Cultural Revolutions
5. Aesthetics of Everyday Folk
6. Communist Women Around the World
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index

What People are Saying About This

Tani Barlow

Remarkable. With rich insights into the nexus of feminism, maternalism, and Cold War politics, Kim offers us an excellent and enlightening history of how a whole communist world of feminism emerged.

Hyaeweol Choi

A tour de force of transnational gender history. Suzy Kim brilliantly brings buried stories, figures, and images to light, presenting a meticulous, thought-provoking, and ultimately compelling history of transnational socialist women that intervenes in Euro-American dominated feminist histories.

Judy Tzu-Chun Wu

In Among Women across Worlds, Kim draws imaginatively on cultural performances, films, international gatherings, and more to gain insight into the political agency of North Korean women and challenge certain presumptions of Cold War gender politics. Groundbreaking.

Editorial Reviews

Suzy Kim's book Among Women across Worlds is a tour de force that will upend the long-standing silence about the vibrant complexity of Marxist feminisms that has pervaded scholarship on the transnational women's movement. Asian history, women's history and international relations scholars may be surprised to learn about the leadership of left women from the Global South to anticolonial and feminist global networks in the second half of the twentieth century. Kim's book ensures we cannot overlook these remarkable women entirely.

Journal of Social History

Among Women across Worlds is a significant addition to the history of socialist women in North Korea in relation to global women's movements for peace and national and social liberation. In the same vein as Chandra Talpade Mohanty's criticism of Western representations of Third-World women as a homogeneous group of victims trapped by culture, Kim challenges the conventional understanding of North Korean women as victims of a monolithic state system and Confucianism-influenced patriarchy. She instead demonstrates their diversity and agency, in many ways liberating them from patriarchal oppression in which women are assigned the same simplistic designation.

Acta Koreana