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Humanities Colloquium - Kristen Ghodsee (Anthropology/Gender Studies/East European Studies ): Victors Writing History: U.S. Anti-Communism and the Worldwide Women’s Movement

When May 04, 2015
from 01:15 PM to 02:45 PM
Where FRIAS, Albertstr. 19, ground floor, large room
Contact Name
Contact Phone 0761 203 97362
Attendees universitätsoffen / open to university members
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For this colloquium, I will present material from a draft chapter of the book that I have been working on here at FRIAS.  The focus of this presentation will be on the ways in which the U.S. government generally viewed women’s movements as “communist fronts” throughout most of the 20th century.  Using declassified documents and internal communications from the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency, I examine U.S. government attitudes toward women’s emancipation and the threat they posed to capitalist and conservative values at home.  Only in the early 1970s – due to increasing pressure from feminists at home and the ongoing success of communist women’s organizations at forming strategic allegiances with women in the developing world – did the United States government start to take women’s issues seriously.  U.S. foreign aid to support global women’s organizing emerged from a Cold War strategy to win the “hearts and minds” of leaders in the newly independent states.

 

 

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