Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World

For twenty-five years, Kumari Jayawardena’s text has been an essential primer on the history of women’s movements in Asia and the middle East—from Egypt, Turkey and Iran, to India, Sri Lanka, China, Indonesia, Vietnam, Japan, Korea and the Philip-pines—in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Jayawardena presents a feminism that didn’t originate as an ideology of the West to be adopted by women in the Third World, but that instead erupted from the specific needs and struggles of women fighting against colonial power, for education or the vote, for safety, and against poverty and inequality. This readable and well-researched survey highlights the role of women in the national liberation and revolutionary movements of these countries.

Kumari Jayawardena is a leading feminist scholar, active in the women’s and civil rights movements in Sri Lanka.