Kristen Ghodsee
Antifascism, Anti-colonialism, and the “New Feminism”
In 1975, the Women’s International Democratic Federation, the largest and probably most influential international women’s organization of the post-1945 era, held its thirtieth anniversary congress in East Berlin. From October 20–24, over 2,000 men and women from 141 countries participated, including representatives from forty-three African countries, many of them newly liberated from or still struggling against colonial oppression. For many women from the Global South, and especially those in Southern Africa, the language of antifascism and the historical role that women played as fighters in antifascist struggles served as an important inspiration for their own anti-colonial struggles. To suggest that those who linked women’s rights with broader issues of anti-colonialism and national independence were mere pawns of Communist Internationalism is to ignore the the mobilizing power of shared oppositions and to deprive twentieth century activists of their own historical agency.
Kristen R. Ghodsee is Professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where she also serves as a member of the Graduate Groups in Anthropology and History. She is the author of twelve books. Her articles and essays have been translated into over 25 languages and have appeared in publications such as The Washington Post, The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, Jacobin, The New Republic, Le Monde Diplomatique, and Die Tageszeitung. Ghodsee has held residential research fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey; the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University; the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington DC; the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies in Germany; the Imre Kertész Kolleg at the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität in Jena, Germany; the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany; the Aleksanteri Institute of the University of Helsinki in Finland; and the Center for History at Sciences Po in Paris. In 2012, Ghodsee was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for her work in Anthropology and Cultural Studies. In 2025-2026, Ghodsee is a Senior Honorary Fellow at the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, Germany.