Among Women Across Worlds - by Suzy Kim

About the Book

"Excavates the transnational linkages between women of North Korea and the world from the late 1940s to 1975, the year designated by the UN as International Women's Year, and offers a different genealogy of the global women's movement that centers the 'East' and the Third World"--

Book Synopsis

In Among Women across Worlds, Suzy Kim explores the transnational connections between North Korean women and the global women's movement. Asian women, especially communists, are often depicted as victims of a patriarchal state. Kim challenges this view through extensive archival research, revealing that North Korean women asserted themselves from the late 1940s to 1975, before the Korean War began and up to the UN's International Women's Year.

Kim centers on North Korea and the "East" to present a new genealogy of the global women's movement. Women of the Korean Democratic Women's Union (KDWU), part of the global left women's movement led by the Women's International Democratic Federation (WIDF), argued that family and domestic issues should be central to both national and international debates. They highlighted the connections between race, nationality, sex, and class in systems of exploitation. Their intersectional program proclaimed "no peace without justice," "the personal is the political," and "women's rights are human rights," long before Western activists adopted these ideas. Among Women across Worlds uncovers movements and ideas foundational to today's era.

Review Quotes

Suzy Kim's Among Women Across Words is a masterpiece. The book has elevated Suzy Kim as a top historian of modern Korea, whether North or South. Among Women Across Words needs to be read across the world.

-- "Korea Journal"

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"

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"

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.