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Globalizing Women: Transnational Feminist Networks, by Valentine M. Moghadam. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. 272 pp. $18.95 paper. ISBN: 0-8018-8024-6.
Organizing of women in the international context has been a major area of interest for scholars of social movements. Linking three main streams of scholarship: the complex and multidimensional process of globalization; non-governmental organizations, global civil society and global social movements; and women's movements and women's organizations, Moghadam examines the role of transnational feminist networks (TFNs). TFNs are "structures organized around above the national level that unite women from three or more countries around a common agenda, such as women's human rights, reproductive health and rights, violence against women, peace and antimilitarism, or feminist economics" (p. 4). The focus is on the TFNs that address themselves to women's human rights and economic policy. Moghadam draws on six cases: three networks that formed to challenge structural adjustment and neoliberal economic policy to develop a feminist critique and alternative framework and an additional three cases of networks that promote women's human rights, specifically in Muslim countries "where fundamentalism emerged and the legal status of women became compromised" (p. 4).
Globalization is viewed as being primarily economic by economists and world-system sociologists. Others have viewed it as a multi-faceted phenomenon; although they are generally inattentive to gender. Feminist scholars have attempted to fill this gap by addressing the economic as well as cultural dimensions of globalization. Two main consequences of globalization pointed out are: the growth of inequalities that has led to the emergence of the global justice movement...