Introduction: recovering the forgotten left feminist networks

The introduction to the special issue Socialist Women in the East-South Interaction of the Global Sixties provides an overview of the four featured contributions and situates them within a larger historical context of feminist exchange between Eastern Europe and the Global South. The goal of the special issue is to recover the rich, yet overlooked, history of left feminist networks that developed during the Cold War – proceeding and in many ways anticipating - the rise of second wave feminism in the West and its transnational endeavors. It highlights the important connections between the movements of the Global Sixties and the earlier leftist, antifascist, and anticolonial struggles. These East-South feminist interactions took many forms, from formal conferences to the transnational circulation of discourses and imaginaries of women’s emancipation and anticolonial solidarity across Cold War borders. These different encounters contributed to shaping the era’s visions of gender equality and anticolonial transnational solidarity. Challenging the conventional views of Eastern European women’s organizations as mere representatives of “state feminism,” the Introduction underlines the importance of recognizing women’s agency, including under authoritarian regimes, and calls for a redefinition of both Second and Third World feminists as key actors forging new understandings of women’s rights and advancing the international commitment to gender equality and anticolonialism.