We Accuse! North Korean Women and Cold War Feminism during the Korean War

While historians of the Cold War have argued that both feminism and pacifism receded in the 1950s with the twin rise of domesticity and McCarthyism, the Korean War galvanized international women to promote women’s rights in the context of the first global peace campaign during the Cold War. Situating North Korean women within the international women’s movement, this paper excavates buried histories of Cold War sutures to show how leftist women tried to bridge the Cold War divide through maternalist strategies. I show how socialist internationalism in the context of a global peace movement facilitated a productive understanding of difference – whether gendered, racial, ethnic, national, or any other – toward a ‘transversal’ politics of solidarity as seen during the Korean War. While the term Cold War feminism generally refers to liberal feminist deployment of gender justice that was used to justify American intervention after World War II, I expand the use of Cold War feminism to define it as the bifurcated theorizing of women’s oppression solidified during the Cold War on both sides of the divide. I argue that the development of the feminist project itself was bifurcated by the global Cold War, the effects of which are still felt in the iterations of contemporary feminisms today.