Social Movements of the 1960s, Liberal Democracy, and Transnational Feminist Internationalism

Vocabulary flashcards covering the emergence of 1960s social movements, Cold War liberal democratic stability, second-wave feminism, the long civil rights movement, and post-WWII anti-imperialist women's internationalism across Asia and Africa.

Socially Embedded Markets

Markets whose organizational forms and distributive functions are shaped by political, social, and religious practices and norms, making them complex political institutions rather than self-regulating, autonomous entities.

Embedded Liberalism

The post-World War II international economic order established under the Bretton Woods agreement, combining open international trade and finance with global governance mechanisms that allowed nation-states autonomy to protect domestic economic priorities, especially employment.

Cycle of Contention

A protest cycle in which pioneering social movements develop, refine, and model tactics and strategies that subsequent movements adopt and adapt.

The Long Civil Rights Movement

A historiographical framework formulated by Jacquelyn Dowd Hall demonstrating that the US civil rights struggle began earlier than the mid-1950s, persisted past the mid-1960s, operated nationally rather than only in the South, relied centrally on women activists, and focused on economic redistribution alongside legal equality.

Politics of Redistribution

An emancipatory focus emphasized by second-wave feminists that sought to expand public contestation over wealth, resources, and labor to incorporate social reproduction.

Politics of Recognition

A feminist tendency that gained prominence in the 1980s under the influence of neoliberal thought, prioritizing the affirmation and valorization of cultural difference and identity over material economic restructuring.

Three-Dimensional Justice Framework

Nancy Fraser's 2013 conceptual model that synthesizes redistribution, recognition, and representation into mutually reinforcing dimensions of a comprehensive emancipatory struggle.

New Social Movements (NSMs)

A wave of post-1960s social movements focusing on qualitative, non-material concerns such as gender, sexuality, race, peace, and ecology, whose emergence disrupted the perceived stability and consensus of affluent Western liberal democracies.

The 'Long Boom'

The era of rapid, continuous economic expansion and prosperity between 1945 and 1973 in Western industrial democracies, marked by record-low unemployment, widespread consumer goods distribution, and the emergence of youth culture.

Democratic Pluralism

A political theory asserting that representative democracies maintain social stability through ongoing bargaining, negotiation, and compromise among diverse, cross-cutting interest groups and the state outside formal parliamentary assemblies.

Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD)

A Cold War strategic doctrine in which the thermonuclear ballistic capabilities of the capitalist and communist superpowers made direct mutual military conflict intolerably costly, shifting warfare into Third World proxy conflicts.

Containment

The cornerstone of post-World War II US foreign policy designed to prevent the geopolitical expansion of communism worldwide through global alliances like NATO and SEATO, forward military bases, and armed interventions.

McCarthyism

The 1950s anticommunist political purge led by US Senator Joseph McCarthy that investigated and expelled alleged communists and leftists from public administration, the armed services, universities, publishing, and the entertainment industry.

'End of Ideology'

A mid-twentieth-century thesis by Western intellectuals asserting that fundamental ideological conflicts between capitalism, fascism, and communism had been settled in favor of liberal democracy and welfare-state capitalism.

Extra-Institutional Politics

Collective political action—such as boycotts, civil disobedience, protests, and sit-ins—conducted outside accepted electoral, legislative, and institutional channels to contest and transform political institutions.

May Events of 1968

A massive wave of student demonstrations, university occupations, and general wildcat strikes across France during the 1968 'year of the barricades,' serving as a landmark threshold for new social movement activism.

Solidarity of Commonalty

An internationalist feminist concept articulated by the WIDF emphasizing shared universal human rights across political, economic, social, and cultural domains to advance the conditions of all women globally.

Solidarity of Complicity

An anti-imperialist feminist principle where women acknowledge structural power disparities between nations and take active political responsibility to contest oppression and military violence carried out in their own country's name.

Solidarity of Possibility

A dynamic within twentieth-century Global South women's movements where organizations across Asia and Africa derived organizing models, tactical inspiration, and progressive leadership directly from one another.

Chronotopes (Feminist Historiography)

Analytical configurations of mutually constitutive space and time used to decenter Euro-American historical narratives (such as using 1945 strictly as 'postwar') by accounting for discontinuous anticolonial and regional struggles.

Social Reform Feminism

A feminist tradition in colonized and postcolonial Asia focused on improving women's literacy, healthcare, and civil welfare through civic and religious voluntary bodies, often operating within or accommodating colonial and state authorities.

Nationalist and State Feminism

A feminist tradition that pursues women's constitutional rights, legal equality, and civic enfranchisement by integrating women's mobilization into the governance structures of the newly independent nation-state.

Leftist, Mass-Based Feminism

A revolutionary feminist tendency characterized by anti-imperialism, anticapitalism, mass mobilization, and a membership base of rural peasant women and working-class women seeking to overhaul relations of production and reproduction.

Women's International Democratic Federation (WIDF)

A transnational women's organization established in Paris in 1945 that explicitly opposed imperialism and fascism, collaborating with Asian and African women's groups to center anti-colonialism within international women's rights.

Mahila Atma Rakshi Samiti (MARS)

The Women's Self-Defense Committee founded in 1942 during the Bengal famine, which organized thousands of rural peasant women during the Tebhaga movement and collaborated with WIDF to initiate pan-Asian anti-imperialist organizing.

Conference of the Women of Asia (1949)

An anti-imperialist international conference held in Beijing in December 1949, bringing together 367 women from 37 countries to center South-South solidarity, agrarian peasant struggles, and national liberation.

Bandung Conference (1955)

A landmark gathering of 29 African and Asian state delegations held in Indonesia that established Third World solidarity and non-alignment, preceded and conceptually influenced by early anti-imperialist women's conferences.

Gerwani (Gerakan Wanita Indonesia)

An Indonesian mass-based leftist women's organization affiliated with WIDF whose membership expanded from 80,000 in 1954 to 662,460 in 1957, organizing peasant and working women around land distribution, divorce equality, and anti-imperialism.

Committee of Correspondence (CoC)

An anticommunist American women's organization funded covertly by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) between 1952 and 1969 to counter leftist and pro-Soviet transnational women's organizing in the Third World.

'Communist Front' Paradigm

A Cold War historiographical assumption that dismissed leftist transnational groups like WIDF as mere Soviet puppets, discounting the genuine political agency, theoretical autonomy, and leadership of Southern women activists.

Politics of Knowledge Construction

The recognition that institutional archives and historical narratives are shaped by power relations and political conflict, requiring analysts to examine marginal, excluded, and critical voices to understand social change.

Backlash Movements

Reactive right-wing populist and conservative patriarchal movements that mobilize around nationalism, anti-immigration sentiment, opposition to feminism, and resistance to LGBTQI+ and reproductive rights.