Women, Empires, and Body Politics at the United Nations, 1946–1975

Giusi Russo is an assistant professor of history at Montgomery County Community College in Pennsylvania.

"The feminist and decolonizing lens on the history of the UN found in Women, Empires, and Body Politics is not only a valuable and important contribution to international relations and its methodology, but also essential to human rights studies, as it speaks to the foundation of the UN mandate."-Rebecca Adami, International Feminist Journal of Politics "In recent years, a new wave of histories has documented the broad range and reach of women’s interventions in the international arena in the twentieth century. Giusi Russo’s Women, Empires, and Body Politics provides a welcome addition to this literature, exploring how women from a wide variety of countries engaged with the formal mechanisms created by the United Nations (UN) in the years before International Women’s Year (1975). Russo focuses, in particular, on the records of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), an archive that had largely been untapped to date."-Nicole C. Bourbonnais, Women's History Review "Women, Empires, and Body Politics at the United Nations, 1946-1975 constitutes a very significant contribution to the study of the UN's gender politics, imperial feminism, and Cold War history, which will equally interest historians of women's and gender history and historians working on the global Cold War."-Chiara Bonfiglioli, H-Diplo “Giusi Russo sheds light on the pivotal and until-now-overlooked role the UN Commission on the Status of Women played in defining international women’s rights between 1946 and 1975. During this era of the Cold War, decolonization, and economic development, the CSW developed the blueprint for what was later popularized as ‘women’s rights are human rights.’ . . . Demonstrating the inextricable links between ‘body politics’ and international politics, Russo’s book fills important gaps in global feminist, foreign relations, and human rights histories.”-Katherine M. Marino, author of Feminism for the Americas: The Making of an International Human Rights Movement “An astute analysis. Giusi Russo provides a chronology of the emergence of body politics and the move from public (civic and political equality) to private (marriage and reproduction) discrimination that characterized this lingering period of imperial feminism. Russo has produced a theoretically sophisticated work that moves the discussion of feminisms in new directions by centering the Global South during and after colonial occupation.”-Eileen Boris, author of Making the Woman Worker: Precarious Labor and the Fight for Global Standards, 1919–2019

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsList of AbbreviationsIntroduction1. Women of the World: Visible and Invisible Bodies2. Imperial Encounters and Occupied Bodies3. Cold War, Competing Womanhood, and Bodies in the Microcosm4. The Sacred Trust and the Body in Pain5. Bodily Rituals and the Dialectic of Foreign and Local Voices 6. Bodies in Captivity, Gender Equilibrium, and the Shift from Liberal Politics7. Reproducing the Nation and the Right to Control One’s DestinyEpilogueNotesBibliographyIndex