What is Kristen Ghodsee reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Kristen Ghodsee, author of Second World, Second Sex: Socialist Women's Activism and Global Solidarity during the Cold War.

Her entry begins:

Right now, I am reading the excellent book, Cold War Anthropology: The CIA, The Pentagon and the Growth of Dual Use Anthropology, by David H. Price. I have long been interested in the impact of Cold War politics on the discipline of anthropology, and back in graduate school I remember reading an essay by Laura Nader about what she called the “Phantom Factor” in anthropology: the persistent (if hidden) presence of the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the production of anthropological knowledge about the world. Both Nader and now Price document the uncomfortable relationship between the scholarly study of foreign cultures and the needs of the U.S. military in its efforts to prevent the spread of world communism. After World War II, the CIA had also funneled research monies through dummy funding agencies toward unsuspecting scholars and into many academic research centers and area studies institutes. The Price book exhaustively demonstrates how...[read on]

About Second World, Second Sex, from the publisher:

Women from the state socialist countries in Eastern Europe—what used to be called the Second World—once dominated women’s activism at the United Nations, but their contributions have been largely forgotten or deemed insignificant in comparison with those of Western feminists. In Second World, Second Sex Kristen Ghodsee rescues some of this lost history by tracing the activism of Eastern European and African women during the 1975 United Nations International Year of Women and the subsequent Decade for Women (1976-1985). Focusing on case studies of state socialist Bulgaria and nonaligned but socialist-leaning Zambia, Ghodsee examines the feminist networks that developed between the Second and Third Worlds and shows how alliances between socialist women challenged American women’s leadership of the global women’s movement. Drawing on interviews and archival research across three continents, Ghodsee argues that international ideological competition between capitalism and socialism profoundly shaped the world women inhabit today.

Learn more about Second World, Second Sex at the Duke University Press website.

My Book, The Movie: The Left Side of History.

The Page 99 Test: The Left Side of History.

Writers Read: Kristen Ghodsee.

--Marshal Zeringue