For the best book published in the previous calendar year on women and politics.

Award Committee: Laura Katz Olson, Lehigh University, Chair; Nancy J. Hirschman, University of Pennsylvania; Jean L. Cohen, Columbia University

Recipient: Valentine M. Moghadam, UNESCO, Social and Human Sciences Sector

Title: Globalizing Women: Transnational Feminist Networks (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005)

Citation: This powerful book provides a vital analysis of global feminism through a study of transnational feminist networks. Emerging in the mid-1980s and proliferating in the 1990s, these groups represent, according to the author, local, state and regional women uniting around a common, world-wide feminist agenda. Their main goal, as well as the author's, is to present globalization as a gendered process and demonstrate its gendered dimensions. As such, they challenge the neo-corporate agenda at its core.

Professor Moghadam focuses on two main areas: women’s human rights in the face of harsh gender regimes in Muslim countries; and the economic consequences for women of ruthless structural adjustment policies imposed by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, among other entities, on Third World nations. She shows how women are not only resisting the exploitation of female labor and patriarchal fundamentalism but also are attempting to influence new policies based on gender and economic justice. The book depicts how transnational feminist networks engage politically through various mechanisms, including lobbying and advocacy, organizing coalitions with other groups, providing information and data to varied governmental and quasi-governmental organizations, and enhancing public awareness everywhere.

This book is not just "about women" but is feminist in its very foundation; the questions that motivate it, the way it frames analysis. Using a feminist political economy model, Professor Moghadam’s concern with the affects of globalization on women relies on the interplay among capital, class, race and gender. Her book also stands out because it interweaves theoretical feminist analysis with that of women’s activism, examining the ways in which agency and structure interact. As she puts it, the work addresses both “globalism-from-above” and “globalism-from-below.” As such, Globalizing Women: Transnational Feminist Networks is an original and significant contribution to the study of women and politics and most deserving of the Victoria Schuck Award.