Even though literature on globalization has been growing exponentially since the late 1980s, one Rutgers professor noticed a glaring omission throughout these texts.

 “The literature never mentions women or feminism,” said Mary Hawkesworth, professor of women’s and gender studies and political science in New Brunswick. If women are mentioned, they are relegated to the domestic sidelines, she said. “There’s a long history in political science and sociology: What men do matters. It’s a screening out; the analytical lens obliterates women. It’s a form of myopia.”

A feminist scholar and activist for more than 30 years, Hawkesworth set out to document what has been omitted in globalization studies. In her book, Globalization & Feminist Activism (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2006), Hawkesworth explores globalization from a feminist perspective and relates transnational feminist efforts to overcome social, economic, and political inequalities from the 15th century.

The historic overview begins in 1405, with Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies, which related women’s successes in roles other than wives and mothers. Hawkesworth documents how European and American women of the 19th century demanded social justice, calling for an end to slavery. With the rise of capitalism, these early feminists also demanded equal pay and better working conditions for milliners, seamstresses, and textile workers throughout Europe and America. By the time of the Seneca Falls Convention in the United States in 1848, an event usually attributed to the beginning of the feminist movement, Hawkesworth has already described a transnational feminist movement that has flourished for centuries.

Winning suffrage rights in Britain, Canada, and the United States after World War I was just one achievement in a long and continuing struggle, as feminists mobilized worldwide to address poverty, war, the sex trade, immigration, and gendered divisions of labor.

Immediately after World War II, feminist activists sought social equality through diplomatic channels of the United Nations. The UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), for example, fought to establish mechanisms to address gender-based injustices, but “the United Nations restricted their mandate to studying and monitoring the status of women across the world,” Hawkesworth said.

Despite these limitations, the commission is monitoring the UN General Assembly and has pressed for the implementation of declarations, conventions, and treaties to advance the status of women, she said. The CSW is also working with the World Health Organization to help women in poor countries and with the International Labour Organization to protect women in the work force, she added.

“Many of the issues of social justice we’re struggling with in the 21st century were already on the transnational agenda – poverty, trafficking, sweatshops – these are all issues that feminists have been mobilizing around for two centuries,” she said. “These issues were huge in the 19th century, and they’re huge in the 21st century.

“We get preoccupied with the present,” Hawkesworth said. “When you look at the long trajectory, you can learn so much from the past. There’s a lot we can learn from the global activism of women in the world.”