How the International Women's Movement Discovered the 'Troubles'

This book analyses women’s transnational encounters in the Northern Ireland case. It connects both the different national contexts of women’s movements and different strands of feminism against the setting of a raging local conflict and new international frameworks. During the 1970s the international women’s movement, composed of a spectrum ranging from radical feminist to conservative, focussed on problems arising from the ‘Troubles’. Using a wide range of European and American sources this book highlights the nationality of the women involved and what it meant for their activism. It argues that activists reflected their own national backgrounds as they worked through a new international framework – driven by media, European integration, the UN’s decade for women and international social movements. This work contributes to both women’s and gender history and to the study of international social movements and transnationalism. It brings them together to show activists’ complicated agendas and how they intersected at national, local and international levels.

Janou Glencross, nee Vorderwulbecke, earned her PhD from the European University Institute, Florence, in 2008. She worked as a research assistant with the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies and is currently managing an interdisciplinary research consortium at Leibniz Universitat Hannover where she also teaches undergraduate and graduate classes.