Despite its considerable successes, the U.S. women's movement has frequently been seen as a disappointment from a global perspective. For instance, in their analysis of global women's movements' influence on the major multinationals, Robert O'Brien and colleagues state that “in the case of the US women's movement, even though it is the largest and most powerful women's movement in the world, its focus is squarely domestic, not international” (Contesting Global Governance, 2000, p. 53). Similarly, in a chapter in the current volume, Joyce Gelb points out that, although the United States has been a standard-bearer in regard to gender equity policy, a “politics of insularity” has sometimes prevented the movement from achieving new gains (p. 177).

One might expect that a book titled The U.S. Women's Movement in Global Perspective might respond to such charges with evidence on how some organizations within the U.S. movement have contributed to international conferences on behalf of women; have supported women suffering atrocities in Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Rwanda; and have lobbied at the United Nations for international normative standards on behalf of women's universal rights. Such is not the case.

What the book does instead is to bring together a valuable collection about the U.S. movement and to provide a series of explicit or implicit comparisons of the American movement with those from five other countries. An equal number of political scientists and sociologists describe the U.S. movement over time and compare it with case studies of women's movements in Chile, Russia, Japan, England, and Ireland. Surprisingly, an interesting chapter on “African American Gendered Repertoires” by Belinda Robnett is cast with these comparative chapters on national movements. That the chapters are more comparable than can usually be expected in an edited volume is due to the use of a familiar conceptual framework from the social movement literature that emphasizes resources and mobilizing structures, political opportunities, and “the world of ideation: identity, culture, discourse, and framing” (p. 15).

Lee Ann Banaszak's introduction sets out this framework as it applies to the U.S. women's movement in a useful section, including several pages on “international opportunities.” She goes on to draw conclusions from the subsequent chapters, notably: 1) The three concepts are interdependent; 2) cultural norms are important in their influence on the timing of social movements' emergence; 3) within movements, divisions can be masked and give a sense of unrealistic continuity; 4) social movements are path dependent; and 5) movements can only be understood by examining activism at multiple levels.

The first half of the volume begins with Jo Freeman's classic 1973 article from the American Journal of Sociology on the origins of women's liberation (second wave), which points to the importance of “co-optable networks.” This is followed by Nancy Whittier's analysis of the transition from the second wave to the third wave of the radical wing of the U.S. movement. The remaining chapters in this half offer important insights regarding the failed campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment and the operation of the National Organization for Women (NOW) at both the national and local levels.

The second half of the book is strikingly different. In each of these chapters, there is clear evidence of the way in which the movements in the different countries are in some way dependent on global feminism. For instance, Lisa Baldez and Celeste Montoya Kirk found that in Chile under the dictatorship of Pinochet (1973–89), the military's severest repression was directed at men whose labor unions and political parties were demobilized. The surprising consequence was the mobilization of women, in international organizations and in domestic organizations, many of which were funded from abroad. Participation in regional and international conferences strengthened women's understanding of feminism and gave them the courage to resist a climate of fear. Carol Nechemias found that in Russia, although the global women's movement played a significant role in spreading and sustaining feminist ideas and activities, the kitchen table, as well as domesticity, had represented an island of freedom to both men and women for 70 years, not a symbol of constraint and missed opportunities for women as viewed in the West. For Japan, Gelb describes a “politics of externality” in which international standards of gender equity have been used by feminists to exert pressure on a reluctant government. Despite extensive mobilization by housewives, working women's groups, and labor unions, feminists in Japan face a backlash associated with declining birth and marriage rates. In the last of these chapters, Deana Rohlinger and David Meyer finish with a more direct approach to the question of transnational influences by examining the framing of abortion access in England, Ireland, and the United States. They find that international organizations may try to coordinate and provide resources to national organizations, and the greater the contact between the two, the greater the influence. However, state policies and national political cultures still “dominate the field on which activists struggle” (p. 213).

Banaszak's concluding chapter is brief. She focuses first on the mobilization and divisions within the U.S. movement and then goes on to consider “The U.S. Movement in the Global Community.” Here, she draws on the chapters in the last half of the book to note that U.S. feminist action “clearly brings resources and allies to feminist movements overseas” (p. 221), although this aid sometimes comes at a considerable price. A more systematic analysis of how this is done and by whom will await another volume.