Jennifer Leigh Disney comparatively analyzes the mobilization of women in two revolutionary cases, Mozambique and Nicaragua, in order to assess the achievements and limitations of women's activism and feminist agency. In both countries, anti-imperialist national liberation wars were fought while proclaiming a socialist vision of emancipation, but a gendered analysis of women's oppression was absent from the theories and practices of the revolutionary struggle in both countries.

In Chapter 1, Disney introduces the two main questions she sets out to answer: How and under what conditions is feminist consciousness created; and what forms of mobilization foster feminist agency and what factors hinder its realization? Using both primary and secondary sources, she explores the extent to which women were able to 1) mobilize within the revolutionary and postrevolutionary movements in Mozambique and Nicaragua, and 2) integrate a feminist analysis into the daily practice and theoretical ideals of the revolutionary movements. In doing so, she has produced a comprehensive study that helps to explain how women's activism is transformed into feminist agency whereby women become actively and collaboratively engaged in formulating an emancipatory vision of society.

Chapters 2 and 3 present the theoretical framework and conceptual parameters for understanding how women are organizing and constructing feminism in Mozambique and Nicaragua. Disney points out that women's oppression was unchanged in the postrevolutionary periods because the Marxist-Leninist vision that shaped the revolutionary movements in both countries reinforced a patriarchal political culture and a vertical organizing structure that obstructed gendered revolutionary change in the public and private spheres of women's lives.

In the remaining chapters, the author explains what women activists in Mozambique and Nicaragua have been able to achieve as a result of the way that they organize. In Chapter 4, Disney addresses the distinct struggles for ideological and organizational autonomy that emerged between women's organizations and their associated political parties in each country. The electoral victory of the Frelimo Party in Mozambique and the adoption of a multiparty democracy caused the Organization of Mozambican Women (OMM) to temporarily split from Frelimo and briefly establish itself as an autonomous women's organization, only to restore itself as a party organization. In contrast, the electoral defeat of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua caused the Luisa Amanda Espinoza Association of the Nicaraguan Women (AMNLAE) to permanently seek autonomy from the party, and also sparked a thriving autonomous women's movement now comprised of hundreds of self-identified feminist organizations.

Chapters 5 and 6 evaluate the policy record of the Frelimo and the Sandinista revolutionary governments. The major gains that women in Mozambique and Nicaragua experienced in the revolutionary periods were political and economic participation, namely, their participation in military defense and in the formal workplace. Women also gained legal equality, equal access to education, and basic material resources in both countries. Disney points out, however, that women's subordinate status in the family remained unchanged as neither the Frelimo nor the Sandinista revolutionary governments challenged the pervasive cultural patriarchies or the accompanying sexual division of labor in the household and family economy.

Chapters 7 and 8 provide evidence that political gains established by the revolutionary government in Mozambique and Nicaragua, such as freedom of speech and expression, have not been accompanied by economic gains in the postrevolutionary period because the expansion of the neoliberal has state increasingly disempowered civil society, including women's organizations. Disney's study reveals that while today there is more organizing of women's autonomous organization in civil society, greater freedom, and a greater diversity of voices in Mozambique and Nicaragua, these autonomous organizations generally have less power to effect change on a national level.

The author's research confirms that without fundamental changes in the sexual division of labor, where women's reproductive work has traditionally been un/undervalued and the secondary status of women in the sphere of home and family remain unchallenged, postrevolutionary societies continue to be as unequal as nonrevolutionary societies. Disney's comparative study of women's mobilization in Mozambique and Nicaragua deftly places women's feminist agency at the center of her analysis, and she skillfully uses intersectionality to enrich our understandings of women's mobilization and antioppression politics in postrevolutionary societies.

In short, Disney's scholarship is a thorough account of women's activism and mobilization from the perspectives of the women involved, making it a valuable contribution to the growing body of global feminist literature. While her approach to feminist agency in history and politics is not pathbreaking, her novel and interesting choices of Mozambique and Nicaragua as case studies, as well as her first-rate comparative analysis, yields insightful, valuable, and relevant information about women's mobilization beyond these two countries. Moreover, her research is theoretically useful to the study of women's mobilization and feminist agency worldwide. This book is a solid piece of scholarship that would be useful reading for college courses on gender and development, global feminisms, feminist theory, and post-revolutionary politics.