In Women, Struggles and Strategies: Third World Perspectives, women from several countries of Africa. Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America relate their experiences of organizing and talk about some of the major issues they are confronting in their countries. Over the past fifteen years the women's movement in the Third World, as elsewhere, has grown tremendously. There has been a great upsurgence of women coming together and organizing themselves in rural areas and in urban ones: peasant women, urban poor women, middle class women, women workers, housewives, professionals...

This collection of articles, giving Third World women's perspectives on their struggles and strategies, cover a wide range of issues and grassroots experiences from Nepal to Brazil, from Zimbabwe to Peru, from Thailand to Nigeria. What binds these articles together is that they relate women's organizing experiences that are rooted in the economic, political and cultural context of their countries.

The experiences and perspectives presented here show the dynamism of the global women's movement. They also dispel some misconceptions about feminism in the Third World: that it is a recent development; that it has been imported from the West; that it is an urban, middle class phenomenon.

"The women's movement was not imposed on women by the United Nations or by Western feminists, but has an independent history," explains Kumari Jayawardena in "Feminism in Sri Lanka in the Decade, 1975 to 1985." "Feminism is neither Eastern nor Western," the Simorgh Women's Resource and Publication Center in Pakistan writes. "It is a transformational process, an idea, a dream, a quest, and in that it is no more bound to international boundaries than any other idea may be." 

A Global Challenge, the first section of this volume , sets the context and challenges of the women's movement around the world: "Networking in the Global Women's Movement," gives an overview of how women's groups are linking up within and among different countries and draws from the experiences of Isis International; "Alternative Visions, Strategies and Perspectives" summarizes ideas and plans of Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN), a grouping of women and organizations concerned with developing and articulating a feminist perspective on development from the Third World.

In From the Grassroots, women and women's groups in Asia, Africa and Latin America present their experiences, analyses, and perspectives on their own struggles and strategies.

Among these, we hear the fascinating story of how women have been developing and carrying on feminist struggles in Sri Lanka for many years. We learn about the blossoming of a grass roots feminist movement in the Philippines. Sistren, a women's theater group in Jamaica, tells how drama is being used as a tool for empowering women workers in rural areas. From Zimbabwe, we learn about the difficult conditions of women workers in the country's expanding industry and about the new structures they are creating to improve these conditions. In Latin America, women from Peru, Brazil and the Dominican Republic are raising challenging questions about the relationship between feminism, the grassroots women's movement, and popular education. And from Nepal, we hear about a rural women's development officer whose story is a testimony to the strength and determination of many other such unrecognized women leading feminist struggles at the grassroots.

The articles in this collection come from publications and other materials sent in to the Isis International Resource Centers in Rome, Italy and Santiago, Chile from women and women's groups in all parts of the globe. We are thankful to all the women and groups who have given us permission to reprint these materials and to share these valuable experiences through our communication channels with women, women's groups and networks in other parts of the world.

Working on this collection has been an inspiring experience. We share these articles here in the hope that others will respond to the ideas and challenges of women from many different countries.

Isis International