Among Women across Worlds: North Korea in Global Cold War

Among Women Across Words (2023, Cornell University Press), cropped

Professor, Suzy Kim, Rutgers University

Tuesday, April 22, 2025
4:00 PM (Pacific Time)

Bunche Hall, Rm 10383

While social movements may appear to have receded in the 1950s with the rise of Cold War domesticity and McCarthyism (much like the upsurge of authoritarianisms today), the Korean War galvanized women to promote women’s rights in the context of the first global peace campaign during the Cold War. Recuperating the erasure of North Korean women from this movement, this talk excavates buried histories of Cold War sutures to show how leftist women tried to bridge the Cold War divide through maternalist strategies. Socialist feminism in the context of a global peace movement facilitated a productive
understanding of “difference” toward a transversal politics of solidarity. The talk weaves together the women’s press with photographs and archival film footage to contemplate their use in transnational movements of resistance and solidarity, both then and now.   

Suzy Kim is a historian and teaches at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. She is author of Everyday Life in the North Korean Revolution, 1945-1950 published by Cornell University Press in 2013 and Among Women across Worlds: North Korea in the Global Cold War also published by Cornell in 2023. She is senior editor of positions: asia critique, and serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Korean Studies and Yŏsŏng kwa yŏksa [Women and History], the Journal of the Korean Association of Women’s History. As a public scholar, she has been an advocate for social justice and peace in Korea as a founding member of Women Cross DMZ.   

Sponsor(s): Center for Korean Studies