Third World feminism, transnationalism, and international solidarity: the Indian Women's Charter of Rights and Duties (1945) and the Federation of South African Women's Charter (1954)

In 1945 the All-India Women's Conference (AIWC) drafted the Indian Women's Charter of Rights and Duties as a strategic tool to build gender equality into the new nation state as it transitioned from colonial rule. In 1954, facing growing apartheid oppression, the Federation of South African Women (FEDSAW) adopted the Women's Charter which likewise sought to unite all women for the removal of political, legal, economic and social disabilities. This article analyses the feminist nature of these charters and explores how their respective women's movements used them to navigate tensions between nationalism and feminism. It also traces the overlooked influence of the FEDSAW Charter on the liberation movement in South Africa, the resonance of these charters in the constitutional writing process in both countries, and the wider influence of the AIWC Charter within the international sphere. Putting these two charters into conversation, within a broader sphere of Third World left feminist transnationalism, it argues, can facilitate a historiographical reframing of their respective women's movements, and decentre the Global North as the nodal point for transnational feminist organising in the late 1940s and 1950s.