From Margin(s) to Center(s). The Third World Women’s Alliance (1969-1979)

This article examines the history of Third World Women’s Alliance (TWWA), a significant proto-intersectional feminist organization involving women of color during the Sixties and Seventies, through a transnational lens. Drawing on archival sources and oral interviews, the article argues that transnationalism played a pivotal role in shaping the TWWA’s antiimperialist ideology and activism. The first section of the article emphasizes the TWWA’s transnational roots by exploring the connection between Frances M. Beal, one of its founders, and African American intellectuals active in Paris, as well as African students in France during the Sixties. The second section delves into the TWWA’s participation in the two Indochinese Women’s Conferences held in Vancouver and Toronto in 1971, highlighting the TWWA’s reputation as one of the important organizations of women of color in the United States and explores the ongoing connections between the TWWA and Vietnamese delegations in Canada following the conferences. In the final two sections, the article examines how Cuba became a contested site for defining the intricate relationship between gender, race, and class in the United States, and how it served as a political reference point that impacted the TWWA’s activism