Funding organisation: Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), Return CH Postdoc.Mobility
Timeline: 01.09.2025 – 31.08.2026
Budget: 125’540 CHF
Principal investigator: Carolina Topini
Keywords: global feminism, sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR), reproductive justice, population policies, women's health activism, biopolitics, stratified reproduction, global health governance

Summary

While much scholarship on transnational feminist organizing has focused on how “official” international forums, such as the various UN-sponsored World Conferences, have fostered global connections among activists, there is a rich landscape of movement-centered gatherings organized outside institutional channels that has received far less attention. Often organized through informal networks, such encounters provided crucial arenas for articulating alternative feminist internationalisms, particularly active in the domain of women’s health and reproductive rights. 

This project focuses on a specific case study: the history of the International Women and Health Meetings (IWHMs), one of the largest forums where feminist health activists from across four continents came together to connect, strategize, and build cross-border coalitions. Between 1977 and 2015, these meetings have been held in various locations, including Rome, Hanover, Geneva, Amsterdam, San José, Quezon City, Kampala, Rio de Janeiro, Toronto, New Delhi, Brussels, and Santo Domingo. They have brought together hundreds of women from around the world — from Black and Indigenous feminists to lesbian and disability rights activists — to pursue a common (if constantly contested) agenda of sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR). They also experimented with innovative modes of governance and organization that contributed to greater representation and inclusiveness among the diverse constituencies of the global women’s health movement — for instance, by alternating the geographic location of the meetings and sharing organizational responsibilities.

Yet their history can be read not only as one of solidarity and communication across various divides (North/South, among others), but also as one of friction, tension, and debate, openly confronting forms of invisibility and structuiral inequalities within movement organizations. Initially informed by the perspectives of white Western European and North American women, the agenda of the IWHMs expanded significantly over time. Black and Global South feminists played a pivotal role in this shift, foregrounding issues of poverty, race, imperialism, population control, and structural adjustment programmes (SAPs), and reframing women’s health and reproductive rights as part of broader struggles against racism and socio-economic inequality. The topics discussed ranged from the priorities shaping contraceptive research to maternal mortality and morbidity, the struggles against the dismantling of welfare and the privatization of health care systems, and the impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and environmental degradation on women’s health. Diverging perspectives emerged, in particular, regarding the role of contraceptive technologies in women’s liberation, and whether feminists should engage more closely with population institutions and gain a seat at the negotiating tables, or prioritize grassroots work.

The project’s aims are:

1. To investigate how the IWHMs served as fertile grounds for coalition-building, providing a compelling case study of how West European and North American women were influenced and challenged by activists from Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
2. To examine how the geography of the meetings shifted from the Global North to the Global South, with political leadership increasingly emerging from feminist organizations shaped by historical processes of imperialism and colonialism.
3. To globalize and de-center the history of Western feminist health activism, foregrounding marginalized histories of activism and their situated understandings of women’s reproductive and sexual agency.
4. To retrace key debates and highlight the diversity of strategies employed by the women who attended the meetings, ranging from integrating feminist frameworks into state and international programs, to creating women’s journals and newsletters to expand access to health information, and to establishing feminist clinics and networks that promoted women-centred models of care.

Methodology

The project connects and builds on three strands of scholarship rarely brought into conversation: the history of transnational feminist movements and networks; the history of global reproductive politics and governance; and the history of technology and medicine. It adopts an intersectional approach and a reproductive justice framework to examine how global structural inequalities critically shape women’s reproductive autonomy and access to health care. Methodologically, it combines the analysis of archival materials — including periodicals, conference proceedings, newsletters, as well as unpublished sources such as campaign materials, personal letters, emails, and photographs — with semi-structured oral history interviews with key members of activist groups.

Banner: 5th IWHM (Encuentro Internacional Mujer y Salud), San José, Costa Rica, 1987 © Rina Nissim

With support from the Swiss National Science Foundation