“Women Against the EEC!”: Limits of Transnational Feminist Solidarity

Abstract

During the first half of the 1970s, Swedish and Danish new women’s movements campaigned against their respective countries joining the European Economic Community (EEC). In doing so, socialist feminist activists in Denmark and Sweden were confronted by questions regarding how to navigate international solidarity between women and where to draw its limits. This article explores these limits by examining Danish and Swedish feminist campaigns against EEC membership from a transnational perspective. I do this by firstly providing a comparative overview of the two Scandinavian countries’ anti-EEC discourses, arguing that they were transnationally interlinked via border-crossing feminist protest culture. Secondly, I explore the political and ideological underpinnings guiding these feminist anti-EEC campaigns, contending that the nationalist and protectionist socialist discourses that emerged from Swedish and Danish new women’s movements’ anti-EEC campaigns were in part discordant with contemporaneous transnational feminist calls for a “global sisterhood”. This article is based on extensive archival research in Sweden and Denmark, with a focus on examining the anti-EEC print culture produced by socialist feminists in the early 1970s.