Partial Truths and the Politics of Community considers what happens after feminists succeed in achieving social change or in founding organizations dedicated to accomplishing their personal and social goals. This collection of eighteen essays by scholars from the fields of international relations and feminist studies explores the theoretical dilemmas and practical politics of living with raised consciousnesses in ""worlds of our own making."" The contributors explore feminisms as dreams of human rights, as a cluster of ideologies, and as a bounty of social practices set within frameworks for tackling problems in nation-building and global governance. In essays that illustrate the impact of feminist concerns with the quality of education, the contributors offer studies of homeschooling, of the education of impoverished girls in rural Mexico, of sororities and their relation to female autonomy, and of the teaching of prisoners by volunteers in county jails. Other contributors call for a greater attention to the ecology of social life, viewing society as a complex of individuals bound to one another through webs of transactions and obligations. These contributors recount examples from Northern Ireland, Poland, and the United States in which such webs sometimes support and sometimes strangle efforts to achieve human dignity and autonomy. Evaluating progress made in the legal realm, other contributors chart the opportunities and limitations of international and domestic law as tools to advance and protect human rights. They consider gender discrimination in universities and colleges, the United Nations and its mixed record on women's issues, and the effects of adding rape to the list of prosecutable war crimes. The volume concludes with two works on how feminism supports democratic constructions of science and religion, with results that destabilize dominant institutions in both realms.

A look at more than a century of feminist activism around the world Conscious Acts and the Politics of Social Change counters the notion, widely propagated by antifeminist forces, that feminists represent a group of socially deviant outsiders. In fifteen essays that explore feminist projects to advance human freedom, social activists and academic analysts find feminists to be typical members of their society who promote social movements for nonviolent change in law-abiding ways. Foiling the picture of aberrance, they portray feminists as grandmothers demonstrating quietly in city squares, mothers distributing "subversive" literature from their babies' strollers, and pious women taking issue with politicians who use religion to justify repressive legislation. The contributors also contend that feminism has been a strong force for building civil society and fighting oppression in political and social systems throughout the world. The essays offer a range of reports on feminist theory and activism, some of which celebrate success stories, including the struggle of American women who fight for suffrage, of Czechoslovaks who resist Communist censorship, of Chilean women who want to end the oppressive Pinochet regime by demanding an accounting of their "disappeared" children. Other essays relate failures--the use of an organization intended to provide assistance to Russian families to gain publicity for its American director and to embezzle funds for her local assistants, the clash among women's groups in Iowa that contributed to the defeat of a state equal rights amendment. The remaining essays consider the persistence of socially ambiguous behavior such as lying, violence, cruelty, and discrimination. Collectively the case studies provide opportunities to investigate the characteristics and strategies that have affected positive social change--and those that have not--with an eye toward understanding how persons who want to initiate constructive social change might do so with the resources at their disposal.