Entwined Liberations: North Korean Democratic Women's Union and Third World Internationalism, 1945–1949

ABSTRACT This research focuses on how the North Korean Democratic Women's Union (NKDWU), the umbrella women's organisation in North Korea formed soon after Korea's liberation from Japanese colonial rule in 1945, forged international leftist women's solidarity during the North Korean state's liminal, revolutionary period (1945–1949). The NKDWU articulated that the North Korean women's model of entwined liberations between the revolutionary state and women, as well as among international women's groups, could guide Third World women toward their own postcolonial liberations. This early international solidarity had reciprocal impact: the concept of NKDWU's entwined liberations evolved into a cosmopolitan vision as their interactions increased with international women's organisations, while the agendas of anti‐imperialism and aspirations of decolonisation initiated by Asian women that culminated at the 1949 Asian Women's Conference shifted the core tenets of transnational feminism.