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towards less powerful groups of women in this society or the masses of women globally. When unenlightened individual feminist thinkers addressed global issues of gender exploitation and oppression they did and do so from a perspective of neocolonialism. Significantly, radical white women writing in Night-Vision: Illuminating War and Class on the NeoColonial Terrain emphasize the reality that” to not understand neocolonialism is to not fully live in the present.” Since unenlightened white feminists were unwilling to acknowledge the spheres of American life where they acted and act in collusion with imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, sustained protest and resistance on the part of black women/women of color and our radical white sisters was needed to break the wall of denial.
    Yet even when large numbers of feminist activists adopted a perspective which included race, gender, class, and nationality, the white “power feminists” continued to project an image of feminism that linked and links women’s equality with imperialism. Global women’s issues like forced female circumcision, sex clubs in Thailand, the veiling of women in Africa, India, the Middle East, and Europe, the killing of female children in China, remain important concerns. However feminist women in the West are still struggling to decolonize feminist thinking and practice so that these issues can be addressed in a manner that does not reinscribe Western imperialism. Consider the way many Western women, white and black, have confronted the issue of female circumcision in Africa and the Middle East. Usually these countries are depicted as “barbaric and uncivilized,” the sexism there portrayed as more brutal and dangerous to women than the sexism here in the United States.
    A decolonized feminist perspective would first and foremost examine how sexist practices in relation to women’s bodies globally are linked. For example: linking circumcision with life-threatening eating disorders (which are the direct consequence of a culture imposing thinness as a beauty ideal) or any life-threatening cosmetic surgery would emphasize that the sexism, the misogyny, underlying these practices globally mirror the sexism here in this country.
    When Issues are addressed in this manner Western imperialism is not reinscribed and feminism cannot be appropriated by transnational capitalism as yet another luxury product from the West women in other cultures must fight to have the right to consume.
    Until radical women in the United States challenge those groups of women pOSIng as feminists in the interest of class opportunism, the tone of global feminism in the West will continue to be set by those with the greatest class power who hold old biases. Radical feminist work around the world daily strengthens political solidarity between women beyond the boundaries of race/ ethnicity and natonality. Mainstream mass media rarely calls attention to these positJve Interventions. In Hatreds: Racialized and Sexualized Conflicts in the 21st Century, Zillah Eisenstein shares the insight:
    

Feminism(s) as transnational-imagined as the rejection of false race/gender borders and falsely constructed “other” - is a major challenge to masculinist nationalism, the distortions of statist communism and “free”-market globalism. It is a feminism that recognizes individual diversity, and freedom, and equality, defined through and beyond north/west and south/ east dialogues.

    No one who has studied the growth of global feminism can deny the Important work women are doing to ensure our freedom. No one can deny that Western women, particularly women in the United States have contributed much that is needed to this struggle and need t~ contribute more. The goal of global feminism is to reach out and join global struggles to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression.

WOMEN AT WORK
    More than half of all women in the United States are In the