About

Jocelyn Olcott is a Professor of History; International Comparative Studies; and Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University. Her first book, Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico, explores questions of gender and citizenship in the 1930s. Her second book, International Women’s Year: The Greatest Consciousness-Raising Event in History, considers the history and legacies of the United Nation’s first world conference on women in 1975 in Mexico City, published by Oxford University Press in 2017. Her current project is a biography of activist and folksinger Concha Michel, a one-time Communist who became an icon of maternalist feminism and a vocal advocate for recognizing the economic importance of subsistence labor. This biography follows Michel’s life from the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth century, examining how concepts of motherhood, labor, and policies surrounding them articulated with major shifts in political-economic thought. Olcott has also initiated an international, interdisciplinary project focused on rethinking the value of care labor broadly, including dependent and household care, environmental, community, cultural, and sexual care. She holds current appointments as Professor of History, Associate Chair of the Department of History, and Professor in Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies at Duke University.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Law
• Geography
• Gender studies
• Economic growth
• Economic geography

Selected publications

• Mary Kay Vaughan (1942–2024)

  Hispanic American Historical Review · 2025-04-29

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• The UN Decade for Women and the Transformation of Feminism

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2025-07-22

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  Abstract The 1975 International Women’s Year conference in Mexico City launched the United Nations’s Decade for Women (1975–1985) amid an ideological struggle between neoliberal and socialist visions of development, both of which ignored women’s critical contributions. In this liminal moment, activist intellectuals in the Global South drew ecumenically from elements of what, in retrospect, appear as sharply contradictory imaginaries of political economy. Ambivalent about both liberal internationalism and hegemonic concepts of feminism, Global South–based activists nonetheless took advantage of the organizational infrastructure offered by the United Nations and the activist momentum created by emergent transnational feminist networks. The UN Decade fostered conferences, technical meetings, and both public and private funding for artistic and academic events and publications. South-based feminist networks refashioned civil-society internationalism around three important themes: the decolonization of knowledge production, the redefinition of the parameters and priorities of feminism, and the intersection of these two concerns to frame a critique of both Marxist and neoliberal approaches.

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• Latin American Feminisms

  Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History · 2024-03-19

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  Abstract Latin American feminisms have roots stretching back to before the independence period and have, since arriving on the intellectual scene in the late 19th century, reflected diverse contexts and with distinct strategies and objectives. While the earliest uses of the term feminism emerged from debates over liberalism, with its universalist imaginaries, these early challenges to patriarchal authority promptly generated multiple feminisms alongside movements that engage feminist ideas but eschew the label. Over the past 150 years, these fractures along lines of class, race, culture, and location have both challenged and revitalized feminist campaigns for social, cultural, and political change. Throughout, Latin America has remained a particularly dynamic region for feminist activism, leading the way on the world stage to draw attention to issues such as human rights, maternalist politics, and decoloniality. While Latin American feminism, in the singular, continues to defy any tidy definition or description, Latin American feminisms, in their multiplicity, have consistently fostered creative and effective challenges to patriarchy, particularly in the areas of legal rights, reproductive justice, freedom from violence, and recognition of subsistence labors.

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• Décoloniser le développement. Mobilisations de femmes des Suds dans la guerre froide tardive

  Clio · 2023-01-01

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  La Décennie des Nations unies pour les femmes (1975‑1985) a coïncidé avec une brève période d’ouverture au cours de la guerre froide, lorsque les nations nouvellement décolonisées semblèrent avoir le dessus, ayant pris le contrôle de l’Assemblée générale des Nations unies et de plusieurs agences de l’ONU, où elles promouvaient l’idée d’un nouvel ordre économique international. Cet article examine brièvement deux réseaux d’intellectuelles activistes basées dans le Sud qui ont émergé à la fin de cette décennie. L’Association des femmes africaines pour la recherche et le développement (AFARD/ AAWORD), créée en 1977, a démontré qu’il était possible de réorienter radicalement les programmes de développement vers le bienêtre et la durabilité plutôt que vers la productivité et la croissance. L’association Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN), fondée en 1984, partageait les objectifs de l’AFARD et en incluait quelques-unes des membres, mais elle reflétait un nouveau contexte de la guerre froide où le développement s’est réorienté vers des solutions néolibérales.

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• Solidarity struggles: Transnational feminisms and Cold War lefts in the Global South

  Bloomsbury Academic eBooks · 2023-01-01

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• Lucy Delap. <i>Feminisms: A Global History</i>.

  The American Historical Review · 2022-12-01

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  Lucy Delap sets an ambitious agenda in Feminisms: A Global History, tackling nearly three centuries of women’s activism and feminist ideas across a wide variety of contexts. Arriving as it has amid a proliferation of litmus tests and the widespread denunciation of “cancel culture,” Delap offers a refreshing insistence that we consider these feminist histories—warts and all—within their own contexts. While she does not give a pass to the distressing histories of racism, elitism, and transphobia within women’s and feminist movements, she does highlight the contributions of even the most flawed efforts and considers the ways they opened up spaces of critique amid their shortcomings. “Usable feminisms,” she cautions her readers, “must be non-doctrinaire and open-ended, shaped but not determined by the encounter between past and present” (23). Right out of the gate, Delap tackles the question that bedevils historians of feminisms: what to include without doing violence to historical context. It is tempting to end up with a Potter Stewart–esque I-know-it-when-I see-it definition that pulls in not only movements and ideas that predated the term “feminism” but also women who explicitly rejected the label feminist but shared many priorities and values with those who embraced it. Delap opts for a big-tent approach, understanding feminism not as a unified object with a coherent history but rather as an “overlapping, internally complex set of actions, questions and demands” (3), a “conversation with many registers” (20), and a mosaic “built up from inherited fragments but offering distinctive patterns and pictures” that demand looking “not only at the shards and fragments that make up the mosaic, but also at the gaps between the pieces” (20–21). Indeed, among the book’s contributions are its attention to disagreements and exclusions—the gaps between the pieces.

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• Surfing The New Wave: International Women’s Year and the Geopolitics of 1970s Mexican Feminism

  Korpus 21 · 2022 · 1 citations

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  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Gender studies

  Although scholars and activists point to the 1975 International Women’s Year Conference as a pivotal moment in the development of transnational feminist networks, there has been less attention paid to the importance of its taking place in Mexico City. This article explores how the “new wave” of Mexican feminism in the early 1970s shaped policy priorities within Mexico as well as how the geopolitical context informed the range of possibilities open to feminist activists. As Mexican President Luis Echeverría pursued recognition on the international stage, he sought to align Mexicanpolicies with UN priorities around population control and women’s opportunities.

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• Full-Rights Feminists and a History of the Care Crisis

  International Review of Social History · 2022-05-31

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  Abstract In 2018, the International Labour Organization published a study about the critical role of paid and unpaid care work for the health of society, the economy, and the planet and about the ways that care work is sustained through the super-exploitation of women, particularly migrant women and racially and ethnically marginalized women. Dorothy Sue Cobble's sweeping, carefully researched, and beautifully written study of full-rights feminists gives us a much-needed history of how the ILO came to attend to questions of care work and social reproduction and how hard-fought this recognition has been.

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• The Geopolitics of Women’s Issues: The “Private Sphere” Goes Global

  Diplomatic History · 2021-05-21

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  Kristen Ghodsee’s revisionist take on the importance of socialist women’s activism was researched and written before the Covid-19 pandemic upended the world, but her observations seem even more compelling now. The Cold War rivalry of the late twentieth century fostered alliances between women from socialist countries and women from recently decolonized nations to advocate for a political economy that promoted social welfare and ecological sustainability. Between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s, as women increasingly bore the brunt of the structural adjustment policies and neoclassical economic paradigms that obliterated social services and prized efficiency over social and environmental health, women from socialist countries offered another option—one in which state policies supported working parents and provided for basic needs such as health care and housing. Ghodsee clearly challenges the U.S.-centered liberal feminist depiction of this period, challenging the dismissal of state-sponsored women’s organizations and showing the many ways that the United States and rest of the NATO crowd lagged behind socialist countries on basic issues such as universal childcare and mothers’ pensions. But Ghodsee also challenges the narrative from postcolonial scholars such as Devaki Jain and Amrita Basu who focus on this period as a turning point for Third World feminists, without recognizing the important role of their alliances with Second World activists. Throughout the book, Ghodsee engages the extant scholarship, clarifying the stakes of her interventions into the historiography. Two more recent books, Joanne Meyerowitz’s A War on Global Poverty and Dorothy Sue Cobble’s For the Many, offer further evidence of how much historians gain by looking more closely at these collaborations across geopolitical divides.

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• Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico

  Duke University Press eBooks · 2020 · 60 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Gender studies

  Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico" is an empirically rich history of women's political organizing during a critical stage of regime consolidation. Rebutting the image of Mexican women as conservative and antirevolutionary, Jocelyn Olcott shows women activists challenging prevailing beliefs about the masculine foundations of citizenship. Piecing together material from national and regional archives, popular journalism, and oral histories, Olcott examines how women inhabited the conventionally manly role of citizen by weaving together its quotidian and formal traditions, drawing strategies from local political struggles and competing gender ideologies. Olcott demonstrates an extraordinary grasp of the complexity of postrevolutionary Mexican politics, exploring the goals and outcomes of women's organizing in Mexico City and the port city of Acapulco as well as in three rural locations: the southeastern state of Yucatan, the central state of Michoacan, and the northern region of the Comarca Lagunera. Combining the strengths of national and regional approaches, this comparative perspective sets in relief the specificities of citizenship as a lived experience.

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Frequent coauthors

• Hae–Young Kim

  New York University

  9 shared

• Dominic Yang

  The University of Texas at Austin

  9 shared

• Carlos Rojas

  9 shared

• Eleanor Hyun

  The University of Texas at Austin

  9 shared

• Aimee Kwon

  University of California, Los Angeles

  9 shared

• Bongjoo Shim

  Columbia University

  9 shared

• Myung Kim

  Lund University

  9 shared

• Daeyoung Kim

  Rural Development Administration

  9 shared

Awards & honors

• The Value of Care: A Public Scholarly Exchange Research Prin…
• The Revolution's Revolutionary Research Principal Investigat…
• Freedom Fighters: Regime Change and U.S. Foreign Policy Inst…