In 1924 leading Australian feminist Bessie Rischbieth (1924) wrote to Carrie Chapman Catt, president of the International Women's Suffrage Alliance: ‘Australia offers such tremendous possibilities: it is the youngest of the great continents in developement [sic] and a comparatively small population makes it possible to sow the seed now of the sort of civilisation women of all countries dream about’. ‘Feminist campaigns’, Maggie Humm (1992: 7) has observed, ‘are inevitably shaped by national priorities and national polities’. Feminist ideology and practice have also been shaped, as Vron Ware (1992: 119) has argued, by the ‘social, economic and political forces of imperialism’ within which much nation-making has taken place.

Feminist aspirations, as Bessie Rischbieth's early identification made clear, have often been complicit with nationalist agendas and conceits (see also Humm 1992: 6). But feminism as a movement concerned with the rights and status of women across cultures, as a ‘radical movement that can unite women across existing divisions of class, race and culture’ (Ware 1992: xvii) is also, as the opening tribute by Sofja Livorna Friedland suggests, an internationalist force, comprising an alliance and perspective capable of disrupting and challenging racial barriers and nationalist exclusions.