# Cultural nationalist and Marxist precursors of African feminism  
Feminist studies have unearthed a long-standing involvement of women in pan-African and African liberation movements. So for example, Reddock provides evidence of Amy Ashwood Garvey's significant involvement in the Garveyite movement that emerged in the early twentieth-century Caribbean and North America, and the possibility that she co-founded the United Negro Improvement Association (Reddock, 2007). Boyce Davies reminds us of the African-African American women's participation, including the organizing and  
sponsorship of the historic 1945 Pan-African Congress (Boyce Davies, 2007). But what was the intellectual environment encountered by Anna Julia Cooper, Adelaide Casely-Hayford, Mabel Dove Danquah and others?  
During the 1950s Eric Williams had drawn the connection between capitalism and slavery (Williams, 1944) and Padmore published Pan-Africanism or Communism? The Coming Struggle for Africa to address the tension between cultural nationalist and revolutionary Marxist positions. This tension was manifest in discussions about which be given primacy - race or class (Padmore, 1972 [1955]). Women were not on this agenda, but their involvement allowed them to form transnational interpersonal relationships with each other. Biographical studies show that radical women travelled extensively, coming into contact with others in both pan-African and socialist movements. Una Marson was involved in anti-imperialist work, while supporting West African students in London during the critical years that led to independence. Personal relationships developed among women such as Claudia Jones and Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, who both attended the World Congress of Women in the USSR in 1963, and met again in Japan the following year to campaign against nuclear weapons. Several attended meetings of the Women's International Democratic Federation, a left-affiliated organization which provided support to African national liberation struggles. ${ }^{3}$