Feminists have claimed that theory should emerge from practice and that knowledge should contribute toward women’s emancipation. However, in the 1990s, African American and postcolonial feminisms criticized feminist knowledge building for its Western bias, upon which false claims to universalism were based, and for its insensitivity to issues of race, class and cultural difference. These literatures, as well as postcolonial literatures on globalization more generally, attempted to construct knowledge, sensitive to issues of difference that mediated between cultural specificity and universality. This paper discusses how these literatures might be useful and/or limiting for understanding women’s social movements in the context of globalization. It puts to test feminists claim that they are committed to building “practical knowledge”, by citing four cases of women’s activist practice around the globe for assessment. It finds that the traveling of discourses between the academia and the grassroots is often uneven, unreciprocated, and under theorized.