They emerged in the mid-1980s as a response to structural adjustment and neoliberal policies, guided by ideas categorized as global feminism.
According to Johanna Brenner in her article Transnational Feminism and the Struggle for Global Justice:"Economic insecurity and impoverishment, exposure to toxics, degradation of water, high infant and maternal mortality rates, forced migration, increased hours spent in paid and unpaid work are only some of the indicates [sic] of women's burdens worldwide"Brenner also states that:"[t]hird world governments are male-dominated, often inefficient, plagued by cronyism, and sometimes corrupt; and the pressures of structural adjustment programs imposed on them by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank have certainly aggravated these tendencies" (Brenner 78).Programs like Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) are part of the package of globalization that is presented to other countries; and while such programs are portrayed as being valuable to improve the status of a country, they result in creating worse situations for the peoples of a country.
Valentine Mogadam best describes TFNs in her book Globalizing Women: Transnational Feminist Networks.
She states in her text:"TFN's have arisen in the context of economic, political, and cultural globalization—and they are tackling both the particularistic and the hegemonic trends of globalization.
Pressure put on governments from feminists around the world resulted in an isolation of the Taliban and an importance placed on Afghan women's rights.