WIDF was founded in Paris in 1945 as an anti-fascist organization with the intent of engaging women in efforts to prevent war and to combat the racist and sexist ideology of fascist regimes.

From the beginnings of World War II left-leaning women who were communist, liberal, or socialist were active in the fight against fascism and the spread of the racist and sexist ideology of Nazism.

[2] During the war, many of the activists, who were primarily aristocrats and intellectuals, took part in anti-fascist conferences throughout Europe, and began to develop a transnational framework for social and political policies that would prevent future conflicts.

WIDF's internal sources about its origin are vague in regard to the political affiliations of the founders, focusing instead on their involvement in resistance and anti-fascist movements during and immediately following the war, and their intent to establish an organization which was open to all progressive women.

The secretariat was composed of a secretary general and four staff members, who would carry out the management of the federation's business, with the exception of bookkeeping, which was assigned to a three-member commission.

[11] Among the founding members were Elizabeth Acland Allen (UK), Cécile Brunschvicg (France), Tsola Dragoycheva (Bulgaria), Dolores Ibárruri (Spain), Ana Pauker (Romania), Kata Pejnović (Yugoslavia), Nina Popova (Russia), Rada Todorova (Bulgaria); Jessie Street (Australia), and Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier (France),[12][13][14][a] Among the women sending congratulations and support for the founding of WDIF were Clementine Churchill, wife of the British Prime Minister; Eleanor Roosevelt, First Lady of the United States, and Isie Smuts, wife of the Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa.

[18] Both organizations condoned colonial and imperial systems and stressed the importance of democracy in achieving fundamental human rights such as freedom of conscience, press, and speech.

[18][20] Their members were typically conservative, upper-class, Christian women from Europe, or places such as Australia, Canada, and the United States, where large numbers of Europeans had settled.

[29] Unlike the pacifist western feminist groups, WIDF members did not see peace as the avoidance or absence of war; rather, they viewed it as the achievement of social justice and the cessation of oppression and exploitation.

[31] For example, the organization rallied Frenchwomen to have their sons refuse to participate in colonial wars,[32] and urged American women to protest the use of germ warfare in Korea.

[29] The executive council that year consisted of members from Algeria, Argentina, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, China, Finland, France, Greece, Hungary, India, Italy, Korea, Norway, Poland, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United States, USSR, and Yugoslavia.

[35][c] Egyptian feminist Saiza Nabarawi, who was a vice president of the International Alliance of Women, attended WIDF's 1952 Vienna Congress and was asked by the board of the IAW to choose which organization she preferred.

[36] WIDF's monthly magazine, which became a quarterly publication in 1966,[37] Women of the Whole World, was produced in six languages – Arabic, English, French, German, Russian, and Spanish from 1946 to 1990.

[43] WIDF members participated in a fact-finding mission in 1946 through Latin America, visiting Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay,[44] to build networks and learn about the issues women faced there.

[32][45] They collected reports from women in India and Algeria to evaluate how the lack of development programs led to poverty and how economic policies and customs systemically exploited agricultural workers.

[44] The observers compiled their report The Women of Asia and Africa,[48] in preparation for a conference planned for 1948 to be held in Calcutta (now Kolkata), in honor of India's independence from the United Kingdom.

[51] Immediately following India's independence, its Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru began implementing policies to silence dissent, imprisoning or driving activists and communists underground.

[52] Neither land reforms to protect peasants and rural women nor changes to hiring and wage systems to produce job and income stability were implemented.

[53] WIDF activists recognized that there was no difference between the struggle against colonial administrations or newly created governments, meaning that their demands for a realignment of power hierarchies to include working- and middle-class women would not be supported.

[58] The Congress of American Women was targeted by the Committee on Un-American Activities of the United States House of Representatives (HUAC) in 1949 due to the support it had been given by the Communist Party.

[27] Twenty-one WIDF activists from Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe spent twelve days evaluating the conditions on the Korean peninsula during the war in May 1951,.

[92] WIDF activists Shahnaz Alami [fa] (Iran) and Hertta Kuusinen (Finland) promoted the idea within the Commission on the Status of Women.

[101] In 1976, the WIDF sponsored an international conference in Sofia, Women in Agriculture, focused on educational training and developing cooperative farms in the Global South.

[112][113] The federation was reorganized in 1994 under the leadership of Sylvie Jan.[114][115] At the 1995 World Conference on Women, many WIDF activists from Eastern Europe explained that their organizations had been dissolved and their voices had been silenced.

[116] In 2002, when Brazilian member Márcia Campos was elected president, the office relocated to Brasília,[113][117] and in 2007 the WIDF's secretariat was located in São Paulo.

[118] Campos was succeeded by Salvadoran Lorena Peña after her election at the 2016 WIDF Congress of Bogotá,[119] and the worldwide headquarters moved to the Palomo neighborhood of San Salvador at 23 Calle Poniente & Avenida Las Victorias #123.

[133] De Haan stated that records of the early organization in France remain in private hands; some materials were destroyed, and others moved multiple times.

[137] The WIDF, according to academics like Elisabeth Armstrong and Suzy Kim, played an important role in supporting women's anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

[139] She also concluded that long before second-wave feminists began promoting intersectional analysis, the WIDF incorporated the principles of evaluating overlapping factors such as class, gender, race, and religion to determine how inequalities were perpetuated globally.

[144] De Haan called the WIDF "the largest and probably most influential international women's organization of the post-1945 era",[1] an assessment which was seconded by Taewoo Kim.