This chapter explores the intersection of antifascism and South American women’s activism in the context of the Spanish Civil War. The analysis focuses on Mi guerra de España (My Spanish War, 1976) by Argentine Mika Etchebéhère, an account of her experiences as a captain of a Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM) militia, and the feminist political magazines Vida Femenina (Buenos Aires, 1933–42) and Acción Femenina (Santiago, 1922–39). From different genres such as the memoir, the essay, or the journal article, and from varied platforms including political and non-political associations and publications, women expressed their will to contribute to the global discussion and struggle against fascism.

The dictatorial regime of Jorge Ubico silenced virtually all internal sociopolitical opposition in Guatemala during the interwar period (1931–44). To circumvent this restrictive political terrain, journalists Luz Valle and Gloria Menéndez Mina created literary journals ostensibly published with advice on home making and personal style which furtively cultivated an intellectual space that reflected transnational antifascist conversations. These journals served as incubators for antifascist, democratic ideals during a period of intense intellectual repression, ideals that revolutionary reformers translated directly into social and political democracy created by the October Revolution in 1944. Within a deeply patriarchal society, the journals’ gender analysis also expanded revolutionary vision of justice to include the political and social inclusion of women. Therefore, the extent to which the Guatemalan Revolution embraced antifascist ideals can be traced in part to the ideas published in Nosotras and Azul.

Critics misunderstood Lacan’s thought for decades. They interpreted him as a theorist who reduced subjectivity to its social and linguistic determinations. What they missed was his emphasis, following Kant and Hegel, on subjectivity. This is what both Slavoj Žižek and Joan Copjec provide when they burst onto the Lacanian scene in 1989. Their works place the emphasis in Lacan’s theory on the problem of subjectivity insofar as the subject remains irreducible to the social order. They uncover a radical version of Lacan that subsequent theorists pick up in the fields of queer theory, feminism, anti-racism, and Marxism. This version of Lacan remains vibrant to this day with many adherents in many disciplines.

Most religious traditions and movements have majorities of women, but most are led by men and are based on deeply embedded patriarchal assumptions. That underlying reality is played out in multiple different Christian traditions and shapes the subsequent contests for power, representation, and influence. This chapter is animated by a primary question from which other questions naturally flow: What are the characteristics of the religious networks constructed by women and to what extent do they function differently from those built largely by men? In attempting to answer that question, I identify five different kinds of networks representing different varieties of female leadership and participation. It is important to state that this typology should not be read as either an ascension or declension narrative about women’s agency and the role of patriarchy in shaping that agency.

In this chapter, I investigate the aura of criminality that lingers around capitalism in feminist discourses of the long 1970s. Navigating landmark works of feminist economics, I establish how polemical publications by Gayle Rubin, Silvia Federici, and Selma James and Mariarosa Dalla Costa instrumentalize the logics and rhetorics of theft in order to evoke the exploitation of women in capitalism, and I examine how these logics and rhetorics are likewise deployed to structure specific figurations of stealing in literary works by Marilyn French, Alix Kates Shulman, Marge Piercy, Rita Mae Brown, and Audre Lorde. My focus here falls primarily on those protagonists who remain trapped within the strictures of the realist feminist novel. What strategies do these women develop for resisting or mitigating the institutionalized terms of their financial oppression? Through an analysis of the ways in which stealing operates within a wider matrix of crimes against the kindred systems of capitalism and patriarchy, I investigate how theft figures in feminist writing as a viable compensatory opportunity for women. Regardless of its criminality, to what extent does the feminist novel present the case that stealing – in its various guises – is sometimes the only pragmatic response to the immediate problem of women’s oppression?

By the mid-twentieth century, for those on the political Left, America had spawned a purely competitive, morally and spiritually debased, money-oriented culture. Inspiring a diverse range of responses, this American culture of money was a central ideological target of 1960s-era activism, alongside interrelated concerns with industrialization, the nuclear threat, the Vietnam War and American interventionism abroad, racism, and environmental degradation. Some counterculture groups adopted explicitly anti-money doctrines and actively sought to build functioning communities outside of the money economy; for others, poverty was associated with spiritual plenitude, or was a secondary symptom of a desire to be free of all responsibilities and entanglements; still others critiqued capitalism’s role in structural oppression. This chapter explores the diversity of such responses, as illustrated in political and literary works of the period, and registers the extent to which countercultural criticism of the culture of money was not without its compromises, inconsistencies, and (apparent) hypocrisies.

This chapter examines gender and sexuality in the writings of Sean O’Casey, through analysis of three works that demonstrate his preoccupation with the way women’s sexuality intersects with money, class, and sex work. As well as examining The Plough and the Stars (1926) and its reception, the chapter analyses two of his lesser-studied works – the short story ‘The Job’, and the prose poem ‘Gold and Silver Will Not Do’ from Windfalls (1934) – and the chapter highlights certain connections between the short-story writing and Eileen O’Casey’s personal experiences.

Novels by AfroDominican writers like Loida Maritza Pérez and Nelly Rosario center the embodied archive as an epistemological site. As Afro-Caribbean feminist philosopher Jacqui Alexander reminds us, “So much of how we remember is embodied: the scent of home: of fresh-baked bread; of newly grated coconut stewed with spice (we never called it cinnamon), nutmeg, and bay leaf from the tree.... Violence can also become embodied, that violation of sex and spirit.” To echo Alexander, we can understand our bodies as archives where the records of multiple translocations, transformations, and the violence done to us are kept. The chapter proposes that in this same way, we can understand an AfroLatina embodied archive at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, class, and transnational migration as a site of knowledge production. The chapter argues that bodies and archival memory are linked to form an embodied archive where memories are kept. The body becomes the place in which experiences are recorded and engrained. This knowledge is often passed on to future generations and creates new AfroLatina feminist knowledges of being, belonging, and self-knowing.

The conclusion considers theoretical and practical changes needed to begin to extricate liberalism and liberal democracies from their patriarchal roots, strengthen the protection of women’s rights in liberal democracies, and bolster the ability of liberal democracies to fight against right-wing religio-populism. The changes suggested are in the tradition of the radical internal critique of liberalism offered by Susan Okin, whose radical liberal, or humanist, feminism aimed to provide theoretical underpinnings for a liberalism that will focus on both the private and the public spheres, recognize the gendered power differentials, oppression, and prejudices maintained and supported by patriarchal liberalism, and take active steps to change them. Most of the discussion will refer to the theoretical and practical changes needed to protect women’s rights in liberal democracies from the adverse effects of patriarchal religion, including its nationalist and populist iterations. The last part will discuss the connection between the suggested changes and the urgently needed overall struggle of liberal democracies against right-wing populism.

This chapter examines the theoretical roots of discrimination against women in liberal states. It starts with a general discussion of feminism and liberalism and the tensions between their main variants, with an emphasis on the public–private distinction. It then introduces a detailed feminist critique of political liberalism, pointing to its flaws, and in particular to the distinction between the public and the private and between the political and nonpolitical on which Rawls’ theory is based. The chapter claims that these flaws have allowed patriarchal religions and other illiberal ideologies to strengthen their power in liberal societies and deepen the oppression of women. This chapter also introduces the role of capitalism in the oppression of Women in western liberal states, its connection to patriarchal religion, and its dependence on the public–private distinction and its corollary distinction between love and justice. The chapter closes with a discussion of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, compares it to the Race Convention, and claims that despite its shortcomings, it is a better model for protecting women’s rights than the liberal model.

Calls to restrict women’s rights are a most effective rallying cry for right-wing populists and religious conservatives in their surprisingly successful attack on the foundations of liberal democracy. Populist leaders across the world use the aggrandizement of patriarchy and the opposition to women’s rights as the engine of a right-wing populist revolution. The success of the populist attack on women’s rights in liberal societies, together with decisions such as the American Dobbs decision, has confirmed feminist warnings regarding the flawed protection of women’s rights in liberal societies, which have hitherto been rejected by most liberals as unfounded and alarmist. The book claims that to understand the success of the religio-populist attack on women’s rights in liberal democracies, and its centrality to the success of right-wing populism, it is necessary to acknowledge and understand the patriarchal nature of liberalism and liberal societies. The introduction defines patriarchy and explains its connections to liberalism, religion, and populism, and the contemporary threat it poses to both women’s rights and liberal democracy. It then sets out the outline of the book.

Summarising how economists have historically studied families from the nineteenth century to the present, we recall that economists developed methodologies in response to how they imagined and constituted the problem of family poverty in different periods. In contemporary times, concerns for poverty-alleviation have increasingly featured concerns for justice across gender, race, and ethnicity. We also recall how family economists prioritised some social and political problems over others, leaving significant injustices uncontested. These findings encourage reflection on how we define the social problems of families today. Describing the small body of economics on the relation between family behaviour and a sustainable biosphere, the book closes with a provocation. If each period of family economics has relied on an act of imagination to formulate the family-relevant social problems worthy of consideration, how might we constitute the problem of family poverty today, consistent with justice across gender, race, and ethnicity, while also tackling the very urgent need for a biosphere capable of supporting human life? How might we imagine living well and dying well today, on a damaged planet undergoing ecosystem collapse? And how might economists assist families to tackle this problem, today?

Utilizing the Foucauldian concept of power, this chapter shows how the power of religion and culture has created and perpetuated the hegemony of patriarchy throughout the centuries, including in liberal states. It claims that liberal theory lacks an adequate theory of power and neglects the dynamics of power and control in the private sphere. Liberalism disregards the institutions, practices, and norms of religion and culture, as a socially and politically significant site of power. This severely curtails the ability of liberal states to ensure that the exercise of power and authority over the individual is justified and that the rights of the individual are safeguarded. After a general theoretical and historical discussion, the chapter discusses the history of the relationship between religion and the state in the USA and the critique of early American feminists on the power of patriarchal religion, and claims that despite the constitutional separation between religion and state in the USA, patriarchal religion continues to influence the law directly and indirectly and constitutes a significant force preserving the hegemony of patriarchy, as the 2022 Dobbs decision demonstrates.

This chapter argues that the flaws in liberal theory and practice that religious conservatives and right-wing populists use to attack women’s rights are also used to undermine liberal democracy. It claims that due to the embeddedness of patriarchy in liberal theory and practice, liberals have chosen to disregard the feminist critique of the liberal public–private distinction and of the refusal to intervene in the nonpolitical sphere. As a result, prejudices that liberals have allowed to flourish in the private sphere serve as the basis for a successful right-wing religio-populist attack on the liberal state itself. Using the example of the USA, the chapter discusses the capture of the American Supreme Court by the populist and religiously conservative Republican Party led by President Trump. It analyzes two major abortion decisions issued by the captured Supreme Court – Whole Women’s Health and Dobbs – and shows how these decisions thoroughly undermine the liberal rights regime, transfer the control over women’s bodies and their rights to Christian religious hands, and are part of a wholesale Christian nationalist attack on American liberal democracy.

This chapter traces social medicine to Shibli Shumayyil, a medical doctor and key figure of the Nahḍa, an intellectual and cultural movement that spanned from the late nineteenth century to the outbreak of the First World War. He envisioned social medicine as a tool for social reform, diagnosing its social ills, and proposing a cure. Shumayyil and his successors rejected the colonial justification of social medicine, instead promoting social medicine as a means to free people from all kinds of oppression, ignorance, and injustice. Throughout the twentieth century until today, as poverty, authoritarianism, and social conflicts escalated in the Arab world, doctors increasingly became advocates for the marginalized, the poor, and the oppressed. The chapter examines the work of several revolutionary doctors in Tunisia, Sudan, and Egypt, who used their practice as a form of protest, praxis, and critique. Not only did these doctors embody the meaning that Guérin originally gave to social medicine but they also incorporated Shumayyil’s idea of medicine as a form of progressive clinical sociology.

This chapter compares two very different authors separated by almost four centuries on the problem of women’s social position. Mary Astell, one of the earliest English feminists, examined these questions in 1694 in A Serious Proposal to the Ladies. She believed that women were not living up to their intellectual potential and were relegated to the realm of trivia and frivolity by the social norms of the period. In 2019, the American Bar Association published a report entitled Walking Out the Door: The Facts, Figures, and Future of Experienced Women Lawyers in Private Practice. Focusing on America’s 350 largest law firms, the report found that women with more than fifteen years of experience are leaving law firms in droves. Like Astell, the report attributed this failure to thrive to male-created cultural norms. Although the two authors agree that women should be able to thrive in a man’s world but aren’t doing so, they rhetorically engage the problem very differently.