Many women come to Britain and France because they risk gender-related persecution such as forced marriage, ‘honour’ crimes or female genital mutilation. However, for most of these women, arrival in Britain or France marks the start of a new phase of problems and troubled circumstances, including public hostility and xenophobic attitudes towards asylum seekers and refugees. This book represents the first full-length study to focus not only on refugee migrant women as users of state and voluntary sector services in France and Britain, but also on their involvement in politics, civic action, and political activism and as agents of change. First, it contributes to the literature on the reception and settlement of refugee women in destination societies in the West. It examines asylum-seeking and refugee women's interactions within and with processes and structures related to asylum and immigration (including detention) and those to do with housing, health, education and training and employment. The book also extends the traditionally accepted boundaries of what constitutes citizenship and political participation through gendered analyses of refugees' experiences and lives.

This chapter considers the unending work of democracy in producing ‘subjects’. It outlines how the crisis facing democracy has been misdiagnosed in various strands of recent liberal thought as one about the accommodation of diverse Others and how a more precise diagnosis may be found by examining the work of democracy rather than theorizing its ideal version. This chapter proposes that the work of democracy in constituting subjects can be radicalized by taking accounts of meaning-making by opening up and being responsive to the possibility of making new and different kinds of subjects.

This chapter explores the politics of the anti-Market issue as it related to the Labour and Conservative parties, national identity and the shape of the domestic debate. It comments on Hugh Gaitskell's ‘thousand years of history’ speech and discusses Labour's stance as it evolved from a ‘wait and see’ position, determined by fears that the Common Market issue would divide the party. This chapter shows that the anti-Market advances forced the Government into a publicity campaign in support of entry, one that directed most of its energies towards countering the sceptical claims.

This chapter draws on the memories of Soviet citizens themselves, presenting the results of a series of in-depth interviews with people who, between them, lived through the full range of Soviet housing possibilities. Interviews were carried out in Moscow and St. Petersburg between March 2002 and May 2006, with a total of sixteen people. All but one of the respondents had experience of communal living. The neighbours were the most important and, usually, the most difficult aspect of life in the communal apartment. Violence was sometimes a problem in communal apartments. It is suggested that women who were unable to find husbands in the post-war decades might live their entire adult lives in hostel accommodation. The move to the single-family apartment made child care a more pressing issue. The importance of housing, and the ways in which the housing shortage distorted people's intimate lives are shown.

This chapter analyses the ongoing discourse in which Hans Mommsen's argument must be understood, and presents the narrative of Holocaust historiography up to the end of the 1980s. In terms of the 'Final Solution' Mommsen saw the vacillation in Hitler's willingness to tolerate a system in which Jews continued to be treated differently. In emphasising the 'Final Solution' as a process, Martin Broszat consciously engaged not only David Irving but also Lucy Dawidowicz's argument that its origins could be sought in Hitler's 'preformed psychological motive of destruction'. Zygmunt Bauman's Modernity and the Holocaust reflected a general tendency, born of functionalism, that the Holocaust could be seen as the product of larger, more profound historical forces. While Bauman is a sociologist the argument he proposed was forged in the wake of both functionalist historiography and acted as a further critique of intentionalism.

This chapter examines the retreat from ‘new byt’, charting the ideological transition from the promotion of communal living to the revival of the individual family and, in theory, the individual family home. The commitment to communal living and communal housing came to an end, and the individual family apartment was now proclaimed the ideal form of housing. Rabotnitsa was less willing than Ogonek both to abandon the principle of communal living and to go along with the fantasy that ordinary families could really acquire single-family apartments. Rabotnitsa also provided a number of examples of successful ‘socialist initiatives’. Anti-egalitarianism justified huge differentials in housing provision. Many of the short stories in Rabotnitsa and Ogonek present family life as subordinate to the demands of industry and making it clear that good citizens should be willing to neglect or even discard it if it interfered with work.

‘The protection of our women’ became a prominent mantra of white politics in South Africa and the South in the postbellum period. Because economic, cultural and social relations in both racial orders were inseverably bound up with gender relations, significant changes in race relations simultaneously inflamed deep-seated anxieties concerning the security and status of white women. At the centre of these anxieties resided the black male as a sexual predator. Despite their different histories – one a recent slave society, the other a still-precarious settler colonial society – this mutual sexual stereotyping expressed the three-fold thrust of white male domination: to gain control over black males, retain access to black women and inoculate all white women at all times from the black-male-as-rapist. Focusing on the violence that rape myths inspired, this chapter shows that racial violence in South Africa and the South were conditioned by contrasting patterns of state formation in the aftermath of debilitating wars. It is organized into three sections dealing with the impact of rape scares on state formation. Each section demonstrates that whites in South Africa and the American South, although haunted by similar sexual fears, drew on different traditions and took different paths when the moment to act arrived.