This chapter defines Black feminist poetics as being a "miracle" rather than a "luxury" in that poetic articulation becomes a way to confront how ideas of US citizenship and personhood are predicated on positing Black women as a necessary "rapeable other." It identifes key moments of collaboration and key poetic premises – non-hierarchy, survival, poetry as essential to self-concept and imagining alternative social relations – by which Black women poets have articulated critical alternatives to social norms in order to capture the beauty of their own being.

Women’s mental health has been shaped by patriarchal societal biases in science, medicine and society. Early medical texts attributed women’s distress to their reproductive system or sexual deprivation. In the Middle Ages, mental illness was often misinterpreted as witchcraft, reinforcing harmful beliefs about female autonomy, and in the nineteenth century, male-dominated medical science pathologised women’s independence with diagnoses such as ‘moral insanity’ to justify institutionalising women who defied social norms. Twentieth-century feminism underpinned advances in medicine and social reform, shaping health policy and psychiatric practice, although controversies around research into hormone replacement therapy (HRT) disrupted momentum. Despite progress, persistent gender bias in research and access to mental health care persists, particularly for marginalised groups, although initiatives like the Women’s Health Strategy offer hope for a more equitable future.

Marleen Gorris’s feminist classic A Question of Silence (1982) features what may be one of the most memorable court scenes ever filmed: an extended scene of wild laughter that grows and grows to eventually engulf all the women in the courtroom. The scene offers an occasion to think through modes and gestures of feminist refusal. There are other scenes: a fifteenth-century image depicting Calefurnia as it pops up in Julie Stone Peters’ Law as Performance; the bacchants in ecstasy tearing apart the son/king as figured in Bonnie Honig’s reading of Euripides’ play in A Feminist Theory of Refusal; Nancy Spero’s Sheela na gigs… Juxtaposing these and yet other scenes, this chapter returns to critical legal themes of rupture and minor jurisprudence in an attempt to further populate the feminist heterotopia that is the elsewhere of law’s mediation.

While Elizabeth Maconchy was not keen on the term ‘woman composer’ her career was nonetheless affected by the fact of her gender. Against a backdrop of long-standing, widespread and seemingly intractable sexism, Maconchy found support and validation from other women composers, notably Grace Williams. This chapter explores the phenomenon of such ‘Supportive Sisterhoods’ over generations and across many different milieus, both artistic and otherwise, from the Amazons to the wives and sisters of the Lake Poets, to the CIA, to the group of women who formed the Macnaghten–Lemare concert series in the 1930s. We find that women have consistently and instinctively banded together to not only form creative partnerships but to stand against the extraordinarily persistent, if ill-founded, view that creativity is something best left to men.

Juana Manso (1819–1875) has been described as “the first woman to be appointed to an official government position and arguably the most radical feminist in nineteenth century Argentina.” Born in Argentina, she left the country with her family in 1840, after her father was exiled by the Rosas regime. When she returned to Buenos Aires in 1853, she was already an experienced educator, author, and editor. In 1859, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, then head of the Elementary Schools Department, appointed her as director of the Escuela de Ambos Sexos, the first co-educational school in Buenos Aires, and editor of the educational journal Anales de la Educación Común. As Argentine president, Sarmiento appointed her to the Board of Public Instruction in 1871. Manso not only advocated for women’s education but also for popular education more widely – her selected passages in our volume, originally published in the Album de Señoritas, serve to illustrate her most passionate interests in these causes.

In the wake of the October 2023 escalation of the Israel–Palestine conflict, NYC-based graffiti bomber Miss17 visualized her solidarity with the Palestinian people by filling her tag name with the colors of the Palestinian flag. In 2024, the largest all-woman graffiti crew in the United States – Few & Far – completed a mural with a feminist take on the “Forbidden Fruit” idea, which gave the grrlz the space to publicly claim their opposition to the genocide of the Palestinian people by painting watermelons – a symbol of Palestinian resistance similar in effect and meaning to the flag. In this chapter, visual arts scholar Dr. Pabón-Colón examines these works, the sociopolitical context in which they were made, and their reception on social media to argue that by performing their feminism in their graffiti these grrlz rejected US imperialism in favor of modeling transnational feminist solidarity.

This chapter characterises the beginning of the 1810s as a transitional moment for both early feminist thought and cultural conceptions of intellectual disability. Through a sustained reading of Lucy Aikin’s critically underexamined Epistles on Women (1810), the chapter argues that the long, combative poem articulates an intersectional appeal to feminine-coded weakness, idiocy, and disability. The opening question of the poem, ‘when was ever weakness in the right?’, pits a utopian matriarchal future against the overwhelming misogyny and brutality of the masculinist past. Aikin’s revisionist history begins in Eden with Eve’s assiduous care for the ‘moping idiot’ Adam and ends in the modern era with the new ideal of feminine friendship supplanting compulsory ideologies of heteropatriarchal marriage. Throughout, Aikin creatively develops a compelling feminist aesthetics and ethics grounded in the complex trope of idiocy and neurodiversity.

At first glance, Thomism and feminism seem like unlikely bedfellows. In spite of the apparent incongruity, I argue that a fruitful dialogue can exist between Aquinas and feminism, particularly regarding the relationship between the body and reason. To this end, I make three points. First, I argue that Aquinas’s anthropology provides a fertile ground for a discussion of women’s nature and flourishing. Second, I argue that there is surprising degree of similarity between the attitude of Thomas toward the female body and the attitude of certain contemporary feminists, such as Simone de Beauvoir and Shulamith Firestone. All three of these authors recognized that women are more affected by their bodies than men are, and all three saw this as a source of inequality between men and women. Third, I argue that, while Aquinas is wrong to conclude that women are less rational than men, it may nonetheless be true that women experience more frequent interruptions to their ability to exercise fully their highest powers because they experience more pain and fatigue related to their biology. Finally, I consider how the nature of the female body may dispose women to exercising their reason slightly differently than men do.

Miras Boronat addresses the work of progressive-era feminists who have been incorporated into the history of pragmatism and are now regarded as feminist pragmatists. She argues that some of those figures already had the resources to deal in important ways with two issues still relevant today: the distinction between sex and gender, and intersectionality. Decades before de Beauvoir or Stoller addressed the sex/gender distinction, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Jessie Taftwas were applying it to the so-called woman question. Gilman’s critique of androcentrism relied on a distinction between the biological and the cultural, while Taft approached the matter from the point of view of social behaviorism and understood gender in terms of social roles and expectations. On the subject of intersectionality, Miras Boronat describes the work of Anna Julia Cooper, who wrote about the “double invisibility” of Black women at the beginning of the progressive era, and she adresses recent work inspired by Cooper that is aimed at developing an analytical approach to intersectionality.

Florence Price’s music expands the conversation around what musical analysis means for composers on the canonical fringes who draw upon influences outside a Western art music framework. This chapter recognizes the limitations of conventional Western music analysis in studies of Price’s music and suggests other modes of analytic inquiry that actively engage with interdisciplinary and intersectional resources. This chapter asks: What would it mean to hear and analyze Florence Price’s music intersectionally? What follows are case studies around select art songs that exemplify modes of assessing her compositions with serious analytical nuance, as well as hearing music through and with the composer. In addition to exploring greater possibilities for the analysis of Price’s music, this chapter confronts the detrimental impact of the exceptionalist narrative in discussions of her compositional ideas, stylistic sources, and career trajectory.

Bowen was not a committed feminist, but she did have a proximity to feminist thinkers and a belief in women’s civic responsibility. She insists in her essay, ‘Woman’s Place in the Affairs of Man’, ‘I am not, and never shall be, a feminist.’ A less strident formulation in Bowen’s first novel seems to better capture the ambiguous but affectionate character of Bowen’s attitude towards women throughout her oeuvre: ‘I am not a Feminist’, says Mrs Kerr in The Hotel, ‘but I do like being a woman’. Bowen certainly liked being and being with women, both in her life and in her writing. She was an acute social, sometimes sociological, observer of women and of their relationships to one another, sometimes in ways that echo and anticipate the insights of feminist thinkers. This chapter focuses Bowen’s observations about women in her essays before moving on to her penultimate novel, The Little Girls.

This chapter unpacks the complex and changing relationship between gender and education. In order to accomplish this, it links each of the most common myths in the area with one of the three waves of feminism that characterised the twentieth century. As with the arguments surrounding social class, it will ultimately be suggested that explanations relying upon a master discourse – not ‘the economy’ again, but rather patriarchy, a unified system of male domination – are outdated. Similarly, it is argued that the view of gender as a binary of man/woman based on anatomy at birth has had its day.

This chapter introduces the breadth of Mary Wollstonecraft’s works, and explains why the book will focus on her feminist thought. It begins with a general introduction to her life and work, then explores the extent to which she is a philosopher of human rights, and how, in turns, it is correct to describe her as a feminist philosopher despite the anachronism involved. The chapter concludes with a short description of the chapters to follow.