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.

In the Doctrine of Right, Kant describes domestic right as “the right to a person akin to the right to a thing.” The Feyerabend lectures lack this framework, but the same set of marriage, parent-child, and master-servant relationships are united under the framework of “domestic societies.” This chapter explores domestic right in Feyerabend, mapping Kant’s careful resistance to conceptualizing these relationships in terms of property right in light of debates about marriage, domestic right, labor, and slavery unfolding in the 1780s. This resistance is informed by a paradox at the heart of Kant’s thinking about domestic right, namely, his claim that marriage and servitude are rightful while sex work and slavery are not. This puzzle arises because Kant follows Achenwall in locating slavery in domestic right, which leads to his innovative framework of domestic right as “the right to a person akin to the right to a thing.” The deep entanglement of Kant’s thinking about sex, and about service and slave labor, should lead us to think about these problems together, and to challenge the silos in Kant scholarship that treat his thinking about gender and sex distinctly from slavery and race.

During the 1930s and early 1940s, numerous groups in Uruguay coalesced to oppose fascism. This chapter examines the antifascist efforts organized by ethnic societies, labor unions, women’s groups, Afro-Uruguayans, students, intellectuals, and artists, among others. The emergent antifascist movements in Uruguay served as nodes in the broader transnational struggle for democracy and against totalitarianism. While some Uruguayans traveled to Spain to directly take part in the Spanish Civil War, others sought to marshal support at home to combat the influence of European fascism. The ideological struggles in Europe were also pressing at home, as President Gabriel Terra initiated a dictatorship in the 1930s that revealed his supporters’ fascist leanings. Likewise, an engrained sense of national exceptionalism tied to Uruguay’s decades-long democratic tradition, augmented the need to resist Terra’s dictatorship (1933–38) and later to repudiate any remnants of its legacy.

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.

This chapter analyses domestic practices associated with childbirth. It considers how urban households approached and framed childbirth as an event of religious significance, by examining prayers that were said before, during, and after the event of childbirth, as well as ritual attempts to demarcate the setting of birth or the lying-in chamber from the rest of the home. Through an examination of the ecclesiastical licensing of London midwives, it explores post-Reformation attempts to regulate the female domestic event of childbirth, amid fears that it could be associated with ‘Popish’ or superstitious practices, and concerns that Catholic midwives, if operating undetected, would attempt to perform clandestine Catholic baptism. By considering personal writing and Quaker and Jewish congregational birth records, it examines the faith of midwives and invited gossips, situating the lying-in room within the broader parish or religious community, and showing how those invited into the home could be representatives of the congregation beyond its walls. It shows that such occasions emphasisied women’s relative authority both within and outside their own households.

The conclusion operates around four questions. First, the appropriate extent and limitations of networks and who should set the boundaries. Self-evidently, the less well-known networks created by the most marginalized, particularly lower-class women of color and Indigenous people at the outer edges of empires and religious traditions, are still the most under-researched and the least understood. Second, how to critically evaluate the relationship between Christianity and empire in the early modern and modern world. Christian expansion and the rise of the European empires are inextricably linked; they are not always in synchronicity regarding objectives or consequences. Third, how did the various revolutions in communications, from the print to the digital revolutions, shape the content of nuclei, the nature and location of nodes that became most important, and the ways networks expanded? Finally, how helpful is it to think of religious traditions capable of transnational mobility in terms of a religious nucleus with a particular DNA core? What inner cores of ideas and practices enabled these disparate religious traditions to grow and thrive thousands of miles from their origins?

As the providers of care work, women experienced the painful losses of male bodies during the Civil War acutely. This chapter explores the way Elizabeth Stuart Phelps used her works—particularly her successful sentimental novel, The Gates Ajar (1868)—to imagine faith as a way to manage this pain. Yet, Phelps’s popularity stemmed from the way her notion of faith also complicated the orthodox Calvinist belief in a disembodied spirit: an ontology premised on the soul’s difference from, and superiority to, the body. By developing what Phelps calls “spiritual materialism,” she puts the lived experience of embodiment at the very center of belief, not drifting or working between mind-centered and body-centered paradigms, as we have seen, but operating beyond them both at the level of faith. Precisely the way this re-embodied faith moves beyond mind-centered and body-centered ontologies allows Phelps’s sentimental novel itself to move beyond the restrictive gender politics of sentimentalism, “minding the body” to tell a less repressive story of domesticity and reveal a more capacious understanding of female desire.

Much of the existing analysis of women in O’Casey’s plays concentrates on the women in his earlier work; this chapter examines the representation of younger women in O’Casey’s later plays, revealing how O’Casey presented a strongly contemporary feminist outlook which sought to re-position his audience’s understanding of female sensibility. The chapter analyses the way in which, by questioning theatrical form and critiquing patriarchal control of women, O’Casey enabled experimentalism in dramatic form to go hand in hand with a willingness to evolve and develop a progressive expression of female sexuality.

The impact of trade agreements is not gender neutral, as women and men play different roles and enjoy different opportunities in society, markets and the economy. In order to minimize the unintended discriminatory impact of these agreements on women, several countries have developed policy instruments with gender-related commitments. However, the nature and scope of these commitments vary considerably from one region to another. Moreover, while some countries have been at the forefront of including these provisions in their trade agreements, many others have lagged behind and have yet to take the first step in this direction. This chapter examines these dynamics. The first part of the chapter looks at the differences in gender-related provisions in different regions, using practical examples to illustrate differences and overlaps within these regions. The second part of the chapter zooms in on one of these regions, South America, as it has emerged as a frontrunner in drafting trade agreements with various types of gender commitments. This section offers reflections on the ways in which countries in South America have drafted gender provisions, the roles of women that these provisions have focused on, and the mainstreaming strategies that are unique to this region (such as the inclusion of stand-alone chapters and the creation of dedicated implementation mechanisms).

The Introduction presents the central ideas of the book. The major theme is acculturation. Dominant forms of ethnohistory discuss Native peoples of the Americas and the ways they responded to Spanish political domination. This book reverses the approach by analyzing how non-Native women adapted to their predominantly Native Mesoamerican cultural environment. Witchcraft and sorcery and their suppression by inquisitions and ecclesiastical courts represent the particular entry point for understanding these processes of acculturation. Non-Native women in this book were Spanish, Canarian, North African, Basque, and Senegambian. They adopted Mesoamerican rituals, such as corn hurling (tlapohualiztli), Nahua healing and midwifery, and peyote consumption, and spoke Nahuatl in everyday lives. Nahuatl loanwords in Spanish, such as metate, tianguis, and patle, symbolize the processes of acculturation. This book studies the earliest forms of non-Native women adapting Mesoamerican sorcery, magic, and healing, limited to the period 1521–71.

Jews attempted mass escapes and uprisings in many dozens of ghettos and camps during the Holocaust. This chapter discusses armed resistance in ghettos and camps, looking both at the better-known instances such as the Warsaw ghetto uprising or the Sonderkommando revolt at Auschwitz–Birkenau and also at other cases of armed resistance in ghettos such as Białystok, as well as Sobibór and Treblinka death camps, seeking to identify patterns and connections between these instances.