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.

Chapter 4 studies French, Dutch, and German periodicals which engaged closely with the question of women’s rights from a range of ideological perspectives. Under the influence of key texts like Uncle Tom’s Cabin and John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women, memories of antislavery became a diverse resource from which women’s rights advocates reprinted and retold selectively, tracing and reinforcing particular trends in remembrance which were salient to different ideological outlooks on the Woman Question. The chapter seeks to capture the complexity of the transnational conversation and the memory work performed and identifies five commonplaces in the recall of antislavery. These clusters of intensified remembrance and debate appear across national contexts and the chapter explores how the memory work performed in these periodicals presented a usable past for the transnational movement for women’s rights. The chapter finally reflects on what parts of the history of antislavery these commonplaces left out, which is as important as tracing the narratives that were promoted.

This chapter claims that in the new millennium, religious conservatives succeed in their struggles to control women’s bodies and to turn their private prejudices into public policy through the misappropriation of human rights and by gaining unwarranted religious exemptions. By allegedly demanding the protection of their own rights to religious liberty, conscientious objection, equality, and multicultural accommodations, religious conservatives are reversing the progress in women’s rights and using liberal rights and concepts as a weapon against women. The chapter argues that, contrary to popular belief, the separation between religion and the state cannot protect women’s rights against the religious conservative attack. It compares the religious conservative attack on women’s rights in the USA, where religion is separated from the state, to the religious conservative attack on women’s rights in Israel, where there is no separation between religion and the state, and shows that despite the very different religion–state relations, the religious conservative attack in the USA and Israel is similar in both method and success.

This chapter argues against the common but oversimplified claim that the secularization of the world and the legal separation between religion and the state in liberal states have eliminated the negative effects patriarchal religion can have on women’s rights. The chapter suggests that there are at least five facets of the relationship between religion and the state in contemporary liberal democracies that are crucial to a proper understanding of the ways in which religion–state relations affect women’s rights: (1) institutional differentiation between religion and the state; (2) strong protection of religious liberty; (3) the involvement of religion in politics; (4) the extent of religious involvement in education and social services; and (5) the levels of religious belief of individuals in society. It analyzes each of these facets and shows how their treatment in liberal states allows patriarchal religion to perpetuate and entrench women’s inequality.

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.

Besides discussing previous scholarship on gender and the rhetoric of slavery, the introduction provides a historical overview and historiography of the nineteenth-century international women’s movement, particularly illuminating interpersonal and cultural connections with organised antislavery. The introduction also outlines an understanding of the woman–slave analogy as part of the international women’s movement’s memory culture. It sets up a common-sense conceptual framework that guides the rest of the book, introducing the terms usable past and the (collective) memory work involved in creating it, as well as the umbrella term memories of antislavery, narratives which were circulated transnationally both during the campaign to end slavery and afterwards.

The final chapter considers the legacy of memories of antislavery in first-wave feminism. It looks at the impact of these memories on the rhetoric of ‘sisterhood’ and the role these memories played in what has come to be called ‘imperial feminism’. Finally, it reflects on how feminism affected the historical transmission of the cultural memory of slavery and abolitionism, which is still a potent model of reform today.

This chapter argues that the resurgence of strong religion has forced liberal states to find new answers to its effects on women’s rights. It discusses two examples. The first is recognition of the jurisdiction of private Muslim Sharia Tribunals to decide Muslim divorces and family disputes, and the second is intervention in Jewish divorce cases in which Jewish religious women find themselves anchored to their marriages due to their husbands’ refusal to grant them a religious divorce. The chapter offers a novel classification of religion–state relations, which sheds new light on the different solutions offered to such dilemmas and their compatibility with women’s rights and with religious freedom. It employs a comparative perspective on religion–state relations to distinguish between three approaches toward religion – nationalization, authorization, and privatization. It assesses the advantages and disadvantages of these approaches and claims that, contrary to liberal inclinations, measured state intervention that enables the liberal state to acknowledge the importance of religious belief in people’s lives, while at the same time protecting the rights of all its citizens, is required.

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 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.

Since its first codification in the early twentieth century, Iranian family law has followed the Shiʿi (Jaʿfarī) school of jurisprudence. In other parts of the Shiʿi world, the question of codifying Shiʿi family law has emerged more recently. This chapter argues that codification enhances the formal rule of law. In the past, family law codification was considered to conflict with a fundamental element of Shiʿi legal thought and religious practice, namely ijtihād, independent legal reasoning by qualified scholars, which makes for a living law. Based on a comparative analysis of Iranian family law and recent Shiʿi (draft) laws put forward in Afghanistan, Bahrain, and Iraq, this chapter discusses where modern Shiʿi family law is located between the “opposite” poles of the formal rule of law (where law is general, prospective, clear, and certain) and ijtihād. The findings indicate that, today, the two are not viewed as contradicting each other. Yet, while Iranian family law only serves as a limited model for other parts of the Shiʿi world, the comparison shows that Iran subjects Shiʿi family law to the formal rule of law more comprehensively than is the case in the other three analyzed countries.

US first ladies have exercised a complicated kind of activism when it comes to women’s rights. Some have acted as vocal advocates to insist that women’s equality should be a national priority. Others have used their platform more quietly to intervene on behalf of women’s rights. Still others have held and promoted views that have contradicted, undermined, or altogether avoided efforts to advance women’s rights. This chapter traces how US first ladies have addressed and influenced the prevailing women’s rights issues of their day, with a focus on two national campaigns: a federal amendment for women’s suffrage and a federal amendment for equal rights. By engaging or avoiding the debates surrounding women’s suffrage and the ERA, these women stretched the political and rhetorical boundaries of their platform and shaped public understanding about the ongoing struggle for women’s equality in the United States.

The Introduction defines the book’s major concepts, such as belonging with, elucidates its major keywords – movement, listening, radiance, resuscitating, restoring, and recycling, and explains its foundational ideas and methodology. These intertwine feminist, historical, ecological, and subject–object analyses to underpin how diminishing women and objects is a related activity. Second, it establishes how texts heal injurious mergings between women and matter and jettison the supposed “female virtues” – dissimulation and passivity – in order to embrace actual ethical beliefs and independence, reconnect women’s corporeality, reason, spirit, sexuality, and virtue, rendering these cooperating, rather than sparring, bodies. Third, it argues that these materialist ethics reveal how consumption can be constructive, a finding that disputes mainstream concerns that women were merely thoughtless consumers. Finally, it illuminates how the political and personal need to incarnate ideals by rendering concrete such abstractions as the “rights of man” entwines with gender debates and subject–object explorations during the revolutionary years.

Chapter 5 argues that in Burney’s Evelina and The Wanderer hats become a kinesthetic means for women’s metamorphosis and for asserting rights laws do not ensure when characters employ them to hide their faces and thereby establish some security from aggressive male intrusion and threatening social expectations, a use which reveals consumption’s positive aspects by linking fashion and necessity. This chapter explores how, in both novels, hats positively facilitate nonrecognition by shrouding or changing the face, allowing women to assert the right to privacy: the liberty they experience allows for self-recognition. Smith’s Desmond, in contrast, offers instances in which characters fail to recognize and to belong with the human and nonhuman, while their very lapse inspires other characters’ (and readers’) recognition of how vital that communion is, especially regarding ecological preservation. One of this chapter’s largest concerns addresses the relationship between characters’ ability to pay attention to things and their potential capacity to secure justice for themselves.

This chapter launches the contemporary section of the book. The overarching argument is that despite the binaries leveraged by leaders and analysts alike, political contestation in the twenty-first century, as in the nineteenth and twentieth, is not reducible to an “Islamist vs. secularist” cleavage. Instead, contestation and key outcomes are driven by shifting coalitions for and against pluralism, notably, an Islamo-liberal/secular liberal coalition that marked the sixth major, pluralizing alignment since the Tanzimat reforms. It would transform state and society, even though the coalition itself proved short-lived as democratization stalled against a backdrop of debates over Islamophobia, the headscarf, minority rights, freedom of expression, media freedoms, and sweeping show trials.