Increasingly, however, during the twentieth century, the world did learn about same-gender relations, moving an underground world into greater public consciousness. The willingness of popular culture to deal with sexu­ality, along with the growing influence of psychology and the experience of World War II, hastened the trend. In the 1920s, for example, a Broadway play, […]

The reproductive society began to erode in the late eighteenth century as a result of the decrease in abundant land for children to inherit, the greater social and political instability of the revolutionary era, and, eventually, the social transformations wrought by industrialization. From the late eigh­teenth through the early nineteenth century, a new familial and […]

The cultural variability of same-sex desire and its labeling is evident from the era of European settlement. Before the arrival of Europeans, many Na­tive American cultures incorporated a form of cross-gender identity and, in some cases, a form of same-sex marriage. In many tribes, a man who felt or dreamed that his true identity was […]

The treatment of the history of homosexuality in Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America illustrates the social-constructionist interpretation of sexuality. The book, which I coauthored with John D’Emilio, draws upon a materialist or Marx — ist-feminist framework and interweaves the topic of same-sex relations throughout the narrative to support broader arguments about the […]

I want to acknowledge in closing that while I emphasize momentum, I am not ignoring the unfinished feminist agendas concerning sexuality, the body, and violence, as well as economic and political rights. I recognize, for ex­ample, that as market economies expand globally, they draw women from rural areas into the world of urban sexual commerce […]

Overlapping and shifting strategies have recurred throughout this historical survey. Feminists who once concentrated on liberal demands for women’s access to male jobs now call for men to share the valuable labor of care­giving. Another case of political adaptation can be found in the realm of reproductive rights. In the United States, the language employed […]

The varied forms of feminist activism that I have surveyed in this essay sup­port one of the major themes of my book No Turning Back: that feminism is neither static nor monolithic. Indeed, I have found that much of the his­torical resilience of feminism derives from its malleability. As the follow­ing examples illustrate, feminism is […]

In addition to addressing the particular needs of women, international femi­nisms have insisted that human rights be understood from women’s per­spective. In a sense, this strategic move helps to resolve the Western tension between universal and particularist claims by redefining the universal as the female. In some cases, the impact on world and local politics […]

In addition to revising its labor policies in the face of structural change, feminism has shifted other central agendas after confronting internal chal­lenges. Because the category “woman” is by no means universal but rather masks internal social hierarchies, conflicts among women of diverse racial and cultural backgrounds have repeatedly forced redefinitions of feminist politics. Those […]

The expanding definition of citizenship proved a necessary but not sufficient cause for feminist movements to form. An economic motor reinforced these ideas — the transition from agricultural, family-based economies to com­mercial, and later industrial, market economies based on wage labor. Over time, women joined the ranks of paid workers, but it was not wage […]