Qasim Amin (1863-1908), an Egyptian lawyer, is best known for his advocacy of women's emancipation in Egypt, through a number of works including The Liberation of Women and The New Woman. In the first of these important books in 1899, he started from the premise that the liberation of women was an essential prerequisite for the liberation of Egyptian society from foreign domination, and used arguments based on Islam to call for an improvement in the status of women. In doing so, he promoted the debate on women in Egypt from a side issue to a major national concern, but he also subjected himself to severe criticism from the khedival palace, as well as from religious leaders, journalists, and writers. In response he wrote The New Woman, published in 1900, in which he defended his position and took some of his ideas further. In The New Woman, Amin relies less on arguments based on the Quran and Sayings of the Prophet, and more openly espouses a Western model of development. Although published a century ago, these two books continue to be a source of controversy and debate in the Arab world and remain key works for understanding the Arab feminist movement. The Liberation of Women and The New Woman appear here in English translation for the first time in one volume.

For over half a century, the countless organizations and initiatives that comprise the Women’s Liberation movement have helped to reshape many aspects of Western societies, from public institutions and cultural production to body politics and subsequent activist movements. This collection represents the first systematic investigation of WLM’s cumulative impacts and achievements within the West. Here, specialists on movements in Europe systematically investigate outcomes in different countries in the light of a reflective social movement theory, comparing them both implicitly and explicitly to developments in other parts of the world.

Introduction origins and reproductions -- Printing feminism -- Locating feminism -- Doing feminism -- Invitations to women's liberation -- Imaging and imagining revolution -- Conclusion feminism redux

In The Liberation of Women, Roberta Hamilton explores two of the key questions that have been systematically raised by the Women's Liberation Movement: why have women occupied a subordinate position in society and how can the variation in the forms and intensity of their exploitation and oppression be explained? Within the Women's Liberation Movement there have been seen to be two different and opposed answers to these questions: a feminist answer and a Marxist one. This new work attempts to examine this debate in specific analytical terms through a study of the changing role of women during a particular historical period - the seventeenth century. In the course of less than one hundred years the rise of capitalism and the acceptance of Protestantism had separately and together radically altered every aspect of a woman's life. Can both a feminist and a Marxist analysis account for these changes? Do such accounts conflict with each other, making a choice inevitable? Do they overlap to such an extent that retaining both would be redundant? Or, finally, are they complementary, can they usefully coexist? The Liberation of Women will be of particular interest to students of history, sociology and Women's Studies and to those who have been involved in the Women's Liberation Movement. In particular, it will prove essential basic reading for an ever-growing number of courses on sexual divisions in society and the role of women.

“A valuable and uncommon perspective . . . The book covers both theory of women’s oppression and the history and politics of women’s movements.” —Dana L. Cloud, author of Reality Bites More than forty years after the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s, women remain without equal rights. If anything, each decade that has passed without a fighting women’s movement has seen a rise in blatant sexism and the further erosion of the gains that were won in the 1960s and 1970s. Yet liberal feminist organizations have followed the Democratic Party even as it has continually tacked rightward since the 1980s. This fully revised edition examines these issues from a Marxist perspective, focusing on the centrality of race and class. It includes chapters on the legacy of Black feminism and other movements of women of color and the importance of the concept of intersectionality. In addition, Women and Socialism: Class, Race, and Capital explores the contributions of socialist feminists and Marxist feminists in further developing a Marxist analysis of women’s oppression amid the stirrings of a new movement today. Praise for Sharon Smith’s Subterranean Fire “Sharon Smith brings that history to life once again, blasting through the myths of the working class that Trump-era narratives cling to in order to connect us once again to the possibility of building broad solidarity.” —Sarah Jaffe, author of Work Won’t Love You Back “A veteran worker-intellectual brilliantly addresses the crisis of the labor movement, skewering those who believe that renewal can come from the top down, and encouraging those who are fighting to rebuild it from the bottom up.” —Mike Davis, author of Planet of Slums

The term women's liberation remains charged and divisive decades after it first entered political and cultural discourse around 1970. In Feeling Women's Liberation, Victoria Hesford mines the archive of that highly contested era to reassess how it has been represented and remembered. Hesford refocuses debates about the movement’s history and influence. Rather than interpreting women's liberation in terms of success or failure, she approaches the movement as a range of rhetorical strategies that were used to persuade and enact a new political constituency and, ultimately, to bring a new world into being. Hesford focuses on rhetoric, tracking the production and deployment of particular phrases and figures in both the mainstream press and movement writings, including the work of Kate Millett. She charts the emergence of the feminist-as-lesbian as a persistent "image-memory" of women's liberation, and she demonstrates how the trope has obscured the complexity of the women's movement and its lasting impact on feminism.

In 1970, ABC, CBS, and NBC--the “Big Three” of the pre-cable television era--discovered the feminist movement. From the famed sit-in at Ladies’ Home Journal to multi-part feature stories on the movement's ideas and leaders, nightly news broadcasts covered feminism more than in any year before or since, bringing women's liberation into American homes. In Watching Women's Liberation, 1970: Feminism's Pivotal Year on the Network News, Bonnie J. Dow uses case studies of key media events to delve into the ways national TV news mediated the emergence of feminism's second wave. First legitimized as a big story by print media, the feminist movement gained broadcast attention as the networks’ eagerness to get in on the action was accompanied by feminists’ efforts to use national media for their own purposes. Dow chronicles the conditions that precipitated feminism's new visibility and analyzes the verbal and visual strategies of broadcast news discourses that tried to make sense of the movement. Groundbreaking and packed with detail, Watching Women's Liberation, 1970 shows how feminism went mainstream--and what it gained and lost on the way.

This collection of essays focuses on the history and politics of the Women's Liberation Movement and Women's Studies, in Australia and around the world.

"There is no true social revolution without the liberation of women," explains the leader of the 1983-87 revolution in Burkina Faso. Workers and peasants in that West African country established a popular revolutionary government and began to combat the hunger, illiteracy, and economic backwardness imposed by imperialist domination.

In this richly detailed firsthand history of the contemporary Women's Liberation Movement (WLM), scholar-activist Carol Giardina argues against the prevalent belief that the movement grew out of frustrations over the male chauvinism experienced by WLM founders active in the Black Freedom Movement and the New Left. Instead, she contends, it was the ideas, resources, and skills that women gained in these movements that were the new and necessary catalysts for forging the WLM in the 1960s. Giardina uses a focused study of the WLM in Florida to tap into the common theory and history shared by a relatively small band of Women's Liberation founders across the country. Drawing on a wealth of interviews, autobiographical essays, organizational records, and published writings, Freedom for Women brings to light information that has been previously ignored in other secondary accounts about the leadership of African American women in the movement. It also explores activists' roots in other movements on the left. Comprehensive, serendipitous, and carefully formulated, Giardina's work is a vivid portrait of the people and events that shaped radical feminism.