The Future That Was: A History of Third World Feminism Against Authoritarianism

How Third World women seized the means of knowledge production to fight against rising authoritarianism and imagine a future freer than our presentBeginning in the 1970s, women of the decolonizing world offered new visions of liberation that centered the ideas and lives of women.Galvanized by International Women’s Year in 1975 and the UN’s Decade of Women, Third World women developed novel ideas of equality and self-determination, building a new internationalism in opposition to neocolonialism and postcolonial authoritarianism.In The Future That Was, feminist historian Durba Mitra offers a pathbreaking account of how these women wrote Third World feminism into being, catalyzing a momentous expansion of knowledge about women, gender, and sexuality that transformed emancipatory politics across the globe. Mitra shows how women from former colonies in South Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and beyond envisioned a radically just world-and did so by insisting that research on the world’s women l