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Can we broaden the boundaries of the history of economic thought to include positionalities articulated by grassroots movements? Following Keynes’s famous remark from General Theory that ‘practical men […] are usually the slaves of some defunct economist,’ we might be wont to dismiss such a push from below. While it is sometimes true that grassroots movements channel preexisting economic thought, I wish to argue that grassroots economic thought can also precede developments subsequently elaborated by economists. This paper considers such a case: by women at the intersection of the women’s liberation movement and the claimants’ unions movement in 1970s Britain. Oral historical and archival work on these working-class women and on achievements such as their succeeding to establish unconditional basic income as an official demand of the British Women’s Liberation Movement forms the springboard for my reconstruction of the grassroots feminist economic thought underpinning the women’s basic income demand. I hope to demonstrate, firstly, how this was a prefiguration of ideas later developed by feminist economists and philosophers; secondly, how unique it was for its time and a consequence of the intersectionality of class, gender, race, and dis/ability. Thirdly, I should like to suggest that bringing into the fold this particular grassroots feminist economic thought on basic income would widen the mainstream understanding and historiography of the idea of basic income. Lastly, I hope to make the point that, within the history of economic thought, grassroots economic thought ought to be heeded far more than it currently is.

Examining how ideas about violence and agency relate to gender, this chapter considers women's participation in armed struggle during the 1960s–1980s. Drawing on a small selection of case studies, it specifically explores women's involvement with left-wing urban guerrilla groups in Italy, West Germany and the United States. I examine different examples of political violence connected to ‘women's issues’, discuss the experiences and reflections of women involved and look at how such activities were received by the broader women's liberation movement. With a foundation thus established, the chapter interrogates the implications of the examples covered in relation to the social organisation of gender, touches on their significance to feminism and concludes with a consideration of the subversive and potentially liberatory possibilities associated with women's political violence.

In 1974, in a lecture at Stanford University, entitled, “Marxism and Feminism” (published in the same year in the journal, Women's Studies), Herbert Marcuse (1974b, p. 279) stated that the Women's Liberation Movement was “perhaps the most important and potentially the most radical political movement that we have, even if the consciousness of this fact has not yet penetrated the Movement as a whole”. Marcuse saw the liberating potential of the movement in its critical consciousness – the light it shone on the invisible structures of oppression inherent in a patriarchal, capitalist system and the knowledge that the dismantling of this system was necessary to have a truly free world.

Following the classification in Alvin Toffler's The Third Wave, the women's movement is definitely a representative of post‐industrial society. Yet in Japan, the second wave of industrialisation and the third have come very close together, hitting a society with deep‐rooted sex role traditions. Thus it is natural that the women's movements in Japan differ from those in the West, yet Japanese feminists, too are moving toward the ultimate goal of a society which will maximise choice and freedom for every individual.

Reconsiders tax reform and economic emancipation of women with respect to public policy formation in The Netherlands. In particular, investigates the attempts of organised interest groups of the Dutch women′s liberation movement during the 1980s to influence the public policy process on tax form. The theory of public choice is applied as a theoretical framework for this case study of The Netherlands. The analysis starts with an overview of the issues at stake in the tax reform debate in The Netherlands. Organised women′s interest groups have a specific viewpoint on these issues. These viewpoints are expressed in the public policy process by various lobby mechanisms and political arenas in the Dutch political‐economic system. The attempts to influence these mechanisms and arenas in favour of women′s interests appear to have been rather unsuccessful in the 1980s. The Dutch policy process can be characterised by the so‐called “barrier model”. Various barriers in the Dutch policy process offer an explanation for the relative failure of the organised women′s interest groups to influence the tax reform process in The Netherlands. This explanation may also be valid for similar cases in other West European countries, where the same issues of tax reform and women′s emancipation are at stake and where the public policy process has the same characteristics. Finally, formulates some policy recommendations to overcome the barriers in the public policy process on tax reform.

Purpose – This chapter explores the significance of emotional exchanges between historians and their research participants in the production of critical histories of the late twentieth-century British women’s movement. It argues for the importance of exploring the ways in which positive emotions, including feelings of excitement, reverence and commonality, influence the research process and potentially complicate historians’ capacity to produce histories that critically assess popular narratives of the development of the women’s movement.

Methodology/Approach – This chapter draws on qualitative assessments of my own experiences carrying out oral history interviews with women’s movement members to explore the emotional exchanges that take place during the research process. It utilises several historiographical concepts, including being a ‘fan of feminism’, discussions about historical subjectivity and oral history debates about empathy, to reflect on my emotional responses whilst carrying out research.

Findings – This chapter demonstrates that positive emotional exchanges between historians and their research participants influence the production of critical histories of the women’s movement. It highlights how historians’ personal identifications with their areas of study impact on their emotional engagement with research participants, potentially complicating or contravening their wider historical aims.

Originality/Value – Several historians have explored how negative emotional exchanges with research participants influenced their production of critical histories of the women’s movement. By focusing on the influence of positive emotional exchanges, this chapter provides an original contribution to this area of reflexive discussion, as well as wider assessments of historical subjectivity and researcher empathy.

bell hooks says in “Reconstructing Black Masculinity” that n[c]ollectively we can break the life threatening choke‐hold patriarchal masculinity imposes on black men and create life sustaining visions of a reconstructed black masculinity that can provide black men ways to save their lives and the lives of their brothers and sisters in struggle. Toward the work of political (re)unification of the genders in black communities today, black men must acknowledge and begin to confront the existence of sexism in black liberation struggle as one of the chief obstacles empeding its advancement. Making womanist space for black men to participate in allied relation to feminist movement to oppose the opression of women means black men going against the grain of the racist and sexist mythology of black manhood and masculinity in the U.S. Its underlying premise rooted in white supremacist patriarchal ideology continues to foster the idea that we pose a racial and sexual threat to American society such that our bodies exist to be feared, brutalized, imprisoned, annihilated‐made invisible.

Findings of an extensive archival study of Pan American Airways (PAA) strongly support Acker’s (1990) notion of the presence and importance of a dominant discourse of organizing logic in structuring a gendered order. Findings also demonstrate that the presence of alternative, but not necessarily feminist, discourses can serve to upset the gender order of organizations. Thus, we conclude that changing the organization’s gender substructure (Acker, 1992b) by changing the dominant discourse or introducing competing discourses may help to destabilize “truths” and interrupt the perpetuation and reification of policies, practices, and understandings that are often taken-for-granted despite their ability to silence voices and privilege some groups over others.