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The Penguin Book of Feminist Writing selects writing from across time and throughout the world, creating a treasure-trove of the most important feminist thought alongside surprising and delightful fiction, poetry and diaries, celebrating the multiplicity of feminist voices that have emerged over the centuries. Beginning in the fifteenth century with Christine de Pizan, who imagined a City of Ladies that would serve as a refuge from the harassment of men, this book goes beyond the usual white, western story. The writers in this anthology ask questions about class, capitalism and colonialism, and other axes of oppression that intersect with sexism. Inside, we find writers like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who declared in 1848 the self-evident truth 'that all men and women are created equal', alongside Sojourner Truth, born into slavery in New York, who asked in 1851 'and ain't I a woman?' Put together by a world-leading historian of ideas and a feminist, The Penguin Book of Feminist Writing is both a history of thought - readers will find incisive and provocative selections from Mary Wollstonecraft, Virginia Woolf, Susan Sontag, Audre Lorde and over one hundred other pioneering thinkers - and a voyage of discovery, highlighting lesser-anthologised thinkers, like Juana Ines de la Cruz's seventeenth-century philosophical satire of 'misguided men', or the "poet of Palestine" Fadwa Tuqan's mountainous journeys towards self-knowledge and revolution. The product of many years of research and reading, The Penguin Book of Feminist Writing is both a deeply considered introduction to feminist thought and an abundance of riches to read and keep throughout a lifetime

At the beginning of De jure naturae et gentium (1672), Samuel von Pufendorf proposed a radical dichotomy between nature and morality. He was followed down this arid path by his great admirer John Locke. This article begins by exploring their descriptions of this dichotomy, examining the ways in which human animals were supposed to haul themselves out of the push and pull of the mechanistic world in order to become free moral agents. The article then argues that bubbling up from within this principal account of morality is an alternative account according to which virtue seems to infuse nature, thereby blurring the lines between obligation and motivation, and refiguring the character of moral and political agency. In uncovering this refiguration, I highlight the importance of Aristotelianism and Stoicism for Pufendorf and Locke, suggest continuities rather than breaks between the natural lawyers of the seventeenth century and the theorists of moral sentiment of the next, and gesture towards a hitherto underappreciated discourse in early modern thought: the normativity of nature.

Hannah Dawson argues that a sea change is underway in how we think about representation – one that requires us to think beyond 'tokenism' and 'meritocracy' and recognise the benefits of having leaders that more closely resemble society.

AbstractIn this article I explore two aspects of Pettit's thesis about Hobbes' innovation with regard to the transformative and central role of language in thought and politics. First, I argue that while Hobbes had many debts to both traditionalists and innovators, he did break new ground in characterising language as in some ways constitutive of thought – a conclusion he came to as a consequence not only of his extreme nominalism, but also of his views on the exceptional sensibility of words. Second, I argue that while language is part of a matrix of the forces which shape politics, it plays a powerful and indispensable part in both saving and cursing society.

Despite a growing body of research on fathers and fatherhood in South Africa, we know relatively little about un(der)employed Black fathers' experiences, perspectives, and patterns of involvement in their children's lives. This article uses Johnson-Hanks' concept of "vital conjunctures" to examine the divergent ways in which young Black men practice fatherhood under conditions of profound economic uncertainty. Three modes of father-child (dis)connections are presented to show how different patterns of paternal involvement are steered by men's economic conditions, the complex relational dynamics they occupy, as well as shifting cultural expectations and gender norms. The article shows how the quality of men's relationships with the mothers of their children plays an important role in differentiating fatherhood practices. Ultimately, this article argues that being a respectable father in conditions of economic uncertainty is a complex and convoluted endeavour involving intense negotiation and improvisation.

AbstractThis article critically explores the complex and contradictory meanings attached to conspicuous consumption in an informal settlement on the outskirts of Johannesburg. It examines why un(der)employed young people, especially young Black men, view the trappings of wealth in their midst and dismiss them as 'fake'. The article shows how the widespread concern with 'faking it' indexes the unstable links between consumption, status, and class differentiation in a time of generalized economic insecurity. Accordingly, it maintains that the accusation of 'fakery' is not only about jealousy and the dangers of being seen to accumulate money without redistributing it, but also a product of the precariousness that characterizes young people's lives. Ultimately, the article shows how consumption affords a unique window into the values, aspirations, and anxieties of young un(der)employed Black men in a context where 'proper' pathways to social mobility are, for most, completely out of reach.

In the seventeenth century, men stepped out of the pages of political philosophy as equal and free, their subjection to government a matter of artifice, manufactured through the social contract. By contrast, women's subjection to men appeared as the creation of nature. Less rational and less virtuous than their counterparts, so the story went, they were rightfully inferior to them. This article examines some pre-modern writers, including Jane Anger, Rachel Speght, Judith Drake and Mary Astell, who wanted to re-carve the boundaries of nature. They argued that with regard to reason and virtue, men and women have equal capacities. They proposed that gender is a construct of power, not of nature. In so doing they marked out anti-essentialist territory that has become central to modern feminism. I propose, however, that their interventions become most legible (and no less urgent) if we situate them in their own context, and in particular in the context of the discipline of logic—the art of reason and the bedrock of an early modern education. These writers used recognizably logical tactics to prove the reason of women, and in so doing donned the mask of the logician, thereby doubly claiming for themselves the mark of a rational man. But they also turned to logic, as logicians since Aristotle had done, to cure the sickness and sophisms of their minds. They appropriated and refigured the obstacles to knowledge, identifying three impediments that beset women: the constitutive power of words, the internalized focus on a woman's externality, and the mental corruption caused by oppression.

Freedom without republicanism : the case of Montaigne / Felicity Green -- Hugo Grotius on freedom of will and self-government : Greek, Patristic and Roman legacies / Martin van Gelderen -- Liberty before licence in Locke / Hannah Dawson -- Liberty and hierarchy in Milton's revolutionary prose / Rachel Foxley -- Democratic republicanism in the early modern period / Annelien de Dijn -- Gender, liberty, participation and virtue : what the eighteenth century can teach us about republicanism / Sandrine Bergès -- Liberty, death, and slavery in the age of Atlantic revolutions, 1770s-1790s / René Koekkoek -- Beyond the 'wretched subterfuge' : liberalism, freedom, responsibility / Eric Nelson -- 'A just and true liberty' : the idea of (neo-Roman) freedom in francophone counter-revolutionary thought c. 1780-1800 / Matthijs Lok -- Chains and invisible threads : liberty and domination in Marx's account of wage-slavery / Bruno Leipold -- Republican liberty in the philosophy of human rights / Lena Halldenius -- Conclusion. On neo-Roman liberty : a response and reassessment / Quentin Skinner.