This chapter argues that Scottish author Naomi Mitchison’s 1962 novel Memoirs of a Spacewoman is an exemplary critical feminist utopia. Touching on many of the literary utopian genre’s foundational tensions and ambiguities, Mitchison’s novel offers readers a world of freely accessible abortions, inter-racial and multi-gendered parenting, queer and alien sexual practices, and universal child-led education. Despite the obviously utopian contours of this speculative narrative world, however, Mitchison’s narrative uses the utopian society for its backdrop of spacefaring alien adventure. By creating a utopian society, only to leave it behind as her protagonists visits stranger alien worlds, the chapter argues that Mitchison manages to maintain a focus on the utopian missing ‘something’, even whilst depicting a feminist utopia. Rather than arriving at a static utopian locus, Mitchison’s eponymous spacewoman journeys in an ongoing process of utopian searching, in which many of the literary genre’s pleasures and dangers are laid bare. With its focus on a female scientist attempting to avoid the harm historically perpetuated on alien flora and fauna by British colonial scientific institutions, Mitchison’s text reveals the utopian prospect of an anti-colonial feminist science.

This chapter explores Scotland’s relationship with utopia, arguing that this relationship is complicated by Scotland’s perceived peripheral, and potentially oppositional, identity within the United Kingdom. Twentieth-century Scottish fiction has often been reticent to engage with fully developed utopian paradigms, instead focusing on quotidian experience. However, utopian communities are also positioned as an opportunity to look beyond the nation to examine questions of individual and collective desire. The chapter focuses on three main strands of Scottish utopian fiction from the post-war to the present: the unusual emphasis on death and cyclical return in key utopian texts; utopian novels that explore communal life and homosociality; and queer works that employ storytelling as a utopian act. The texts discussed in this chapter reveal that in Scottish literature utopia is not located in some far-off future but, rather, operates within the continuity created by shared narratives of identity, community, and desire. Examining these themes, the chapter concludes that Scottish utopian fiction is more varied than previous accounts have noted.

The Introduction sets the scene for the book’s chapters and analysis. On the northern periphery of Nairobi, in southern Kiambu County, the city’s expansion into a landscape of poor smallholders is bringing new opportunities, dilemmas, and conflicts. Profoundly shaped by Kenya’s colonial history, Kiambu’s ‘workers with patches of land’ struggle to sustain their households while the skyrocketing price of land ratchets up gendered and generational tensions over their meagre plots, with consequences for class futures. Land sale by senior men turns would-be inheritors, their young adult sons, into landless and land-poor paupers, heightening their exposure to economic precarity. The Introduction sets out how these dynamics are lived at the site of kinship, and how moral principles of patrilineal obligation and land retention fail in the face of market opportunity. Within this context, the Introduction sets out the book’s exploration of how Kiambu’s young men struggle to sustain hopes for middle-class lifestyles as the economic ground shifts beneath their feet.

This chapter examines the ‘parliamentary novel’, a genre developed in the mid nineteenth century by Benjamin Disraeli and Anthony Trollope, as more Britons gained the right to vote. These novels often served to educate new voters about the virtues of the parliamentary system, portraying statesmen as noble figures and reinforcing traditional parliamentary ideals for an industrial society. The chapter surveys this genre, focusing on authors with first-hand experience in Parliament or close connections to MPs. It traces the genre’s evolution, particularly its post-1945 transformation from respected literature to what Gerald Kaufman labelled ‘trash’. While considering broader works by authors like Jeffrey Archer and Michael Dobbs, the chapter centres on Maurice Edelman and Edwina Currie. The motives behind these novels varied, but male authors in the genre’s classic period typically aimed to celebrate Parliament. However, as female authors emerged in the 1990s, they shifted the genre’s focus from glorifying male heroes to critiquing both these figures and Parliament itself, reflecting a growing scepticism towards male-dominated politics and altering the genre’s original celebratory purpose.

Chapter 5 explores the construction of women, especially young women, as dubious and untrustworthy figures in male discourse, a source of cynicism and doubt about kinship’s future. It captures men’s fears about ‘greedy’ women and ‘gold diggers’ who only want to marry men in order to expropriate their wealth. At the same time, the chapter explores counter-discourses of young women getting by in a world of male failure, their relations with their male kin, and their ambitions to become successful ‘hustlers’ in their own right. Speaking to regional literature on love, marriage, and youth relationships, it explores the gendered tensions created by a world of masculine destitution, illuminating male fears about the capacity of women to exploit their ‘in-betweenness’ to acquire patrilineal land.

Chapter 4 turns towards the role of women’s work in reproducing the household, focusing on the labour of relation-making in the neighbourhood as a means of creating economic networks through which material assistance can be sought. Commenting on anthropological literature that frames African contexts as ones of ‘mutuality’ and ‘obligation’, the chapter discusses the difficulty of finding assistance for aspirational projects (especially school fees) in an atomised neighbourhood where families compete for the prestige of economic advancement. It remarks upon the possibilities and limits of caring labour as a means through which women enter into economic relations of mutual support with others.

Chapter 6 shows how the history of land reform in central Kenya, dating back to the late colonial period, has shaped a situation of scarcity in which access to land, and contestation over it, has become highly gendered. Engaging with regional literature on land, kinship, and economic change, it discusses the micro-politics of ‘intimate exclusion’ that plays out in inheritance disputes, with young men trying to exclude their sisters from inheriting precious land. Meanwhile, older men try to argue for their daughters’ ability to inherit, citing wider legal change and the rising rates of divorce. The chapter discusses the intimate politics of envy and competition, exploring ‘zero-sum’ family disputes over wealth, demonstrating the moral arguments for ‘inclusion’ that are made by senior men, and attempts to control and mitigate greed-fuelled conflicts in the future through fair distribution.

This chapter returns to the import of marriage as an institution at the interface between intimate, personal lives and wider political transformation. It highlights the experiences of those who have remained unmarried beyond the usual marrying age and draws on discussions of ethical imagination from earlier in the book to explore some submerged connections between non-marriage and social activism. The multiple temporalities in which reflecting on marriage occurs (here by those who remain unmarried) reveal how such judgements constitute imaginative and political work. Involvement in gender-related activism is a possible trajectory for those concerned about women’s or LGBTQ rights. The potential fractures between conservative Islam and the more liberal attitudes of urban, middle-class, youthful Malaysians constitute a zone of contention – but also, for some, a suggestive field for imaginative reflection about their own situation, about the marriage of their parents or those of siblings or friends. In these fissures, transformative standpoints and visions may carry the seeds of wider political change.

This chapter looks at forms of uncertainty that occur at different stages of married life. A central question here is what does uncertainty produce? The chapter focuses partly on Malay protagonists and on two particularly fragile moments in Malay marriage: during betrothal and, counterintuitively, much later on, after several decades, when one might expect marriages to be highly stable. The former was a pattern familiar from earlier research. But some older Malay women spoke of a more recent trend – for husbands of many years to marry a younger woman polygamously. Meanwhile, other, non-Malay, couples have adopted unconventional living arrangements or have taken unusual paths to suit their particular circumstances. In considering how different kinds of marital uncertainty play out, the significance of expectations about marriage and the registers of temporality through which they are calibrated and recalibrated are illuminated. The force of unanticipated events stimulates the reflection of protagonists and their consociates – as readers may recognise from their own experiences – reformulating ideas of what is appropriate or acceptable behaviour, and precipitating new ethical stances.

This chapter provides an overview of suicidal behaviours and suicide prevention strategies among minority groups, including refugees, migrants, asylum seekers, and internally displaced persons (IDPs). The chapter highlights the interplay of cultural and gender diversity in shaping suicidal behaviours and emphasizes the need for tailored interventions that address the specific challenges faced by these populations. It reviews the existing literature on the prevalence of suicide among minority groups in both high-income countries (HICs) and low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), examining the role of cultural factors, gender-based violence, and mental health issues. The chapter also discusses suicide prevention strategies in humanitarian settings, such as community engagement, gatekeeper training, cultural adaptation of interventions, and the importance of integrating mental health services into primary healthcare services. The chapter highlights evidence-based practices recommended by research, the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC), and the World Health Organization (WHO). The conclusion underscores the need of a comprehensive, culturally sensitive approach and calls for further research, increased investment in mental health infrastructure, and the development of gender-sensitive strategies to reduce the burden of suicide among minority groups in humanitarian contexts.

This chapter examines the intimate world of the family through an intergenerational lens. Education and work outside the home are understood by many women in Malaysia, as elsewhere, to have fundamentally altered the dynamics of conjugality. Variations in individual life courses, availability of resources, education and ethnic or religious backgrounds partly shape trajectories of life and marriage. Exploring continuity and change between generations, we see how marriage encapsulates both possibilities, enabling radical departures from conventional norms under the guise of conformity as well as the replication of past patterns. The binary of ‘arrangement’ versus ‘choice’ constitutes, simultaneously, a reference point and a misleading way to calibrate transformation – as anthropologists have shown for South Asia. Beyond this, marriages mark time, and are a means to tell and reflect upon family histories. Efforts to change the course of events or escape cycles of misfortune may be rare and difficult to achieve. Reflecting on differences and change across generations engages qualities of moral imagination, and is part of making history.

This chapter discusses modern approaches to understanding Hensel’s music and future scholarly challenges for its interpretation. Nowadays Hensel’s music is written about and performed widely and she has become one of the best-known woman composers. Yet this was not always the case. What had to happen to transform Hensel – in the eyes of scholars, performers, students and lay listeners – from an overlooked and sometimes maligned figure into someone now regarded as one of the most gifted composers of her generation? What lessons can we learn from considering how she moved from the margins toward the centre of the canon? And what challenges lie ahead? Looking back on the past forty years of Hensel studies reveals three main, interlinked developments that have shaped our understanding of her music: a greater awareness of the relationship and differences between her and her brother’s musical styles; a more sophisticated analytical understanding of her music; and a drastic increase in the amount of her music available for study.

This chapter explores what is surely one of the core questions of the entire volume - how did Fanny and Felix interact as musicians and as composers? Both displayed prodigious musical talent at an early age, and both received a parallel musical education, but social and class boundaries dictated that Felix shuld become a professional composer while Fanny was destined to remain in the domestic spheres. This also largely dictated the genres in which they went on to compose. The chapter also considers convergences and divergences in compositional style.

This chapter explores the “joint” musical education of the two siblings Fanny and Felix, taking as its point of departure the educational backgrounds of the parents which differentiated little by gender in terms of approach and content, but certainly in the intended paths for the two children. Felix was destined to become a professional composer, and the genres in which he was groomed were thus the “public” ones (opera in particular) while Fanny was expected to excel in the “small” genres: piano pieces and songs.

This chapter explores the extraordinarily close relationship between the two eldest Mendelssohn siblings, the challenges and occasional tensions between them, especially following Fanny’s marriage after which their ways separated. The two had access to the same economic status, social circle, educational opportunities, and entertainment, but their paths were largely determined long before they were born. Fanny and Felix provide a salient example of how gender above all else can determine the outcomes of an otherwise identical entry into the world. Contexts for the choices their parents made can be drawn from their family history; the results of those choices can be observed in how the relationship between Fanny and Felix formed and transformed from their years as students, to emerging composers, and then correspondents when their relationship was carried out primarily via letters.

Although little of her music appeared during her lifetime, Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel was well known due to the numerous publications about her brother Felix. With the rise of feminism in the late nineteenth century, she was frequently mentioned as part of the larger discourse about the problems that women composers faced. After the publication of Sebastian Hensel’s Die Familie Mendelssohn (1879), Hensel came to serve as a symbol for women’s societal restrictions, most notably for pro-suffrage writers in the United States and England. Hensel was frequently at the centre of published arguments about women’s creativity, and her music was sometimes programmed to rebut assertions of their inability to compose. Knowledge of Hensel was transmitted through American women’s organizations, and children’s music clubs were named for her. Although Hensel’s fame faded in the mid twentieth century, publications and recordings of her music were stimulated by second-wave feminism beginning in the 1970s and 1980s.

Who were the women of Meerut, said to have turned a nonviolent military mutiny – a refusal to load and fire a weapon – into a violent revolt that nearly toppled the British Raj? Were they prostitutes, or were they wives? There is much in the book to suggest the latter, but (ironically) that same evidence also suggests the simultaneous possibility of the former. This paradoxical formulation requires a more nuanced understanding of the nature of north Indian marriage in mid-century. A more fundamental question is: Did the women of Meerut exist? Or were they the product of overheated imaginations casting about for exculpation – on both sides of the racial divide? This necessitates a further examination of the two sources for the story of the Meerut women, or rather the question of their independent narrative origin. While the evidence militates in favor of their historicity, gender humiliation was already in the air: Even if they did not exist, they would be invented. They matter not simply because they enable us to add women to the mix of history (and stir, as the saying goes), but because they allow us to perceive something fundamental about the nature of history itself.