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The first book-length study to reveal how women in exile shaped South Africa’s antiapartheid movement

This groundbreaking book explores the often-overlooked role of women in South Africa’s liberation movements, particularly within the African National Congress during its years in exile from 1960 to 1990. It examines how transformations in gender roles—though contested—were central to imagining a postapartheid South Africa.

Through an analysis of women’s diplomatic work and their advocacy for policies on sexual education, birth control, family life, and childcare, Rachel Sandwell challenges traditional narratives that have ignored or minimized women’s contributions. She highlights how South African women played a crucial role in connecting exiles to left-wing international organizations like the Women’s International Democratic Federation, positioning women as key figures in global anticolonial politics.

The book also explores how gender transformation was at the heart of the exiled antiapartheid movement’s vision for a free South Africa. Women fought for recognition beyond the role of “mothers of the nation,” sparking internal debates over revolutionary morality, the compatibility of motherhood with military service, and responses to sexual and domestic violence within the movement. These struggles mirrored broader ideological conflicts over nation building, belonging, and political identity as the African National Congress sought legitimacy as a government-in-exile.

Ultimately, National Liberation and the Political Life of Exile asks how we write histories of revolutionary movements—especially those that, despite their transformative ambitions, did not fully realize their goals. A vital contribution to feminist history, anticolonial studies, and the history of global liberation struggles, this book reshapes our understanding of gender and politics in the antiapartheid movement.

Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science was founded in Berlin in 1919 as a place of research, political advocacy, counseling, and public education. Inspired by the world’s first gay rights organizations, it was closely allied with other groups fighting for sexual reform and women’s rights, and was destroyed in 1933 as the first target of the Nazi book burnings. Not Straight from Germany examines the legacy of that history, combining essays and a lavish array of visual materials. Scholarly essays investigate the ways in which sex became public in early 20th-century Germany, contributing to a growing awareness of Hirschfeld’s influence on histories of sexuality while also widening the perspective beyond the lens of identity politics.
 
Two visual sourcebooks and catalog essays on an exhibition of contemporary artists’ responses to the Hirschfeld historical materials interrogate the modes of visual representation that Hirschfeld employed by re-imagining the public visibility of his institute from a contemporary perspective. The archival material includes stunning, never-before-published images from Hirschfeld’s institute that challenge many received ideas, while the scholarly and art catalog essays explore collaboration and dialogue as methods of research and activism that resonate beyond the academy to pressing issues of public concern.

 

Winner of the Healthy Teen Network’s Carol Mendez Cassell Award for Excellence in Sexuality Education and the American Sociological Association's Children and Youth Section's 2012 Distinguished Scholarly Research Award

For American parents, teenage sex is something to be feared and forbidden: most would never consider allowing their children to have sex at home, and sex is a frequent source of family conflict. In the Netherlands, where teenage pregnancies are far less frequent than in the United States, parents aim above all for family cohesiveness, often permitting young couples to sleep together and providing them with contraceptives. Drawing on extensive interviews with parents and teens, Not Under My Roof offers an unprecedented, intimate account of the different ways that girls and boys in both countries negotiate love, lust, and growing up.

Tracing the roots of the parents’ divergent attitudes, Amy T. Schalet reveals how they grow out of their respective conceptions of the self, relationships, gender, autonomy, and authority. She provides a probing analysis of the way family culture shapes not just sex but also alcohol consumption and parent-teen relationships. Avoiding caricatures of permissive Europeans and puritanical Americans, Schalet shows that the Dutch require self-control from teens and parents, while Americans guide their children toward autonomous adulthood at the expense of the family bond.