Utopian visions that produced distinctly dystopic projects are rightly associated with the catastrophically violent and repressive first half of twentieth-century European history— “the age of extremes” in Eric Hobsbawm's apt phrase. National Socialism, fascism, communism, and European colonialism represented totalizing, highly ideological visions of how politics and economics, society and culture should be dramatically reorganized. Each of these projects deployed gendered rhetorics and representations; each was explicitly preoccupied with redefining masculinity and femininity, marriage and family, domesticity and sexuality. Each sought to subordinate individuals to an overarching social project, integrating some, excluding others, always elaborating complex hierarchies of gender, race, and culture.

In 1940, Howard Kershner, director of European relief for the American Friends Service Committee, was stationed in Vichy France, where Quakers were organizing relief for refugees. He had witnessed any number of wartime atrocities in his years of service during the Spanish Civil War, including violence directed at civilians, bombings, starvation, and disease. Now he added a new item to the litany of wartime suffering: “One of the greatest tragedies of all times is the separation of families in Europe today: wives in one country, husbands in another, with no possibility of reunion and often no means of communication; babies who have never seen their fathers; scattered fragments of families not knowing if their loved ones are living or dead, and often without hope of ever seeing them again. There are multitudes of wretched souls for whom it seems the sun of hope has set.”

Soviet socialism shared with its utopian socialist predecessors a critique of the conventional family and its household economy. Marx and Engels asserted that women's emancipation would follow the abolition of private property, allowing the family to be a union of individuals within which relations between the sexes would be “a purely private affair.” Building on this legacy, Lenin imagined a future when unpaid housework and child care would be replaced by communal dining rooms, nurseries, kindergartens, and other industries. The issue was so central to the revolutionary program that the Bolsheviks published decrees establishing civil marriage and divorce soon after the October Revolution, in December 1917. These first steps were intended to replace Russia's family laws with a new legal framework that would encourage more egalitarian sexual and social relations. A complete Code on Marriage, the Family, and Guardianship was ratified by the Central Executive Committee a year later, in October 1918. The code established a radical new doctrine based on individual rights and gender equality, but it also preserved marriage registration, alimony, child support, and other transitional provisions thought to be unnecessary after the triumph of socialism. Soviet debates about the relative merits of unfettered sexuality and the protection of women and children thus resonated with long-standing tensions in the history of socialism.

Only a few years ago rights of sexual minorities in Poland caused not only national controversies over what democracy means, but also gained international attention, visible in demonstrations in front of embassies in Berlin and London, wide media coverage, and protest letters to the Polish prime minister by the Helsinki Foundation of Human Rights as well as Amnesty International and the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA). Several Polish politicians were repeatedly cautioned for their extreme conservative stance on homosexual issues and homophobic remarks as well as criticized for the prohibitions of the so-called Marsz Równości (Equality March), the Polish version of the Christopher Street Day (usually known as Gay Pride Parade) as being against the standards of democracy and human rights. Finally, and in particular as a reaction to the various remarks of Polish politicians, a resolution against homophobia was submitted to the European Parliament in January 2006 and passed in June 2006. Despite the resolution, the then Polish minister of education, Roman Giertych (League of Polish Families, or LPR), caused another great stir at the European Union (EU) conference of ministers of education in Heidelberg, Germany, on March 1, 2007, when he stated that brochures on sexuality education published by the Council of Europe that contained information on homosexuality and homosexual relations were to be prohibited in Polish schools. In the same speech, he rebuked societies that allowed abortion on social grounds and called abortion a “legal crime” and a “new form of barbarism.”

By spring 1945 when the Allied Military Government and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) confronted the masses of refugees and displaced persons gathered in, or streaming toward, occupied Germany in the wake of the Third Reich's defeat, food—its supply, distribution, and, not least, symbolic meaning—had been clearly established as a key political and psychological issue for military and occupation policy. The rhetoric of allied war aims and of relief work posited food provision as a fundamental issue of human survival, development, and dignity. In 1943, the anthropologist Margaret Mead, deploying both political and psychoanalytically oriented social work discourses, cautioned American policy makers planning the future of a defeated Nazi Germany about the importance of rationing for establishing control over an occupied population. “Whenever a people feels that its food supply is in the hands of an authority,” she reminded them—in terms suffused with unarticulated gender assumptions, “it tends to regard that authority as to some degree parental.” Moreover she added, “probably no other operation, even the provision of hospitalization and emergency care, is so effective in proving to an anxious and disturbed people that the powers that be are good and have their welfare at heart.”