Previous historians have acknowledged the existence of paid domestic labor in the Soviet Union, but their work always proceeded from the assumption that domestic service was something illicit. This book shows that domestic service not only remained legal under Soviet law, its existence was openly discussed and even considered essential for the Soviet economy. Yet, the compatibility of domestic service with the Bolsheviks’ egalitarian message remained a contested issue. Critics of domestic service argued on Marxist grounds that it was an “unproductive employment” of workers. Proponents of paid domestic labor emphasized the domestic workers’ contribution to the building of socialism because this labor freed the still more valuable labor of their employers. Throughout the seven decades of the Soviet Union, the question of paid domestic labor came up time and again, but its contradictions could not be resolved. Bolsheviks’ sincere desire to make maids and nannies equal participants in the building of socialism came into conflict with their gendered vision of society where housework was women’s work.

This chapter historically contextualises the Kurdish women’s movement and traces the trajectory of its organisational structures and knowledge production from 1978 to the present. It situates the Kurdistan Freedom Movement and its local political and armed branches in the regional and international matrices of domination: Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran. It zooms in on the main internal rupture points where the women resisted and fought against their male comrades in order to build their autonomous ranks within the larger liberation movement.

Chapter 2 examines how the claim of difference and sustainability was organised and implemented by the Kurdish women’s movement in the political sphere of Diyarbakir, where the movement has a long-standing history of organising women according to party ideology and structures. I analyse how this struggle for space unfolded once the urban wars started in mid-2015, mapping out the tools and mechanisms of resistance used by the movement as a whole and the women’s structures in particular. This chapter gives space to the critical voices, residents not organised behind party lines, as they were caught in the frontlines between the PKK and the Turkish army.

Drawing on a close reading of the French feminist Des Femmes's documentary Mouvement de libération des femmes Iraniennes année zero made by a group of filmmakers and journalists associated with Antoinette Fouque and the Psych et Po, this chapter articulates the ways that the Iranian Revolution’s anti-disciplinary concept of “the planetary” ( jahani in Persian) situates the object of Iranian studies and the radical mission of the field.

More Australians were talking about a wider array of rights than ever before in the 1970s. A new generation of militant Indigenous activists and young women saw the need for new or reimagined conceptions beyond inherited gradualist, equalitarian visions of political change. Indigenous radicals, buoyed and subsequently disappointed by the remarkable referendum victory of May 1967, were soon petitioning the UN over structural and endemic economic and cultural rights infringements. Reflecting anti-colonial rhetoric at the United Nations, activists placed the need for the right to restitution for the wrongs of colonialism at the centre of their human rights agenda. Women’s liberationists, on the other hand, rejected calls for a new international order that merely replicated divisions between the private and public, the breadwinner and homemaker. Not only would this potentially weaken gains by Western feminists, but merely replicating the demands of underdeveloped states might dramatically limit the rights of women in developing nations. The so-called Right to Life movement sought to appropriate the concept of “human” at the same time, pushing its definition beyond birth to the time of conception. As rights became more a focus of public discussion, battle lines were also being drawn as to what rights were and who could claim them.