In Elegy 4.9, Propertius provides an aetiology for a detail of the cult of Hercules at the Ara Maxima: the prohibition on women attending the ceremony. He presents this particularity as a retaliatory measure taken by the hero himself, who reacted to the banning of any male from the space in which the cult of Bona Dea is celebrated. Propertius describes the priestess of Bona Dea as trying to prevent Hercules from entering the sacred space by arguing that female chastity must be respected. After having argued that there is no insurmountable difference between the sexes since there may be role reversal between men and women, Hercules forces the door. Propertius uses this episode located in ancient Latium to put forward some reflections on a (modern) topic, specific to the elegiac genre: sexual identity and gender relations. He presents an alternative point of view that includes both facets of what Augustus seeks to impose in his politics of promoting ancient social practices, essentially concerned with control over morality and sexuality: a strict conception of female morality, and a crucial questioning of gender conceptions: what makes the difference between the sexes? It is dress, behaviour or the body?

This chapter picks up the discussion on gendered violence and gendered order established by the Nazarbayev regime. Never before did any movement pay so much attention to this agenda. Never before in the contemporary history of Kazakhstan did protest movements call out openly on double oppression of the regime – through its patriarchal and authoritarian nature of governing. In this chapter, I also focus on the ideas of class, inequality, and transnational dialogue of Oyan, Qazaqstan and Qazaq Koktemi with other protest movements in the world. Dwelling further on my argument about Qazaq Koktemi representing the fading of the post-Soviet era, I also analyse in detail the 8 March 2021 Women’s Rally in Almaty and the many actors united behind its call for de-Sovietizing and de-stereotyping this vital day of mobilization. I believe that the 2021 Women’s March opened many eyes to the fact that there is a vibrant plurality of views and activist forms within Qazaq Koktemi and that these forms are no longer chained by the old paradigms of the ‘gender’ question in Nazarbayev’s terms, with the tokenization of female politicians and persistent sexism in the political domain.

Sociologist and tango dancer Kathy Davis provides an ethnographic exploration of passion in tango dancers, and she illustrates how such passion is embodied, attached to strongly felt emotions, and implicated in biographical transformations. She argues that tango dancing offers a perfect site for understanding the importance of passion in ordinary people’s everyday lives, gender relations in late modernity, and the possibilities and pitfalls of transnational encounters in a globalizing world.

Iran pursued many secular reforms during the interwar years. From revamping its educational system to dictating new modes of dress, including unveiling, the first Pahlavi state pushed through sometimes controversial changes that fueled opposition and dissent. America expanded its involvement in Iran’s cultural affairs as these transformations were taking place. Iran celebrated its pre-Islamic past and invited American and other Orientalists to participate in such programs. As American missionary influence in Iran declined, American scholars and diplomats instead became more actively involved in Iranian cultural and educational affairs.

Australian women writers have always been among the most internationally successful producers of anglophone romantic fiction. This chapter explores Australian romance novels from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century to consider how Australian women writers thought and wrote about romantic love, marriage and gender relations. It argues that early Australian romances display unexpectedly unromantic misgivings about love and marriage for women, and that Australian women writers used the genre to argue that love, marriage and domesticity are not enough to make women happy and provide them with fulfilling lives. The novels of Rosa Praed and Marie Bjelke Petersen, among others, suggest that, in addition to love and a life partner, Australian women need the opportunity of meaningful work and a higher purpose to make marriage successful and to find satisfaction in their lives.

Widespread cultural sensibilities about gender, sexuality, age, and status converge on the dressed body, weighing down on women’s bodies much more heavily than on men’s. Reactions to the miniskirt go to the heart of normative cultural assumptions about the hierarchical nature of gender relations in most of Zambia’s ethnic groups and across the country’s class spectrum. When miniskirts first became fashionable in the late 1960s and early 1970s, they fueled discussions about women’s proper place in the new nation; ‘foreign’ influences were blamed for independent women’s lack of morality. In the 1990s when the miniskirt returned, the debate developed a sharper and violent edge, mobilising ideas associating sexuality with women’s dress practice. Stripping incidents of women wearing short skirts and tight clothing occurred in downtown space again and again during the 2000s. Recently they have been followed by protests that are turning violence against women into a general social issue.

Krystyna Duniec and Agata Adamiecka-Sitek question the seemingly incontestable values and lineages of standard historiographies that are foundationally patriarchal and evidence how theatre profited from the trade in women’s bodies, and Duniec notes that through theatre we can chart the move from marginalization to empowered presence for LGBTQ groups. Duniec focuses on the interwar period, which she interprets as a time of tremendous innovation in theatre practices that remain/repeat today. She notes that through theatre we can chart the move from marginalization to empowered presence for LGBTQ groups. The Polish People’s Republic, as Adamiecka-Sitek shows, proclaimed gender equality but in reality reproduced bourgeois gender relations that excluded women from empowered positions in theatre institutions. She then charts how women’s narratives emerged outside of a ‘homosocial’ order built on fraternal ties that she traces from the establishment of public theatre.

Do gender roles and relations change upon displacement and during refugees’ encampment, and if so how? By drawing on Hearn’s theory of the hegemony of men as its analytical matrix, this chapter addresses gender systems pre-flight and in Uganda’s Kyaka II, and explores the perceptions of women, men, teenager girls and boys, as well as of aid workers. Systems pre-flight were widely noted to be patriarchal—with men as the hegemonic actor to whom women and youth should submit—while practiced differently across ethnic groups. Such tendencies were also widely shared as ‘normal’ in the camp, but shifts therein did occur. In addition to some men accepting and others contesting the use of force as a legitimate social practice to maintain their dominance, many women in Kyaka II depicted their various roles; teenage girls and boys tended to find their peers to be rather equal meanwhile, but expressed patriarchal perceptions regarding adults. Gender relations were (re)negotiated, and different patterns hereof arose in Kyaka II. Through the nature of the humanitarian support provided, aid workers were influential too. It is argued that they assigned roles, but at the same time hindered men and women from fulfilling them; with their power, aid workers figuratively also became part of the gender systems on-site.

The book concludes by summarizing the main findings of each preceding chapter as well as reflecting on how gender-based violence, humanitarian structures, gender relations, and coping strategies represent inherently intertwined subject matters that cannot be discussed in isolation. In addition the role of time and space is addressed, which runs as a core theme throughout the book—albeit ones not directly theorized. Finally, some areas requiring close further research going forward are identified.

In order to understand contemporary Saudi society, it is imperative to focus on local contexts, particularly as Saudi society is not a homogeneous entity. Local context does not necessarily refer to the Kingdom as a unitary body, but rather to specific constituencies and regional areas. This comprehension of diverse Saudi societies is more nuanced and expansive than the traditional perspective of a relatively homogeneous Saudi society as it allows for a greater variation in the study of young Saudi male perceptions of masculinity, gender relations and marriage in everyday life. This chapter discusses perceptions of masculinity, attitudes to gender relations and the vexing problems of making a ‘good’ marriage as related to accepted Saudi socio-cultural norms. In fact, many young men maintain that a Saudi ‘social dictatorship’ exists, one based on historical socio-tribal attitudes and customs rather than solely Islamic jurisprudence and religious norms. Indeed, there is widespread recognition that these socio-cultural norms frequently govern the way ‘things are supposed to be’ in the community. Failure to follow these accepted practices can lead to family conflict and, significantly, ‘loss of face’ within society.

Violence was part of everyday life beyond the wars and rebellions for many Yucatecans, particularly in the countryside. This background provides clues to what was considered normal or expected behavior and should make it easier to understand why, for example, acting violently was not a remote form of settling affairs and why fleeing to the bush or joining the Caste War rebels were attractive options to many lower-class Yucatecans. Life was grim for the lower classes in nineteenth-century Yucatán. Their situation varied considerably depending on whether they lived in urban or rural environments, whether they were self-employed or not and whether they lacked or had access to some means of production. Physical force intensified the severity of these living conditions, in particular for the lower classes and dependents, i.e., wives, children, and domestics, all of whom were subject to patriarchal authority. As in most parts of the world at that time, violence was a day-to-day affair in nineteenth-century Yucatán. Lower-class males suffered physical aggression at the hands of superiors and were beaten regularly by hacienda overseers and parish priests.

Violence was part of everyday life beyond the wars and rebellions for many Yucatecans, particularly in the countryside. This background provides clues to what was considered normal or expected behavior and should make it easier to understand why, for example, acting violently was not a remote form of settling affairs and why fleeing to the bush or joining the Caste War rebels were attractive options to many lower-class Yucatecans. Life was grim for the lower classes in nineteenth-century Yucatán. Their situation varied considerably depending on whether they lived in urban or rural environments, whether they were self-employed or not and whether they lacked or had access to some means of production. Physical force intensified the severity of these living conditions, in particular for the lower classes and dependents, i.e., wives, children, and domestics, all of whom were subject to patriarchal authority. As in most parts of the world at that time, violence was a day-to-day affair in nineteenth-century Yucatán. Lower-class males suffered physical aggression at the hands of superiors and were beaten regularly by hacienda overseers and parish priests.

This chapter uses a selection of wartime love letters between soldiers and their wives/girlfriends to make two arguments. It shows how the world that couples constructed for themselves through the conventions of exchanging love letters was subject to many outside influences. It considers among others the case of a young woman who corresponded with multiple soldier penfriends, doubtless motivated by her own quest for pleasure and attention but also encouraged by regime messages to young women on the home front urging them to send ‘love tokens’ to unattached men at the front. Overall, however, the chapter makes the case that intimate correspondence between home and front, particularly where it evoked sexual feelings, could for all its conventional qualities constitute a refuge for individuals from the anxieties caused by the war and the dangers faced by front-line soldiers and civilians on the home front.

This chapter explores personal property and the desire for possessions as a dimension of private life in Nazi Germany. It examines the regime’s promotion of ‘German advertising’ as part of its drive against ‘Jewish’ business and asks how far, if at all, popular aspirations for consumer goods were accommodated within a dictatorship that was geared to a war economy at the expense of private consumption. It goes on to ask how far and with what arguments the regime in wartime encouraged private saving, and it shows that the promotional material used by savings banks often encouraged private saving using arguments – even in wartime – that focused less on patriotic duty than on personal dreams of material possessions. In promoting wartime saving, the regime thus in many respects continued its pre-war encouragement of private consumer aspirations, even if such aspirations were largely deferred.

This chapter examines the career of the novelist and advice columnist Walther von Hollander during the Third Reich, setting it in the context of his longer career before and after Nazism and in particular his prominence as an advice columnist in post-war West Germany. It argues that von Hollander’s books and letters to his readers during the Nazi period contained an ambivalent mix of messages. On one hand, he promoted the idea that individual personal happiness could be achieved during self-optimisation and conscious effort applied to personal relationships. This notion, characteristic of contemporary Western societies, was not specific to Nazism. On the other hand, his advice was also tinged with elements of Nazi ideology that promised to dissolve and eradicate the disappointments associated with individuality through an orientation towards the wider community and the nation.

This chapter analyses a range of different ego-documents, written and visual, to explore how ordinary Germans positioned themselves vis-a-vis the National Socialist regime. Creating such records was a symbolically charged practice which valorised notions of the private. The analysis particularly focuses on the performance of gender roles in this context. The first section explores these issues in private conversations recorded in the 1930s by Amy Buller, which were later published as 'Darkness over Germany'. The second section examines private photo albums made by young women, showcasing leisure and enjoyment as ways of living out ideological promises of the Nazi regime. The third section analyses an illustrated diary by the wife of a German officer, which configures her experience of the years 1942–1945 as a romantic fantasy. The analysis shows not just what National Socialism did to ordinary Germans, but what ordinary Germans did with National Socialism. In using it as a resource to realise their personal aspirations and fantasies, they could become avid supporters of the regime – but also ones that were all too happy to drop its specific political aims in an instance, when new ideological templates promised greater personal satisfaction.

This chapter critiques the way in which historians of National Socialism have dealt with the topic of private life, highlights recent new developments in the historiography that can be built on, and shows how concepts of privacy and the private drawn from sociology and political theory can usefully be applied and tested in relation to developments under the Nazi dictatorship.

This chapter examines the home leave granted to soldiers during the Second World War as a fundamental dimension of private life for millions of Germans in wartime. It explores the topic from a number of different perspectives. It outlines the regime’s policies and propaganda regarding home leave as a privilege, focusing on the regime’s goals and its conflicting impulses both to control the time men spent away from their military duties and to allow some degree of undisturbed privacy. The chapter then examines personal letters between home and front in order to explore the expectations and experiences relating to home leave on the part of the men on leave and their wives or girlfriends and families. Finally, it uses cases from military and civil courts to show instances of marital conflict and domestic violence associated with home leave.