"An examination of how American leftist radicalism was experienced in a gendered and raced context through the lives of three women (Charlotte Anita Whitney, Dorothy Ray Healey, and Kendra Harris Alexander) who joined and led the California branches of the Communist Party from 1919 to 1992"--

"This volume offers a feminist critique of counter- and deradicalization programmes, including those collected under the umbrella of 'preventing and countering violent extremis'. Based on insights from five countries, and examples from elsewhere, the book shows how collectively efforts rely on particular narratives of agency, security and human rights. Putting gender at the centre of analysis reveals a series of significant limitations in anti-radicalisation work, in construction, operation, and evaluation. First, these programmes fail to explore or engage with how masculinity and femininity inform the radicalisation process. As a result, they cannot successfully understand the personal drivers or the socio-political environment of these programmes. Second, within the operations of these programmes it becomes clear that male radicalisation is unreflectively linked to an excessive but flawed masculinity, whilst ideas about women's radicalisation depend on orientalist stereotypes about passivity and subjugation. Solutions for male deradicalisation therefore hinge on particular ideals of masculinity that few men can obtain, and deradicalising women is seen as a rescue mission. Third, the impact of these programmes derives from a racialized paternalist logic that justifies intervention in 'ordinary lives' in the name of security, yet fails to deliver. There is a gendered differential in the impact of counter-radicalisation measures. Although the rhetoric of countering terrorism is often couched in a narrative of 'women's rights' and 'liberal values', the book demonstrates the consequences are often detrimental to these precepts. The book concludes by offering an alternative way of thinking about and implementing anti-radicalisation efforts, rooted in a feminist peace"--

This book presents original research on gender and the power dynamics of diverse forms of violent extremism, and efforts to counter them. Based on focus group and interview research with some 250 participants in Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands and UK in 2015 and 2016, it offers insights from communities affected by radicalisation and violent extremism. It introduces the concept of gendered radicalisation, exploring how the multiple factors of paths to violent extremist groups – social, local, individual and global – can differ for both men and women, and why. The book also offers a critical analysis of gender and terrorism; a summary of current policy in the five countries of study and some of the core gendered assumptions prevalent in interventions to prevent violent extremism; a comparison of Jihadi extremism and the far right; and a chapter of recommendations. This book is of use to academics, policy-makers, students and the general reader interested in better understanding a phenomenon defining our times.

In 1919 Charlotte Anita Whitney, a wealthy white woman, received one of the first Communist Labor Party membership cards for the charter group of the northern California Communist Labor Party. Less than a decade later in Berkeley, California, a Jewish woman named Dorothy Ray Healey became a card-carrying member of the Young Communist League. Nearly forty years later, in 1966, Kendra Claire Harris Alexander, a mixed-race woman, enlisted with the Los Angeles branch of the Communist Party, determined to promote class equality. In Gendering Radicalism, Beth Slutsky examines how American leftist radicalism was experienced through the lives of these three women who led the California branches of the Communist Party from its founding in 1919 to its near dissolution in 1992. Separately, each woman represents a generation of the membership and activism of the party. Collectively, Slutsky argues, their individual histories tell the story of one of the most infamous organizations this country has ever known and in a broader sense represent the story of all women who have devoted their lives to radicalism in America. Slutsky considers how gender politics, California’s political climate, coalitions with other activist groups and local communities, and generational dynamics created a grassroots Communist movement distinct from the Communist parties in the Soviet Union and Europe. An ambitious comparative study, Gendering Radicalism demonstrates the continuity and changes of the party both within and among three generations of its female leaders’ lives.

Gender and the Radical and Extreme Right takes up an important and often-overlooked across scholarship on the radical right, gender, and education. These subfields have mostly operated independent of one another, and the scholars and practitioners who attend to educational interventions on the far right rarely address gender directly, while the growing body of scholarship on gender and the far right typically overlooks the issue of educational implications. This edited volume steps into this space, bringing together seven chapters and an afterword to help readers rethink the educational implications of research on gender and the radical right. As a starting point for future dialogue and research across previously disparate subfields, this volume highlights education as one space where such an integration may be seen as a fruitful avenue for further exploration. This book was originally published as a special issue of Gender and Education.

This book explores a significant lacuna in British history. Between the 1790s and the 1840s, the concept of psychological androgyny or the unsexed mind emerged as a notion of psychosexual equality, promoted by a small though influential network of heterodox radicals on the margins of Rational Dissent. Deeply concerned with the growing segregation of the sexes, supported seemingly by arbitrary and increasingly binary models of sexual difference, heterodox radicals insisted that while the body might be sexed, the mind was not. They argued that society and the prejudicial masculinist institutions of patriarchy should be reformed to accommodate and protect what one radical described as an ‘infinitely varied humanity’. In placing the concept of psychological androgyny centre stage, this book offers a substantial revision to understandings of progressive debates on gender in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century in Britain.

"This volume offers a feminist critique of counter- and deradicalization programmes, including those collected under the umbrella of 'preventing and countering violent extremis'. Based on insights from five countries, and examples from elsewhere, the book shows how collectively efforts rely on particular narratives of agency, security and human rights. Putting gender at the centre of analysis reveals a series of significant limitations in anti-radicalisation work, in construction, operation, and evaluation. First, these programmes fail to explore or engage with how masculinity and femininity inform the radicalisation process. As a result, they cannot successfully understand the personal drivers or the socio-political environment of these programmes. Second, within the operations of these programmes it becomes clear that male radicalisation is unreflectively linked to an excessive but flawed masculinity, whilst ideas about women's radicalisation depend on orientalist stereotypes about passivity and subjugation. Solutions for male deradicalisation therefore hinge on particular ideals of masculinity that few men can obtain, and deradicalising women is seen as a rescue mission. Third, the impact of these programmes derives from a racialized paternalist logic that justifies intervention in 'ordinary lives' in the name of security, yet fails to deliver. There is a gendered differential in the impact of counter-radicalisation measures. Although the rhetoric of countering terrorism is often couched in a narrative of 'women's rights' and 'liberal values', the book demonstrates the consequences are often detrimental to these precepts. The book concludes by offering an alternative way of thinking about and implementing anti-radicalisation efforts, rooted in a feminist peace"--