Being reviewed:
The Future That Was: A History of Third World Feminism Against Authoritarianism
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Durba Mitra is a feminist historian and theorist whose work explores how gender and sexuality has shaped the intimate relationship between modern disciplinary knowledge and emancipatory politics. Her new book, The Future That Was: A History of Third World Feminism Against Authoritarianism (Princeton University Press, 2026), opens by reflecting on the powerful yearnings of global women who worked to build a different world through research on women and gender. Mitra argues that Third World feminism reinvented Third Worldism as a project of antiauthoritarianism. The Future That Was explores key genres that have defined the trajectory of feminist internationalism in the twentieth century, from the rise of women’s conferences and policy reports on women’s status to the expansion of transnational protests for women’s rights. As Mitra shows, feminist intellectuals refused the pessimism and disillusionment that resulted the fracturing of movements for civil rights and decolonization in the 1970s and 1980s. Instead, they defiantly revitalized a collective liberatory politics centered in the ideas and visions of women.
The book engages key debates that shape the critical yet endangered work of gender and sexuality studies today, including a commitment to imagining a “feminism against cisness” based in the ideas of feminist literary scholar, feminist materialist, and trans studies theorist Emma Heaney. Mitra demonstrates how global research on women had a vexed dependence on NGO funding, foreign aid, private foundations, and international governance that enshrined the quantification of sexual difference in the foundations of international rights. The book reflects shared commitments by Mitra and Heaney to a feminist future freed from the dangerous policing and violent enforcement of binary gender. The Future That Was teaches us about the aspirations of minoritized knowledge like women’s and gender studies following the United Nations International Women’s Year in 1975, and how fragile these fields are now, fifty years later, with the institutionalization of Project 2025, the annihilation of US aid, and attacks on gender and “DEI” across colleges and universities. Seemingly resilient infrastructures for global research on women, gender, and sexual rights have been and continue to be destroyed by authoritarian states, reactionary think tanks, and universities scared of funding threats.
Emma Heaney spoke with Durba Mitra on Zoom in February 2026 about this vital history of Third World feminism and the place of feminist visions for the future in our world now.
Emma Heaney (EH): How did you come to this project, at this moment in history? You write in the introduction that you started out researching the role of women and feminist knowledge production in the immediate aftermath of decolonial uprising. But you found that in the early period, in the 1950s, these milieus were largely dominated by men. How, then, did you find this urgent story of the fierce resistance to patriarchal aspects of authoritarian states in the decolonizing world?
Durba Mitra (DM): This book is very much a product of pandemic times. I imagined that I would write an expansive book that required travel across the world, and then, in a time of incredible isolation, fear, and disillusionment, I found myself writing a very different book: one that speaks very much to our present, even though the history that I am writing about is fifty years ago.
My first book, Indian Sex Life, told a history at the turn of the 20th century, in which feminized sexuality became central to the development of modern social thought. But as I wrote, I wondered, How did women understand themselves as subjects?
So, I wanted to write a history of what happened when women entered the domain of knowledge production, en masse in the mid-20th century, when women gained access to literacy and higher education for the first time across the world. How do we understand the role of women as knowledge producers themselves?
I was also writing this book for my students. In the last ten years, we have had so much conversation about the decolonization of knowledge, about who were the key thinkers of decolonization, and the importance of these ideas today. And for the teaching of decolonization, we have developed a powerful, alternative anti-canon: everything from Frantz Fanon to Aimé Césaire to Walter Rodney. But when I was teaching the history of decolonization, I found myself thinking, How do we understand feminist epistemologies in this history?
Initially, I had a romantic idea that if we went back to the earliest period of non-alliance and decolonization, we would readily find a history of women who were theorizing worlds, a domain of Third World feminist imaginaries that are part of this early epistemological history of anticolonialism, Third Worldism, and decolonization. And there’s certainly women who were key parts of anticolonial struggles with sustained commitment to women’s rights. But the creation of an entire domain of knowledge based in Third World feminist dreams came later.
These women wrote against disillusionment, insisting on the importance of situated feminist knowledge as a way to combat the neofascism and inequality of their present.
It is only in the 1970s and 1980s when the feminists really take the international stage. And it was after that initial period of Third World utopianism, and Afro-Asian imaginaries of solidarity in Third World spaces. Third World feminist imaginaries are expanding in a very different moment: in a time of profound disillusionment with civil rights and decolonization with the assassinations of anticolonial and civil rights leaders; in the cruel economic inequality that expands across the world; in the fracturing and failure of postcolonial states the rise of civil and proxy wars; and, of course, in the ongoing dynamics of Cold War. In this time of fracture and pessimism, there was an incredible proliferation of writing by the world’s women and women of color in the United States and Europe. These women wrote against disillusionment, insisting on the importance of situated feminist knowledge as a way to combat the neofascism and inequality of their present.
That’s what stuck out to me. What is it about this moment of despair that led women to become the builders of worlds and optimists for a different future? How did Third World women reimagine the world and engage in projects of worldmaking, thinking with political theorist Adom Getachew’s essential formulation on the world after empire? What happened when women were able to seize the means of knowledge production, to write their world for the first time?
EH: Yet your book isn’t just about these women rushing the stage, as it were, but how their advance was contained: by Western states, by international bodies of power, and others. A significant method of containment was luring or incorporating Third World feminism—now through the filter of “women’s rights”—into the emergent international diplomatic order, to the expanding of the UN in the 1970s and 1980s. And this lure was baited with foundation money, crucially from the Ford Foundation, and other international foundations. The hook was this taming of Third World feminist claims about political rights into a new frame: individual empowerment, social services, microcredit, all under this umbrella term of “development.”
How was this idea of development advanced, materially and politically? What were the consequences of rhetorical investment in the idea of the development of women, and in grounding that idea in the center of this new phase of an emergent international organization of national relationships?
DM: When I began to write the book, my first question was: What is the archive for the history of Third World feminism?
What I found was an archive in excess. Almost everything that I could find was a report for a state development agency, a United Nations conference report, or an NGO report for a funding agency, like USAID or Ford. Unlike my first book with its archive in fragments, I was confronted with a different problem of the archive, an unending pile of papers. What kind of history of women can one write from a prolific archive that is created on behalf of policymaking? The language of these reports reflected a very specific lexicon, that of development, which utilized the language of indicators and the comparative measures of women’s health, reproduction, and economic life. These categories of development have become naturalized over the course of the late 20th century as the dominant way to assess a democratic state and comparatively measure and rank the progress of nations. Categories of women and gender became foundational for these global comparative measures of development.
What was striking to me is that women were deeply involved in this project of incorporating those measures into state practice and UN internationalism. These development paradigms were produced in a domain of research that intersected with but was distinct from the institutionalization of women’s and gender studies in the North American academy. An entire world of thousands of women from around the globe engaged in a project of knowledge production by and for the state, international governing bodies, and philanthropic funders.
And so, while scholars within the academy in the global North begin to produce new fields of feminist theoretical writing (and what become the seeds of queer theory and beyond), women in the decolonizing world are expected and funded primarily to do “action research,” quantitative social science research that was necessarily utilitarian for policymaking.
Development research has to have a relationship to policy that can be implemented: in legal structures, in health programs, use value that was evaluated for its practicality. There’s a utilitarian idea of the knowledge project, unlike what we imagine as the use value of feminist theory or feminist and queer thought. And there is a bifurcation that I am describing in this period: Over the last fifty years, the place of theory is the global North, and everyone else is mandated to produce empirical research.
I would add that there were many generations of people in the decolonizing world and people involved in civil rights here in the United States who were invested in the state as a site of realizing their political possibility, in truly democratic status that would enshrine their political rights. The women I study were involved in state making projects that imagined an ideal postcolonial democracy where women would have access to equal citizenship, where women would be leaders working to imagine what that state would look like. The project of decolonization was a project of experimentation of what the state should and could be.
Yet what the incomplete process of decolonization yielded was the swift foreclosure of any of those projects of radical experimentation. Postcolonial states replicated and reproduced many of the state structures that they inherited from the colonial state that came before. Even in the case of civil rights in the United States, we see the massive proliferation and implementation of laws designed to ensure structural equality and access to rights; but of course, there was a significant distance between equality before the law and equality in everyday life.
Women enter the scene of internationalism and confront the alienation and disillusionment that people feel after being burned by the project of state politics. These women were deeply invested in working within the domain of nation-state and international politics. They built feminist imaginaries that could transform the state but also worked against patriarchal laws, policies, and violent policing by the state. Feminists worked in and against the state, to use the language of the 1979 British socialist pamphlet recently animating the work of political theorist Katrina Forrester.
EH: This reminds me most of W. E. B. Du Bois’s careful materialist account of the aftermath of the Civil War, and the potential of radical reconstruction, that was very rapidly, in the period of less than a decade, recaptured by existing structures of power. There’s a real parallel between that and the story that you’re telling: there was a generation of Black women in the United States, in the late 19th and early 20th century, who were very engaged in racial uplift programming to document the conditions of racial terror that were the stuff of life under Jim Crow. It’s a parallel moment of genuine possibility, which was recaptured by the capitalist state and by the international order of power, very quickly.
DM: This was a real test for me as a writer because writing about possibility or optimism or the dreams of a feminist future can be challenging to express as a feminist theorist and historian committed to critique. I begin the book with the concept of yearning, which I learned from the great Toni Morrison, who writes of the yearnings of people during the early promise of civil rights and decolonization in her essay, “The Foreigner’s Home.” It requires a different relationship to the work of historical judgement, where I worked to both imagine and critically assess the lives and ideas of these women, their very real aspirations and labor to build a different world and the biases and exclusions that shaped the limits of their intellectual work. This is what I name in the book as “a history without prophets.” I immersed myself in the fact that women not only participated in but saw real political possibility against patriarchal nationalism in the promise of UN internationalism.
It makes me reflect on what we have lost in the present, especially in the last two and a half years, with the swift dismantling of the United Nations, human rights internationalism, and USAID, which are fraught institutions worthy of much criticism, but without question transformed the terrain of women’s organizing and political life across the world. Today, we have a rather pessimistic view of the many ineffective resolutions at the United Nations or the lack of enforcement power at the International Criminal Court for enforcing justice in the international stage. But for these women—and for Third World people in the 1970s and 1980s—these international bodies became the primary place to build a new global political imagination that could undo neocolonial governance and increasingly authoritarian politics at home.
EH: So, you had to look toward the potential that Third World women were finding in different structures for their thought production. For example, even though the NGO was part of the strategy of containing the rise of Third World women, you talk about how feminist organizations were creating knowledge against neocolonialist ideology. And one way they were doing so was through producing reports on the status of women in different states.
Can you talk about the report as a form? What information did it seek? How did the creation of quantitative data affect women’s lives? What effects did these documents have?
DM: I thought that I was writing a book that was going to be very different than writing my first book, which focused on histories of knowledge under colonialism, and then I found myself focused on a genre that is colonial in its foundations: the report. The report is a key element of the constitution of the modern state but also is essential for liberatory politics for anticolonial movements and minorities in the second half of the 20th century. What was really striking to me is how much institutional labor went into the practice of report writing. And this is particularly so when we think about feminist intellectual labor on the international scale.
This has to do with this idea of research that is utilitarian in nature, that research on women was supposed to have an effect on the actual lives of women. And the way you have an effect on their lives is you write a report for an increasingly technocratic state that offered detailed policy recommendations. The state may then take the report, based on the evidence of the social scientific data, and reform policies or procedures for women, and then commission another report.
In 1963 the United States wrote a status of women report on women in America, a short report with broad summaries about the condition of women. Within ten years, dozens of countries had written some kind of status of women report for the respective country. And soon, as we see with the rise of internationalism, is the rise of a hegemonic genre of reporting that enumerated the condition of women in nation-states that could be used in big comparative projects of international conferences and plans of action.
Everyone gets involved in the labor of report writing. Even local organizations began to write status reports. And reports beget reports, with updates to earlier research studies and newly commissioned reports on new laws and policies. Institutions begin to produce reports for the sake of writing reports.
But what is considered a measure of “status”? Like, what is the concept of status? What is the meaning of the category “women”? Both of these concepts are taken for granted in these reports; they are naturalized and imagined as clearly delineated empirical sites that could be easily measured and enumerated. Status in particular has a legal dimension to it, and so we see that right away in the mid-1970s with the publication of reports on the legal status of women from across the world. But over the course of the 1970s and 1980s that word, “status,” becomes more and more broad, and it comes to mean anything to do with women. The category of women is taken as a biological determined, self-evident category for demographic measure in a universal calculus of economic development, what M. Murphy terms the “economization of life.” Population studies and demographic enumeration dominate the world of research on women and gender, and narrow measures of women as labor dominated their constitution as subjects, as Neferti Tadiar describes in the cruel capitalist calculus that leaves little “remaindered life.”
The report was a powerfully normative genre and deeply entrenched in structures of the reproduction of state power based in binary gender. Yet as I show, women of the decolonizing world also worked to subvert the norms of the status report to produce radically transformative documents, revolutionizing the very limits of the report.
EH: And therefore, repressed…
DM: Exactly. Those radically transformative reports on the status of women under military dictatorships, like in 1980s Pakistan, are forcefully disappeared by the state. Women take up normative genres, replicating norms at points, but also create new possibilities for dissent in these genres and defy the presumed purpose of the policy report.
Third World women felt that you all are not talking about the issues that matter to us: neocolonialism, apartheid, colonial occupation, the perpetual structure of debt that created ongoing conditions of war…
EH: Let’s talk about the Nairobi Manifesto of 1985. It’s this very broad and direct declaration of dissent, produced by several feminist organizations in Africa. The manifesto really targets the World Bank and the IMF, names the conditions of famine and food insecurity, and other persistent and wide-ranging problems from the perspective of African feminists. That’s how you begin your chapter on organizations, but, as the chapter ends, with the immiseration of Third World women only increases across the 1980s and 1990s.
What happened? How did these bold aspirations and clear vision of organizations fail to produce, or that were prevented from producing, the amelioration of those conditions that they were identifying?
DM: This is really the most profound manifesto from Third World feminists, worthy of more study and teaching. It is a direct indictment of wide-ranging authorities for creating impossible living conditions for the most vulnerable people on the African continent. The manifesto is an extraordinary product of the collaboration of many organizations, including AAWORD, the Association of African Women for research and development. AAWORD is the first really Pan-African feminist organization, the first transnational research organization across Third World spaces and a model for organizations that followed around the world.
AAWORD was founded at a conference at a 1976 Wellesley College on Women and Development. Frustrated by their marginalization at the conference, Third World feminists from across Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America have a counter conference, late at night, subverting the official conference and its emphasis on American women’s research on the rest of the world. Third World women felt that you all are not talking about the issues that matter to us: neocolonialism, apartheid, colonial occupation, the perpetual structure of debt that created ongoing conditions of war, famine, and displacement for the world’s poor.
That manifesto was written over four decades ago. But when I return to it now, and I feel devastated to know we see worse conditions of militarism, forced migration, and the oppression of women than what these women were diagnosing in that statement from 1985.
Third World women were catalyzed through transnational collectivity, through the act of being together across difference and borders. So Latin American feminists went to India, and Indian feminists went to the Caribbean, and Caribbean feminists like Lucille Mathurin Mair did visits across Europe, the United States, Asia, and Africa to talk about the common needs and dreams of Third World women. Women made alliances because they saw a link between women based on global economic inequality, global militarism, and patriarchal authoritarianism that created a necessity of alliance across regions.
I was engaging with archival research during the pandemic and then caregiving for my mother, so I was sitting solitary in an apartment and hospitals for months and reading the writing of women that were going across borders, meeting in giant conference centers with thousands of people, sitting together in small workshops, laughing and crying together. And I saw that the world they lived in—where you went to a gathering in Copenhagen and then Delhi and then Nairobi and at the workshop you would build a collaborative research project and organizations—swiftly ends after 9/11 because of border restrictions.
I suggest that the building of women’s organizations through cross border collaboration leads to a total transformation of civil society. There is an entire domain of organizing and writing that leads to new structures of reproductive rights, access to healthcare, welfare policies for food and nutrition, revolutionizing the distribution of state- and aid-based resources. With the rise of women’s nongovernmental organization—which both supplants and supplements the state, particularly related to basic resources and healthcare, but also in terms of research and writing—suddenly there is a new structure of knowledge production that was not within the formal domain of state nor in the academy.
EH: The next domain of knowledge production that you engage with is the book. Specifically, you focus on the collective knowledge that surrounded production of texts in the milieus that you study, and also how the production of consciousness was very central to the imagined project of these women. You talk about white papers, sexual health manuals, children’s books, journals, anthologies, and publishing organizations. And within the people who were engaged in producing and circulating text, there was more diversity of class, caste, and race.
How did the production and circulation of writing contrast with the project of conferences? Was writing a place that was less contained, or was it stymied by the lure of money and the necessity of mobility and resources?
DM: The more I think about it, the more I realize that in the 1970s and 1980s there is an epistemological revolution that transformed the terrain of knowledge about women, gender, and sexuality. And for those of us who were born into that moment, we may not realize that before that period there was little published writing by the world’s women about women. In this moment, there is just … an explosion of writing. So much of the experience of writing this book was letting that revelation wash over me.
Women begin to write. And as soon as they have access to writing, they do it voraciously, in a way that was never imagined before.
Yet even as women seized the means of knowledge production, they required capital in order to publish that knowledge. Between 1980 and 1990, there are dozens and dozens of feminist presses that are created. By the mid-1990s, because of corporate capital and publishers consolidating in the global North, there is a very quick shutting down of feminist presses and progressive and left presses. There are major international feminist bookfairs around the world in the 1980s and into the 1990s, but that world of feminist publishing disappears soon after. By the late 1990s, this alternative world of published ephemera, feminist literature and other kinds of writing, collapses.
There is this massive explosion of epistemological possibility—of writing by women—that is largely foreclosed by the neoliberal and corporate takeover of progressive politics. The story I tell comes before cooptation: the work of feminists who created worlds of knowledge before foreclosure, disappearance, defunding, and today, the annihilation of these infrastructures.
EH: The book begins with the enclosure of knowledge in the form of the conference; and the book ends with the rise of street protests. You discuss a 1983 protest called by the Punjab Women’s Lawyers Association and the Women’s Action Forum against the efforts of President Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq’s legal revisions. This revision of Pakistan’s law ensured that women would essentially have no voice in court cases, because it required that two women testify to equal one man in the court of law: raising the legal penalty for adultery, making rape hard to prove.
But it’s an imposition, a legal innovation; and so, Third World women were pushing back. And by showing this protest, you destroy the idea of patriarchy as an ahistorical tradition that some places in the world are stuck in, and some places in the world have progressed beyond. Rather, you reveal precisely how much patriarchy depends on counterrevolution.
How did these protests of the 1980s resonate into the present? Not just the present that we are in, but also the movement from that mid-1980s onward?
DM: If there’s a takeaway from this generation, it is that, amid the nihilism and pessimism that’s surrounded them, they organized. They organized, and they organized, and they organized. And they did so on behalf of what I call a feminist hermeneutical politics, the political claim that women had the right and expertise to interpret the law and authoritative religious texts.
They were organizing in response to counterrevolutionary movements, which had manifested in the form of state repression and new forms of authoritarian rule over women’s lives and bodies. Many postcolonial states invoked the language of anticolonial revolution and anti-imperial claims to sovereignty to maintain power. Algeria is a really good example of this: there is a promise of constitutional democracy and women’s equal rights in the mid-1970s, but by 1980 women faced new draconian laws that dictated their movement and soon women confronted a proposed family legal code that made women subordinate to men across the law.
So, while in any class on decolonization we read the essential ideas of Frantz Fanon, we may not learn the political theories of the women who were involved with the Algerian liberation movement, women like Djamila Bouhired, who spoke on behalf of Algerian independence at the United Nations in 1957. These women become key leaders and symbols in Algerian women’s movements against authoritarian laws in the 1980s. How do we grapple with the fact that women who are involved in Algerian liberation in the 1950s and 1960s, who literally put their bodies on the line for Algerian independence, were two decades later now considered not only second-class citizens, but essentially not citizens at all? And how do we reckon with the incomplete and ongoing work of these women’s movements? Even as women protested the draconian family code then and continue to do so now, it passed in 1984 and remains enshrined in Algerian law today.
So, just because there were women’s mass protests on the streets and in feminist publications does not mean that women are always successful. The history I tell is not a romantic story.
Nonetheless, I am amazed by the work of these feminists because they assert the right to produce expert knowledge and claim authority and self-determination in the face of incredible authoritarian repression and neofascist violence.
EH: Maybe you are not romanticizing, but you are valorizing the effort to say, again and again, How can we make a future? And it’s not about outcome, it’s not about the success, it’s about the endurance of that project. Look at the present condition of the world: the profound maldistribution of life chances, of opulence and deprivation, the valorization of genocide.
But your demand, in this book, is to study what happens in these hopeless situations. To learn what kind of thought and action is produced. And to hold that up.
DM: Thank you for this perspective. This book documents a genealogy of global abolitionist, anticarceral, antimilitary thought, one that is and has been a part of Third World feminism and long tied to global Black feminist thought. It offers resources that may help us today, as we work to claim a politics of feminist imagination and a politics of futurity that is antiwar, anti-occupation, and antigenocide.
Here, again, I cannot help but think about my students. How are we to imagine a threshold for justice, when the paradigms of justice that we struggled to build in the 20th century have been totally annihilated? These women were trying to do that work, experiment and trying to imagine a world where there is an antiwar politics that makes possible a future without forced famine, displacement, and extreme violence, within impossible conditions of living during their present, when survival was not promised. These women were creating, imagining, demanding a shared understanding that human flourishing should be a shared right that we all have.
We no longer have a shared vision of the right to flourishing. The universalist ethical imaginaries that were critical to 20th century thought—civil rights, human rights, and international law—are under annihilation today. Maybe that is where we are: We have to stop being in a crouch, stop hoping that our inaction and silence will protect us from fascist chaos and state violence. Instead, we need to move from being in the defensive and intentionally think towards building a future for ourselves, in the face of authoritarian states that tells us we do not have the right to survive, to create worlds for ourselves. We do. 
This article was commissioned by Ben Platt.
