The Future That Was: A History of Third World Feminism Against Authoritarianism

Beginning in the 1970s, women of the decolonizing world offered new visions of liberation that centered the ideas and lives of women. Galvanized by International Women’s Year in 1975 and the UN’s Decade of Women, Third World women developed novel ideas of equality and self-determination, building a new internationalism in opposition to neocolonialism and postcolonial authoritarianism. In The Future That Was, historian Durba Mitra offers a novel account of how these women wrote Third World feminism into being, catalyzing a momentous expansion of knowledge about women, gender, and sexuality that transformed emancipatory politics across the globe.

 

 

Durba Mitra is Richard B. Wolf Associate Professor in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. Mitra’s scholarship brings together feminist thought, sexuality studies, and global intellectual history. Mitra's second book, The Future That Was: A History of Third World Feminism Against Authoritarianism, is forthcoming from Princeton University Press in early 2026. Mitra is also the author of Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought (Princeton University Press, 2020).

 

Sponsors: Centre for South Asian Studies, Asian Institute at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, and the Department of History, University of Toronto.