This article deliberates on the entanglements between politics and the history of food, health, and gender in Hindu middle-class households of early twentieth-century North India, through the genre of printed cookbooks in Hindi. While cookbooks became important nodes through which to construct an ideal Hindu housewife and kitchen, they were also a place where educated, middle-class women’s voices came to be heard, recorded, and published. The article shows how and why cookbooks are an important source for writing gendered social histories of the Hindu middle classes in modern India. Simultaneously, reflecting on the larger politics of food, the article focuses on the social identities embedded in these culinary texts, and the multiple meanings they embodied, as they strengthened gender, caste, and religious boundaries, constructed a past golden culinary age, upheld ayurvedic knowledge, bemoaned the present state of culinary sciences, used food to overcome the malaise of the middle classes, fashioned an ideal Hindu upper-caste palate as synonymous with a vegetarian diet, and imagined a healthy family and a strong Hindu nation through culinary idioms.

The Bad Bridget project centres on Irish-born female criminal suspects in North America from 1838 to 1918. Its title derives from the common occurrence of the forename Bridget in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Ireland, and its application as a collective name to Irish women in the US. The ‘Bad Bridget’ title seemed to capture our focus on the individual, as well as the diverse experiences of the girls and women on whom the project is based. While we hesitated about using the title initially, lest ‘bad’ suggest a shaming of behaviour or individuals, or ‘Bridget’ a judgement on Irish heritage, we decided that the benefits of the collective name outweighed potential drawbacks. This article expands on the idea that a name can imply shame. It focuses on our use of real forenames and surnames instead of pseudonyms (or other anonymisation alternatives) to identify individual girls and women in our project outputs to date. The article makes the case for the use of real names in this context, exploring in turn our roles and responsibilities as historians, archival and scholarly expectations, our responsibilities towards our subject matter, and our audiences (including the descendants of the Irish girls and women suspected of criminal behaviour).

The history of environmental education in Australia is political, and fraught with power battles. Indeed, environmental education in Australia (as in many places elsewhere) has always been political. The early calls for environmental education came as a response to the perceived growing environmental crises on the 1960s. At this time, it was seen as a scientific and social priority by scientists, environmentalists and academics, but it was not seen as an educational priority by education departments. Rather, environmental educators were treated as yet another adjectival education lobby group wanting space in an already overcrowded curriculum. There was a time when most state education authorities were engaging with environmental education, but the politicisation of the placement of sustainability as (an optional) cross-curriculum priority has enabled avoidance of the politics of environmental issues and thereby a political stance that is tacitly supporting the status quo of the current neoliberal political systems. This article argues that the times have changed and so has the nature of politics and power bases, and it is time to rethink approaches to environmental education research and recognise that the politics of the past may not be the politics of the future as the generations grow different.

Globally, women experience poverty at disproportionate rates to men, with the situation being worse for Indigenous women and women of colour. Social security systems are one avenue for income redistribution that can alleviate poverty. However, such systems are themselves embedded within and produced by unequal social relations, meaning they can also serve to perpetuate and exacerbate social inequalities. This is exemplified under neoliberal welfare reforms, which have disproportionate negative impacts for women across the world (e.g. increased poverty and stigma, reduced health/wellbeing, and more). Again, this is particularly the case for Indigenous women and women of colour.

In this article, we offer an intersectional feminist analysis of an intensive form of neoliberal welfare conditionality, Australia’s ‘compulsory income management’ program (CIM). CIM quarantines social security incomes onto cashless bank cards to restrict expenditure to ‘approved’ items. Drawing on interviews and surveys with 170 individuals who have personally experienced CIM, we show that it has myriad negative impacts that are especially borne by (Indigenous) women. These are not, we argue, unintended policy impacts, but are instead symptomatic of the gendered and racialised violence that is woven into patriarchal capitalism more broadly. Thus, the experience of CIM holds lessons for welfare states internationally.

Although there is evidence that social status has a genetic basis, it is less known whether the genetic predisposition differs between men and women as well as among different status indicators and whether there are any intercorrelations among predispositions of status indicators. We therefore investigated the genetic predisposition for different indicators of social status separately for men and women, using polygenic scores obtained from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study. We used multivariate polygenic regression of 7 different social status indicators on a total of 24 different polygenic scores. We find that in both men and women, wages and education show more associations with polygenic scores than the other status indicators. Also, the genetic predispositions for education and wages are correlated in both men and women, whereas in men more than in women, the genetic predispositions seem to cluster into wages and education on the one hand, and status indicators of position in the hierarchy, on the other hand, with being in a management position somewhere in between. These findings are consistent with an assumption of two different forms of selection pressure associated with either cognitive skill or dominance, which holds true particularly in men. We conclude that the genetic predisposition to higher social status may have changed even though the importance of the cultural trait of social status may have been very constant. Social status may thus be an example of a social trait of constant importance, but with a changing genetic predisposition.

This article presents a systematic examination of matrilineal succession in Greek myth. It uses MANTO, a digital database of Greek myth, to identify kings who succeed their fathers-in-law, maternal grandfathers, step-fathers, or wives’ previous husbands. Analysis of the fifty-four instances identified shows that the prominence of the ‘succession via widow’ motif in archaic epic is not typical of the broader tradition. Rather, civic mythmaking more commonly relies on succession by sons-in-law and maternal grandsons to craft connections between cities and lineages, and to claim panhellenic prestige. We show that matrilineal successors are not treated as necessarily illegitimate or inferior within the overwhelmingly patrilineal conventions of Greek myth. In fact, matrilineal calculations afford certain advantages, like the ability to integrate heroes from elsewhere, or to champion local kings with divine fathers. Matrilineal succession reveals the gendered dynamics inherent to Greek myth; we argue that, although in these instances regnal power is transferred through female relatives, the heroines involved are typically treated simply as nodes for this power and their roles in these stories do not necessarily correlate to a greater visibility or autonomy.

Sabina Yuhas (@Overszabi) and Juliana Belova (@juliewanderz or Oyibo Marlian) are Hungarian and Russian women, respectively, who are fascinated by Nigerian popular culture. Despite their successes in exploiting Black culture to attain wealth and fame in the Nigerian mediasphere, their works have hardly been studied. Close readings and nuanced analyses of their selected TikTok skits show a multiplicity of images that are neither fully European nor Nigerian—equivocal identities—mediating Otherness. However, the longstanding power asymmetries between Africa and Europe characterize their enactments as commodification of Blackness, accounting for why Nigerians who perform “Europeanness” do not attain corresponding success.

This introduction sets out the context for the special feature on gender and deindustrialization. It briefly outlines the development of research in this field and the contribution made by the articles included in this issue, before pointing to some directions for future research.