This collection sets out to analyze the influence of women's movements on the emergence of Europe's welfare state from the 1880s to the 1950s, and the limits of that influence. It compares the women's movements - and social policies concerning women - in the dictatorships of Italy, Germany and Spain with the democracies in Britain, France and Scandinavia. It throws new lights on feminism, especially in the inter-war period.

This collection sets out to analyze the influence of women's movements on the emergence of Europe's welfare state from the 1880s to the 1950s, and the limits of that influence. It compares the women's movements - and social policies concerning women - in the dictatorships of Italy, Germany and Spain with the democracies in Britain, France and Scandinavia. It throws new lights on feminism, especially in the inter-war period.

Historically, as well as more recently, women's emancipation has been seen in two ways: sometimes as the `right to be equal' and sometimes as the `right to be different'. These views have often overlapped and interacted: in a variety of guises they have played an important role in both the development of ideas about women and feminism, and the works of political thinkers by no means primarily concerned with women's liberation. The chapters of this book deal primarily with the meaning and use of these two concepts in the context of gender relations (past and present), but also draw attention to their place in the understanding and analysis of other human relationships.

Contents:
Contributors include: Carole Pateman, Adriana Cavarero, Karen Offen, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Deborah L. Rhode, Patrizia Violi, Rosi Braidotti, Jane Flax, Silvia Vegetti Finzi

This highly acclaimed volume brings together some of the world's foremost historians of ideas to consider Machiavelli's political thought in the larger context of the European republican tradition, and the image of Machiavelli held by other republicans. An international team of scholars from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds (notably law, philosophy, history and the history of political thought) explore both the immediate Florentine context in which Machiavelli wrote, and the republican legacy to which he contributed.