It is not. Of course, it isn’t. That’s the game they play to try to shut you up before you expose their deception.

A woman can be brilliant, capable, competent, well-educated, emotionally disciplined, accomplished, and deeply committed to her family, and still occupy a structurally vulnerable position. Those are not contradictions, and that distinction matters, because you know what, patriarchy has never fundamentally required women to be weak. It only requires them to be dependent, because dependent women are easier to contain, to manage, to control. To push around.

Women with no power are easier to direct, to destabilize – economically and every which way. You can limit them without even applying any force, And not talking about intelligence or strength, We are talking about leverage – leverage is power

And dependency removes leverage. In fact, dependency is the opposite of power.

Tradwifery narrows the female world

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So in talking about women and power or dependency, we’ve been looking at tradwives, but that’s really just one segment within this whole “put the women away” programme, so when we are talking about trad-wifery, the issue is not cooking; we’re definitely not talking about bread…We’re not even talking about who chooses to have children and who doesn’t

We’re talking about something much broader and decidedly deeper – we are discussing the ‘21st century patriarchal project” where the objective is to drive women out of the leadership, professional and public spaces of the world, and push us back into the condition where we are dependent on men…where we are rendered indigent, dependent and silent, or in other words, powerless. Without power. Without resources, or access to resources

What we’re looking at is constriction; the constriction of financial independence, intellectual expansion, professional development, creative identity, external influence and autonomous mobility.

Tradwifery packages this reduction in very nice words. It describes it beautifully.

It uses terms like softness, peace, devotion, simplicity, but this aesthetic softness does not eliminate structural reality.

If a woman’s survival, stability, and access are heavily mediated through a man, her autonomy has already been significantly reduced, no matter how lovingly this arrangement is presented; how beautiful the wedding or how luxurious the home.

Of course, the question is not whether women should be allowed to choose these kinds of lives. Of course, they should! If they want to. That’s the point of choice and autonomy. It is important to realise, also, that the act of choosing, the act of utilising an option gained for her through feminism does not make her a feminist…and that is another essay for another time.

The real question is why is it that cultures which are shaped by patriarchy consistently celebrate female dependence as feminine virtue?

That is the conversation the system wants us to avoid, because the practitioners are aware, very much so, that once women possess financial leverage, intellectual authority, independent access, mobility or self-sustaining identity, they become significantly harder to contain within unequal systems and structures; within systems and structures built on inequality.

And that is what patriarchy has always struggled with most, one of the things with which it has struggled the most – women having the ability to choose to not be owned and controlled, women’s ability to exercise our options in favour of our own selves.

Biology is a fact. It is not a fence.

While much of the world spent this last weekend buying flowers, the digital zeitgeist was busy drafting an exit-interview for the female mind - a growing, louder narrative that seeks to collapse the entire identity of ‘Woman’ into the single act of ‘Mother”

They call it ‘biological destiny.’ I call it a systemic recall, a calculated move to decommission high-performing intellects just as they are gaining ground in the architecture of power.

Let us begin by addressing the most dangerous accolade, the most effective containment strategy ever handed to a woman: the idea that motherhood is her ‘Peak Femininity.’

On the surface, it sounds like a tribute. In reality, it is a containment strategy, a structural ceiling

When you label a single biological function as the ‘peak,’ the highest point, the apex, the pinnacle, the zenith, you turn every other possible intellectual conquest into a secondary feature. Strategy, leadership, professional accomplishment, global governance – al become secondary; less important; less aspirational.

You create an architectural boundary that suggests a woman’s mind is merely a support system for her reproductive organs. This is the Biological Exit-Interview that the patriarchy has prepared for women. It is a systemic recall designed to bring high-performing womanly intellects back under domestic management. When women are told their “peak” of potential resides in the home, they are being encouraged to exit the arenas where power operates and systemic change actually happens. They are being excluded from human activity; human advancement; being shoved into the shadows and erased from sight – as is clearly being done in Afghanistan and increasingly in the United States, for example.

Today, at the Power Table, we are performing a systemic audit on this ‘peak’ that they want women to just sit quietly upon. We move the conversation from the womb to the will, the will, the human will to advance, to exploration, to more —and we begin with the fact that you, woman, are the architect of your own identity, not a script written by your biology.

We are separating the material from the mind, exposing the intellectual de-skilling of women, and we are reclaiming the only thing that actually defines us: Sovereign Agency. We are performing the most radical, feminine act possible: The exercise of full human agency.

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Every year, on Mother’s Day, the cultural machinery pivots toward a very specific type of reverence. We are surrounded by a narrative that frames motherhood not as a choice or a form of service, but as the “ultimate expression” of womanhood, as a biological destiny that supposedly supersedes all intellectual or professional ambition. In other words, women are not supposed to have any higher ambition than serving men and making their children.

While the idea of motherhood is wrapped in floral tributes, once a year or so, we must look closer. Beneath the celebration lies a systemic audit: an attempt to collapse the expansive architecture of the female mind into the singular utility of the womb. On Mother’s Day, much of the world pauses to honour this labour of the womb. But beneath the pretty cards and the annual curlicued exaltations, lies a more clinical demand: that this specific labour be recognized not just as a contribution, but as a woman’s entirety.” We are being told that it is all that she should aspire to, and that anything else is an abdication of her “natural” role.

Women are being conditioned to accept that not only should they not want, but that furthermore they have not the capacity for anything higher – indeed anything other than – ministering to the man, making his children, maintaining his home and without complaint, supplying every need that he wants her to. That is what they posit as the highest calling of women. The highest calling of men, on the other hand, is never associated with the act of making and raising children, except to the extent that he is acknowledged as “the head of the family”, the man of the house, the king of the castle.

Let’s just say this: having the biological equipment to bear children is a capacity, much like having legs is a capacity for walking.

Having legs does not mean one’s “destiny” is to run marathons to the exclusion of all other activity. So, to argue that a woman’s brain, the most complex structure in the known universe, is merely a secondary support system for her reproductive organs is an intellectual regression, a fallacy, an illogic, a false premise. A demonstration of deep intellectual – and spiritual – ignorance or just rank stupidity.

To say that a woman is to be defined entirely by her reproductive capacity is to say that an architect is defined by the bricks, or steel, or mortar she uses to construct a building; it confuses the material with the mind that directs it – which clearly is not a demonstration of intelligent thinking.

“The suggestion that a woman’s biological capacity is her ‘destiny’ is an attempt to mothball the female mind. Women are not a collection of parts designed for a singular output; we are architects, strategists, and thinkers whose biology is a fact, not a fence. A foundation, but not a boundary.

Motherhood is part of womanhood. It is not the totality of womanhood.

The truth is that motherhood is a profound choice of stewardship – and it is a choice, a choice granted by the fundamental right of very human being to bodily autonomy and sovereignty. Every woman is born with that – to use if and when they please, notwithstanding the malice of the men agitating to deny it for their own nefarious ends. Notwithstanding the fact that the patriarchy resists this reality and expends immeasurable energy and resources to deny women this right – the same right that men claim and which they defend with their very lives!

For them to call motherhood a woman’s ‘destiny’ is to attempt to perform a lobotomy on her potential, it is intended to render women incompetent and unproductive, so those of us who have accepted the conditioning, must stop confusing a capacity for birth with a lack of capacity for everything else.

To have the biological equipment for reproduction is a fact, merely, of femaleness, so to suggest that this equipment dictates a woman’s intellectual or social contribution or her potential for such, is nothing more than a domination and control strategy.

There is a profound difference between the labours of reproduction and the labours of production: biological labour is an automated, physical process. It is very significant, but it does not require the exercise of strategy or the application of rigorous intellect to function; intellectual labour is a voluntary, sovereign act. It is the labour of the will, it is the decision to build systems, influence policy, and direct the course of history.

Motherhood is a magnificent human experience for those who choose it, but it is not a biological mandate that erases the need for a career, a calling, or a contribution to the global intellect. We are humans first, equipped with wombs, yes, but governed by our minds

The single most complex structure in the universe is the human brain – and men, who declare themselves to be intelligent, all-wise and divine beings, continuously fail to comprehend the reality that women were not created to serve them, but are creatures of the universe, here to express the entirety of their selves. Period. Women were not created to be the slaves or servants of men. Women never were animals for men to domesticate.

For them to still be arguing after, even all these millions of years of human evolution, that a woman’s cognitive sovereignty, her ability to strategize, lead, and analyze, is secondary to a biological process is an act of intellectual de-skilling, and generates real questions about the quality of men’s brains. This is a quite simple concept. I mean, of course, we can all agree that it could have been difficult for men to accept when they yet unschooled and ignorant, but with all the scientific and qualitative evidence available to them today, that they still harbour these primitive and unhelpful beliefs is cause for wonder – and concern – about the quality of their brain function, to begin with.

It beggars belief. It is frightening because it has harmed and continues to harm not only some women, but all women and all men, and the entirety of the universe, as a matter of fact.

All the flora and fauna, and the soil itself of our earth, are harmed by men’s insistence that they are the be-all and end all of everything and that women as a consequence do not count for much, and should contribute to the universe, only that which men allow – aka the procreation of other human beings, and that, solely as the means to further the goals of men.

In some very dark corners of the world, the gremlins of patriarchy are twittering that motherhood is peak femininity, and some women who have been co-opted and conditioned are parroting the propaganda.

Framing motherhood as “peak feminism” is a co-option of the word. It attempts to use the language of choice to remove choice.

Think about it for a moment – femininity as it has been fed to us, is a construct of beings who had absolutely no idea what real femininity is; it is a definition created by the patriarchy of old – as assortment of primitive, unschooled, unwise, acquisitive, violent, megalomaniac, despotic, power hungry men – a bunch of beings whose only interest was in ensuring that they – and their interests and proclivities – were served by women…

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These are men who, at best, had a passing familiarity with birth among the animals of the fields, considered women akin to the beasts of the field, alive only to serve them, men as their masters, and fully and unconditionally dismissed the notion that women – female human beings – are also in possession of a brain –made up of the same substance and having the same capacities as theirs. They dismissed that notion, not out of ignorance, because they had seen women at work, had fought and killed women, precisely because of women’s powers and capacities. They knew full well the capacities of women – but they needed the diminution to be true to fit their domination and control world view – they expected it to be proven true, just because they said so.

True femininity is not found in the fulfillment of a pre-determined script. It is found in the intellectual rigor required to define oneself. It is found in the sovereignty of choosing one’s contribution—whether that be raising a child, running a corporation, or auditing the very structures of power that seek to limit us.

What we must do is dismantle the idea that femininity is a passive surrender to biological defaults. If we are to define “Peak Femininity,” let it be this: The exercise of full human agency.

Real sovereignty is the power to define one’s own utility. When “destiny” is dictated by biology, it isn’t “peak” anything; it is a pre-determined script that serves a specific economic and social architecture - and women have a human right to sovereign despite the machination and the stupidity – and cupidity – of certain species of man.

We are humans first. We are governed by our minds, not our mandates. The most radical and feminine thing a woman can do is refuse to be contained by the narrow logic of her own biology and instead, take her place at the table of global thought—fully present, fully intellectual, and entirely by choice.

Women are humans first, equipped with wombs, yes, but governed by our minds, our brains – and the most feminine – and radical – thing a woman can do is exercise her full human agency.

So, every year, when we honour the labour of mothers, let us also honour the sovereign intellect of the women who perform it.

A society that romanticizes motherhood while restricting women’s intellectual, political, economic, and personal freedom is not honoring women, it is managing them.

The question of where women “fit” in any systemic overhaul – corporate, social, political or other – is often framed as a search for a seat at a table that has already been built. They started the Un…

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There are approximately 550 million women in the West and three and a half billion or so in the Global South, all of us living within systems that are highly patriarchal, though that might manifest in different ways. So, it is not the presence of patriarchy itself that is the primary difference between these two groups of women, but the structure of the barriers used to sustain it in different places.

While the West often grapples with the idea of “Technocratic Paternalism”, for example, where power is gated by institutional biases that are as strong as they are sometimes subtle, the Global South frequently navigates “Explicit Structural Exclusion,” where laws and fragile systems create clear and direct barriers to sovereignty, and even to survival

As of January 2026, the global landscape of political leadership shows a slow, uneven ascent, with women now holding 27.5% of national parliamentary seats worldwide. The Global South leads in terms of radical parity in political representation. Countries like Rwanda, Cuba, and Bolivia have achieved or exceeded 50% representation by women and have maintained it for decades. Much of this came through the adoption of legislated quotas, a practice which has not enjoyed much sympathy in the West. In contrast, the West relies on “slow-burn” – very slow burn – cultural shifts.

In a significant setback for 2026, however, partly perhaps as an effect of the intense and growing backlash against women in many parts of the world, the proportion of women Speakers of Parliament has dropped to 19.9%, down from nearly 24% just a year ago. Only 16% of new Speakers appointed in 2025 were women, which might signal a hardening of the “top-tier” glass ceiling.

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Women hold round about 30% of seats on corporate boards worldwide, with Europe being in the lead and the Asian countries having less that 20%, but Chair roles are rare everywhere, sitting at less than 5% altogether.

The “bro-culture” in the STEM and digital sectors is global. There is high access generally, in the West, but retention is much lower for women and there are significant pay gaps. Women make up only 30% of workers in STEMin the Global South, but sub-Saharan Africa has a 11% digital gender gap.

In the West, labour is wage-based and women struggle with things like struggle “unpaid care” and the motherhood penalty, while in the rest of the world, women are shifting toward self-employment or subsistence agriculture due to state fragility, which paradoxically makes them entrepreneurs, which is significant for autonomy and financial independence.

It is in the areas of health and security that the divide seems most visceral. In 2026, the risk of death simply by virtue of being female is drastically different across these two populations.

A 15-year-old girl in a fragile/conflict-affected setting (primarily Global South) has a 1 in 51 lifetime risk of dying from maternal causes. For her peer in the West, that risk is 1 in 593, with the exception of Black women in the US, for whom the rate of maternal death stands at 50.3, with 80% of those considered preventable.

Hostility is the “global common.” Women are subject to all forms of violence, and extremes of violence, in every country and peoples on earth. On a daily basis 76% of women MPs worldwide report experiencing online or offline violence. In the Global South, this often manifests as physical intimidation; in the West, it is increasingly digital and reputational.

Globally, roughly 1 in 3 women aged between 15 and 49 have experienced physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence in their lifetime, with over 137 women killed daily by family members. As of 2026, violence against women remains significantly higher in the Global South (e.g., Oceania, Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia) than in Western countries, generally ranging from 17%–38% for annual prevalence.

Religion remains a primary “Institutional Fixer” that can either gatekeep or provide a floor for women’s rights. The March 2026 Vatican report on women’s leadership highlights a tension: while there is a push for more administrative roles, the “sacred” barriers to ordained authority remain firm.

In the Global South, religious frameworks (such as Shariah or traditional customary laws) often supersede state laws regarding marriage, inheritance, and property.

In the U.S. and parts of Europe, “Religious Liberty” is increasingly used as a framework to roll back reproductive autonomy, mirroring the restrictive family laws found in more conservative Global South states, some of which made their way into the Global South through Western colonisation, originally.

Current data from 2026 suggests that at the present rate of progress, full gender parity will not be reached for another 134 years, so not until 2158, at the earliest. The “dependency syndrome”, where women are forced to rely on systems they did not design, and that were not designed with them in mind – is being, encouragingly, challenged by a rise in feminist-led civil society organizations, which the UN recently cited as the single most powerful driver of progress.

These are just a small portion of the areas that could be investigated, and the differences are, in some cases, quite stark. What is also true is that women tend to work through differences rather than allow them to be points of indissoluble contention. Women of both regions are also, purposefully increasing their interconnectedness, spurred on by a shared resistance to the incidences of increasingly horrific wars, and supported by technology. Women will both overcome differences and use them for good.

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In June 2020, the World Economic Forum (WEF), launched “The Great Reset” in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, introducing it as an economic recovery plan aimed at rebuilding global systems to be more sustainable and equitable.

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The WEF – an emergent coalition of technological oligarchs (broligarchs), ecclesiastical authorities (bishops), and their institutional proxies, (governments and international orgsnisations) – envisioned a coordinated reconfiguration of global socioeconomic and political structures, a transition from traditional governance to a top-down paternalistic technocracy where individual agency is traded for “security” managed by a corporate board. Although the public narrative surrounding this reset emphasizes a transition toward stakeholder capitalism and inclusive growth, a critical analysis reveals a landscape where the fundamental needs and agency of women are relegated to secondary metrics or erased entirely.

The World Economic Forum (WEF), often frames itself as the responsible “Global Father” managing a chaotic world – this being, of course, the ultimate patriarchal trope: the idea that a small group of powerful “fathers” (the 1%) knows what is best for the “family” (the 99%) and, furthermore, has the power to enforce it!

This report examines the profound implications of this top-down agenda, with a particular focus on the erosion of women’s rights, the precaritization of labour, the enclosure of private property through digital identity systems, and the specific, compounding risks faced by women in the Global South.

Broligarchs, Bishops and their Proxies

The Great Reset is not merely a policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It is also a proactive attempt to stabilize the capitalist system through a “new-normative” order, and is championed by two primary factions of the global powerbrokers. The first, the broligarchs, consists of high-tech tycoons who exert near-total control over the digital infrastructure of communication, finance, and information. These individuals include prominent figures in Silicon Valley and beyond, who leverage their monopolistic power to bypass traditional state authority, effectively becoming quasi-sovereign actors who are able to operate outside of governmental and national border restrictions. Their governance model is characterized by what is termed techno-caesarism – a fusion of nationalist conservatism with unapologetic technological accelerationism – which prioritizes algorithmic efficiency over democratic accountability.

The second faction, the bishops, provides the moral and philosophical legitimacy for this transition. Represented by entities such as the Council for Inclusive Capitalism, a partnership between the Vatican and global corporate giants like Mastercard, Salesforce, and Allianz, this group seeks to “rebrand” capitalism as a force for social good. By invoking religious imperatives to “hear the cry of the poor,” these actors provide a veneer of ethical justification for a system that continues to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of the same tiny minority.

The proxies are the state and government actors who legislate into being, the environment that advances the ambitions of the broligarchs, and the international organisations and institutions which ease access and global reach for the broligarchs. Together, these groups form a powerful nexus that shapes global policy without engaging in any meaningful consultation with the populations most affected, particularly women.

The Stakeholder Capitalism Facade and Gender Parity Metrics

The Great Reset’s primary economic vehicle is stakeholder capitalism, a model that ostensibly moves away from the narrow pursuit of shareholder profit toward a broader consideration of social and environmental impact. Within this framework, gender equality is frequently cited as a foundational pillar for resilient growth. The World Economic Forum (WEF) and its associated bodies regularly publish metrics, such as the Global Gender Gap Report, which currently project that full parity is 123 years away. The most recent report projects that parity in political empowerment for women will take more than 180 years, so not before the year 2206!

Despite the inclusion of these metrics, the Great Reset treats gender parity as a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) for market stability, rather than as a fundamental human right. The emphasis on “gender lens investing” and the “diversity dividend” frames women’s empowerment as a tool for economic productivity, commodifying rather than supporting the struggle for equality, an instrumentalist approach that ignores the structural drivers of patriarchy and fails to address the deep-seated power imbalances that the broligarchs and bishops continue to exploit.

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One of the most concerning aspects of the Great Reset for women, is the rapid expansion of technocratic oversight through digital identity systems and Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). Promoted as tools for financial inclusion, these technologies actually represent a significant threat to private property and financial autonomy. For women, who have historically struggled for the right to own and inherit property, the transition to a centralized, digital financial system threatens to recreate old, disempowering forms of dependency.

The push for a cashless society through CBDCs removes the “under-the-radar” financial agency that is often vital for women seeking to manage household finances independently or to escape abusive situations. In many parts of the world, cash provides a level of privacy and autonomy that centralized digital systems are designed to eliminate. Furthermore, the digitalization of property records under the oversight of broligarchic institutions may allow for the algorithmic enforcement of patriarchal inheritance norms or the arbitrary seizure of assets in “green zones” designated for climate mitigation.

The concentration of data in the hands of a few tech tycoons represents what some scholars call the “largest appropriation of public data by a private individual in the history of a modern state” and this enclosure of the digital commons has direct implications for women’s private property rights, as the legal and technical frameworks governing these systems are built without their input and, therefore, reflect mostly the biases of the men who design them.

The Great Reset is deeply intertwined with the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), a phase of technological development that emphasizes artificial intelligence, automation, and the fusion of biological and digital systems. This revolution is profoundly reshaping the labour market, with disproportionately negative consequences for women. Although technological breakthroughs are often framed as opportunities for innovation, they are also drivers of mass displacement in sectors where women are overrepresented.

Women are concentrated in “job families” that face the highest risks of automation, such as administrative, service, and retail roles. In the United States and globally, women are expected to face five jobs lost for every one job gained in the new economy.

As routine cognitive and manual tasks are automated, the Great Reset narrative points to the “care economy” as a growth sector for women. This sector, in which women are already over-represented, includes nursing, elder care, and child care, relies on traits that machines cannot yet replicate. However, these roles are already historically undervalued, underpaid, and poorly protected, so by funneling displaced female workers into the care sector without professionalising these roles, by de-professionalising them, as is the case in the US, or without increasing wages, the Great Reset risks reinforcing a gendered labour ghetto.

Meanwhile, the high-growth STEM sectors remain dominated by men, with women’s participation in technical roles like software development actually declining in recent years. The “broligarch” culture of the tech industry creates a hostile environment that further marginalizes women, while the lack of structural support for work-life balance continues to act as a barrier to advancement.

The focus on “skills for the future” and “reskilling” often places the burden of adaptation on individual women rather than addressing the systemic biases that exclude them from leadership and high-value creation processes. The “Great Reset” in the workplace is thus an intensification of existing precarity for many women, although it is disguised as a transition to a more “human-centric” economy.

The Great Reset is being planned and promoted in spaces where female leadership is either marginalized or performative. While some few women hold high-level positions in international organizations, the “core” decision-making remains in the hands of the broligarchs and their cadre of technocrats who operate within a “cult of the visionary,” which values aggressive disruption and concentrated power over collaborative, inclusive governance.

The media landscape plays a crucial role in this process, because broligarchs control the platforms that shape public discourse. These platforms are used to promote narratives of “progress” driven from above, while suppressing dissenting voices, including those of feminist activists and Global South scholars. The erosion of public trust in democratic institutions is a direct result of this centralized control, as the truth is often “smothered by lies told for power and for profit”.

In recent years, corporate media has shown a marked “capitulation” on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts, bending to the political and economic pressures of authoritarian-leaning movements and governments, and the interests of powerful men. This retreat from equity reflects the true priorities of the Great Reset coalition: systemic stability and profit over social justice. For women, this means that their perspectives on technological change, environmental policy, and economic reform are increasingly ignored in favour of a monolithic, and male-driven consensus.

The rise of the “manosphere” and the polarization of social media further contribute to a climate where misogyny and anti-feminist rhetoric are amplified. Broligarchic control of algorithms has already accelerated these particular trends, creating digital environments that are hostile to women’s participation in public life. This loss of narrative power is a critical threat to women’s rights, as it allows for the re-imposition of patriarchal norms under the guise of “common sense” or “technological necessity”.

A significant, though often understated, aspect of the Great Reset is the push for greater technocratic oversight of human health and biology. The pandemic has been used to justify the creation of new global health governance structures, including pandemic treaties and AI-driven surveillance systems which often prioritize the “containment of institutional risk” at the expense of individual rights and autonomy.

For women, this shift toward a “new-normative” health society has profound implications for bodily autonomy. In a system where health is used as a primary metric for social participation, women’s bodies, traditionally the site of intense social and political control, become subjects of even greater technocratic scrutiny. The emergence of castes or estates based on health status, “purity”, or digital health credentials could lead to new forms of exclusion and discrimination that disproportionately affect those who are already marginalized.

The fusion of biological and digital technologies – the “Bio-Digital Convergence” – is a core tenet of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the Great Reset. This convergence seeks to apply the same logic of optimization and extraction to human biology that has been applied to the natural world through the eras of colonisation and the growth of multi-national corporations. Critical feminist scholars argue that this represents a colonization of the life-world, where the most intimate aspects of human existence are monitored and monetized by broligarchic corporations.

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The lack of gender-specific considerations in the design of these health and AI treaties is a major concern. These systems are built on male-biased data and reflect the priorities of powerful technocrats, therefore they risk reinforcing patriarchal control over reproductive health and bodily integrity. The “Great Reset” of health thus risks becoming a “Great Enclosure” of the female body.

The Great Reset, as proposed by the broligarchs, bishops, and their proxies, is a project of the preservation of power, disguised as a project of global reform. It seeks to resolve the contradictions of contemporary capitalism – climate change, inequality, and systemic instability – without challenging the underlying power structures that produce them. For women, and particularly women in the Global South, the “Great Reset” is an intensification of existing patterns of enclosure, extraction, and erasure.

The reconfiguration of the workplace through the Fourth Industrial Revolution threatens to widen the gender gap and create new forms of precarious labor. The expansion of digital identity and centralized financial systems poses a direct threat to women’s property rights and financial autonomy. The “green transition” mirrors colonial-era extractivism, displacing Southern women and destroying their territories in the name of Northern sustainability. Finally, the push for technocratic sovereignty over health and biology represents a new frontier in the control of women’s bodies.

The 2025 Global Gender Gap Report’s estimate of 123 years to parity is likely optimistic if the Great Reset agenda is fully realized, i.e. not before the year 2149. This model, driven by the patriarchy’s most powerful men, is not designed to empower women; it is designed to manage them as a resource within a more “efficient”, monitored, and stabilized system of capitalist accumulation. A truly inclusive future would require the dismantling of the broligarchic and ecclesiastical monopolies that currently dictate the global agenda, and the elevation of the diverse, grassroots voices that are currently being suppressed.

The “Great Reset” that women actually need is one that centres the sustainability of life, the protection of the digital and physical commons, and the unconditional right to bodily and economic autonomy. This alternative path requires not a “reset” of the old system by the same “elite” men, but a radical transformation of the global order, driven by those who have historically been its most marginalized subjects. In the absence of such a transformation, the Great Reset will remain a “realistic utopia” for the powerful, built on the continued exploitation and marginalization of women worldwide.

Part II will discuss the Great Reset and the women of the Global South.

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Maternalism is not new. Before “tradwifery”, there was “maternalism”.

Maternalism is a social and political ideology that first surfaced in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries in the US and Western Europe, centred around the early 18^th century idea of “Republican Motherhood” and women’s role in, and responsibility for, raising “virtuous” citizens.

In the current cultural and strategic landscape of 2026, “maternalism” or “New Maternalism” has re-emerged not just as a lifestyle choice, but as a complex, multi-layered trend that spans aesthetics, political strategy, and corporate power dynamics. Depending on the room you’re in, maternalism is being framed either as a “radical return to centre” or a sophisticated “co-option” of women’s agency. It is now, a polished, high-production evolution of the “tradwife” movement, but with a more intellectual, “sovereign” veneer.

Maternalism trades the “hustle culture” and “girl boss” tropes for an emphasis on care, cultivation and some notion of domestic sovereignty. It frames domesticity not as a submission, but as a strategic withdrawal from a broken neoliberal system. Women in this space argue that by reclaiming the “maternal centre,” they are protecting the next generation from the “digital plantation” of tech-feudalism.

On the systemic level, “maternalism” is being deployed by traditionalist gatekeepers – the “Bishops” of the political right – as a tool for de-demonization. Populist movements are using maternal imagery to “feminize” their platforms, making exclusionary or ultra-conservative policies feel nurturing and protective rather than aggressive. Leaders are leaning into this archetype to justify surveillance and pro-natalist policies (the “Zero Trimester” e.g.), framing state control over women’s bodies as a form of “national care” or “demographic survival.”

In the corporate and medical worlds, maternalism has manifested as an expansion of the motherhood penalty. The Zero Trimester concept suggests that all women of reproductive age are in a state of “pre-pregnancy,” which requires that they be monitored and managed long before they ever conceive. Structural gatekeepers often use “maternalist” logic like “wellness” initiatives or “flexibility” programs, to silently filter women out of high-stakes leadership roles (the “Broligarchy”), under the guise of protecting their “work-life balance” or “natural” maternal capacity.

Like the trad-wife phenomenon, the “maternalism” trend is often viewed as a tactical co-option. It takes the genuine need for relief and rejuvenation, and redirects it into a performance of traditional femininity that tethers women to the domestic sphere.

Maternalism in 2026 is a Visual Manifesto of care that doubles as a structural anchor. It offers a tempting “relief” from the exhaustion of modern life, but often at the cost of the very systemic autonomy women have been fighting, for centuries, to reclaim.

From Maternalism to Tradwifery

The connection between maternalism and the tradwife movement is profound. Maternalism functions as the structural logic behind the aesthetic performance. “Tradwife” is the visual and lifestyle brand, and maternalism is the historical and political ideology that provides its moral scaffolding.

Maternalism is the belief that women’s unique capacity for care, historically rooted in motherhood, gives them a specific moral authority and a distinct role in society, and the tradwife movement uses this as its primary justification. The tradwife claims a “sovereign” domain, arguing that her domestic labour is a higher calling than corporate “slavery,” mirroring 19th-century “social maternalism,” where women argued for political influence not on the basis of equality, but rather on the basis of their “superior” nurturing instincts.

However, although they share a visual language, their utility differs. Tradwifery is a performance, often a digital-first lifestyle, high in aesthetics and “visual manifestos” of sourdough starters and floral dresses. It is an individual choice. Maternalism, on the other hand, is a structural tool, a broader political project. When the “Bishops” of society lean into maternalism, they aren’t just talking about baking; they are talking about policies, like the “Zero Trimester” or restricted reproductive autonomy, that treat all women as “mothers-in-waiting”, to limit their professional mobility.

It must be made clear, however, that maternalism is not motherhood. Motherhood is a relationship and a biological reality; maternalism is a political posture. It is the belief that a woman’s primary social value and moral authority are derived exclusively from her capacity to nurture, care, and domesticate.

Historically, this has been the favorite tool of the “Bishops”, the traditional gatekeepers of social order. By framing the home as a woman’s “natural” seat of power, they successfully localized her influence. Maternalism suggests that women are too “morally superior” or “biologically delicate” for the grubby, aggressive world of systemic leadership, and it offers a crown, but only if that crown stays within the kitchen.

In 2026, maternalism has undergone a high-tech rebrand and become the “moral scaffolding” for the tradwife movement.

The Relief Trap

The connection between maternalism and tradwifery is rooted partly in the promise of relief; the notion that women have suffered under independence, autonomy, and the professional life, what with the constant need for decision making and such. Women, therefore, being after all, not constitutionally built for this, are suffering from so-called “emancipation fatigue” and need relief – which can be provided only by either of these living conditions.

The tradwife aesthetic markets itself as a sanctuary from the noise; the ultimate relief; a return to a simplified, high-discipline domesticity that protects the family from the noise of the “Digital Plantation.” It speaks directly to the woman who is tired of being a “girlboss” in a system that never actually liked girls.

However, this “relief” is a tactical co-option. By leaning into the maternalist archetype, the tradwife isn’t actually reclaiming her power; she is retreating into a scripted role that the Broligarchy finds entirely manageable. She trades the complexity of institutional leadership – the messy, difficult work of being a Sovereign Architect who shapes the world – for a curated performance of femininity that the status quo finds non-threatening, and even useful.

The danger lies in the “maternalist” posture being used to pacify intellectual ambition. It frames the rejection of the “boardroom” as a form of self-care, when it might actually be, instead, a strategic retreat that leaves the levers of institutional power entirely in the hands of traditional gatekeepers (the “Bishops”).

There is great irony in the fact that while the tradwife claims to be “returning to the land,” she is often the most efficient worker on the Digital Plantation. To maintain the brand of domestic sovereignty, she must feed the algorithmic beast 24/7. Her home is no longer a private sanctuary; it is a film set. Her children’s lives are content. Her “peace” is monetized through a high-speed fibre-optic cable owned by the very tech-feudalists she claims to have escaped!

She has been convinced – and seeks to convince others – that her “sovereignty” is found in the sourdough starter, while the actual levers of power – economic policy, reproductive autonomy, and systemic governance – remain firmly in the hands of those who benefit from her absence. In this way, maternalism serves as the ultimate structural anchor. It provides the aesthetic of a “Boardroom Protest” without ever requiring a single seat at the table to be moved

Although it seeks to reclaim the domestic sphere as a “protest” against the modern world, it often fails to challenge the underlying s

tructures, thus creating this “Boardroom Protest” that never actually leaves the kitchen. It trades the complexity of institutional leadership for a scripted performance of femininity that the “Broligarchy” finds non-threatening, and even useful, for maintaining the status quo, i.e. for the maintenance of power securely in the hands of the Patriarchy and out of reach of women.

The contemporary resurgence of the “trad-wife” (traditional wife) phenomenon represents a significant socio-political shift within the digital landscape, signaling a convergence of aestheticized domesticity, neoliberal fatigue, and reactionary ideologies.

It is often presented as a benign lifestyle choice centered on homemaking and child-rearing, but an exhaustive analysis reveals that the movement functions as a sophisticated rhetorical and visual instrument for the normalization of patriarchal and white supremacist worldviews. This report examines the multi-layered dimensions of the trad-wife subculture, tracing its historical genealogies in Western nations such as the United States, United Kingdom, Europe, and Australia, and contrasting these with domesticity trends in non-Western regions like China, Brazil, and Southern Africa. By situating these trends within a global framework, the study illuminates how the commodification of “tradition” serves as a primary mechanism for the reprivatization of social reproduction and the fortification of ethno-nationalist identities.

The Digital Genesis and Aesthetic Rhetoric of Tradwifery

The “trad-wife” subculture is fundamentally a product of platform capitalism, which emerged as a distinct social media identity in the mid-2010s before reaching a tipping point during the 2020 pandemic lockdowns. The movement heavily utilizes platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube to circulate a hyper-feminine aesthetic that is frequently reminiscent of 1950s American suburbia or the “angel in the house” Victorian-era ideal. This aestheticization is not merely stylistic; it operates through “nostalgic temporalities” that construct an idealized past to provide solutions for contemporary social precarity.

Trad-wife influencers employ a complex set of visual and auditory cues to perform a version of femininity that emphasizes submissiveness, poised obedience, and a rejection of modern feminist achievements. For instance, influencers like Nara Smith or Hannah Neeleman (Ballerina Farm) utilize an overly obedient tone and meticulously curated domestic settings to signal their devotion to serving their husbands and children. This “aesthetic mode of veridiction” suggests that their anti-feminist messaging is “natural” and “authentic” because it is consistently performed across a wide network of trusted influencers.

The standard 1950s American retro-glamour of many, with the housewife wearing high heels and aprons with floral dresses, busy in pastel-painted kitchens is meant to invoke a period of perceived stability and clear social hierarchies. There is extensive video documentation of making everything “from scratch” – baking bread, gardening, and hand-washing – which is intended to validate domestic labour as an elite skill and frame modern convenience as a “lie.” The soft-spoken, poised delivery often beginning with “My husband was craving...” naturalises the husband’s desires as the centre of the woman’s universe, while the use of filters and music that evoke a pre-digital, rural idyll is meant to position domesticity as an escape from the “hostile” neoliberal work world.

The movement leverages “choice feminism”, the neoliberal argument that any choice a woman makes is inherently feminist, to deflect accusations of misogyny. By framing submission as a “liberated choice,” these women insulate themselves from criticism of structural inequality while simultaneously benefiting from the very rights (such as financial independence and legal protection) that feminists fought to secure.

The Western Core: Domesticity as a Gateway to White Supremacy

In Western nations, the link between trad-wife identity and white supremacy is often obscured by the “hyper-feminine” and “wholesome” nature of the content. However, scholarship increasingly identifies tradwifery as a “softening” tactic used by the alt-right and white nationalist movements to make extremist ideologies palatable to a mainstream audience.

Sociological analysis identifies trad-wives as “shield maidens” who serve as auxiliaries to the “manosphere”, whose role is to normalize white supremacy by presenting it as community service, hospitality, and traditional child-rearing. While the alt-right is often viewed as a male-dominated space of “incels” and “MRAs” (Men’s Rights Activists), women in the movement – sometimes also called “fashy femmes” – weaponize their femininity against feminism, claiming that the liberation of women has “failed” women by robbing them of male providers and stable families.

Online, the connection to white supremacy is often signaled through subtle hashtags and coded language. Phrases like the “#14words” (referencing the white supremacist slogan about securing a future for white children) or #thirdposition are frequently interspersed with domestic content. These influencers promote the idea that a white woman’s “natural biological role” is to produce the next generation of “pure” children to prevent the “Great Replacement” or “White Genocide”.

The contemporary trad-wife is the ideological descendant of white women who sustained racial hierarchies in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Historical groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) in the United States – where most of this is coming from – used “maternal authority” and “moral virtue” to justify racial violence and anti-Black oppression during the Jim Crow era. These women positioned themselves as the “fair sex” – a category of womanhood that was explicitly defined by its exclusion of Black, indigenous, and non-white women.

The colonial era of the 1500-1700s in the US, was the “fair sex” where white women’s work seen as domestic/feminine and Black women’s work as animalistic labour. The Jim Crow era ushered in the “Southern Belle” using “purity” to incite lynchings and sustain educational apartheid through groups like the UDC. Then in the posrt WWII era – the 1950s – came the myth of the suburban idyll built on redlining and the exclusion of non-white families. So, we come to today, with the “Trad-wife” and her digital performance of “traditional” roles that frame white, Western hetero-normativity as universal “fact.”

This lineage demonstrates that white women have long been strategic agents of white supremacy, leveraging their “fragility” and “domesticity” to maintain proximity to white male power while enforcing the subjugation of others.

Global Domesticities and Nationalist Resurgence

The “trad-wife” term is largely a Western internet neologism, but similar trends of domestic revival and traditionalist resurgence are evident across the globe, adapted in each place to local socio-political crises and nationalist projects.

In Brazil, the rise of the far-right under Jair Bolsonaro saw a profound emphasis on “Tradition, Family, and Property” - a concept originally used to justify the 1964 military coup which, supported by the U.S. and conservative elite, ousted President João Goulart to establish a 21-year military dictatorship. Bolsonaro’s motto, “God, Nation, Family,” serves as a cornerstone of a Christian nationalist project that defines the “true people” through faith and traditional heteronormative family structures. This movement relies on a selective, fictionalized “European Middle Ages” to frame white Brazilians as the legitimate heirs of a pure, Christian Portugal, thereby erasing the importance of indigenous and African populations.

Bolsonaro’s administration transferred the protection of indigenous and quilombola (descendants of enslaved people) lands to the Ministry of Agriculture, demonstrating how the “defense of the family” often serves as a pretext for the physical and epistemological erasure of non-white communities.

China: The “Full-Time Wife” and the Rejection of 996

In the Chinese digital sphere, particularly on Xiaohongshu, the “full-time wife” (quan-zhi tai-tai) has emerged as a symbol of middle-class status rather than “laziness,” as it had been characterized under socialist labour regimes. This trend is frequently framed as an escape from the “996” work culture, the grueling labor cycle of 9 am to 9 pm, six days a week, which is seen as incompatible with personal fulfillment and family stability.

Unlike the Western trad-wife, the Chinese domestic trend is less about retro-aesthetics and more about “professionalizing” the home. These women are often depicted as having the education and experience to work, but “choosing” the home as a superior site for “managing human capital” aka child-rearing. However, this shift aligns with broader state-sanctioned Han nationalism, which increasingly emphasizes “traditional” family values to address declining birth rates and maintain social order in the face of economic stagnation.

Africa: Virginity Testing and the “Return to Tradition”

In Southern Africa, particularly within Zulu communities in South Africa, there has been a notable resurgence in “virginity testing” and other gendered “coming-of-age” rituals. Proponents, such as traditional healer Nomagugu Ngobese, frame these practices as an “African return to tradition” and a defense against the HIV/AIDS epidemic, however, this “traditionalism” often serves as a “shaming weapon” in the struggle against gender-based violence, placing the burden of moral purity on young girls while reinforcing patriarchal control over female sexuality.

In contrast, the “Nhanga” movement in Zimbabwe reimagines the traditional girls’ bedroom (once a space for marriage grooming) as a subversive, peer-led forum for discussing sexuality, education, and legal rights. This indicates that “tradition” in the African context is a contested terrain—it can be used to enforce patriarchal subordination or repurposed to promote gender equality.

Neoliberalism and Social Reproduction

To understand the trad-wife phenomenon as a global worldview, it must be situated within the crisis of neoliberal capitalism. Scholars argue that the movement is a “plea for balance” from a generation of women struggling with the impossible demands of modern work and dwindling state support.

Neoliberalism has systematically dismantled the social safety net, leading to the “reprivatization of care”. By shifting the costs of social reproduction – such as child-rearing and caregiving – back to the private household, the state and capital benefit from the unpaid labour of women. The trad-wife aesthetic glamorizes this shift, presenting the home as a sanctuary of “moral and aesthetic authority” rather than a site of unpaid toil.

While Marxist Feminism sees domestic workas a site of capitalise accumulation, tradwifery seeks to mask the economic exploitation inherent in unpaid labour. The trad-wife trend reflects the collapse of the work-life balance under late capitalism, while social reproduction theory posits that capital “cannibalizes” its own social base; and considerations of intersectionality recognise that systems of power (race, class, gender) are interconnected, and demonstrates that the trad-wife identity is a performance of white privilege inaccessible to most women. The politics of tradwifery exploits the “wholesome” look of tradwives to mask authoritarian ideology, demonstrating clearly how aesthetics can be used to legitimize domination..

The “invisible labor” of these influencers is further complicated by “platform capitalism.” On the surface, they advocate for financial dependence, but high-profile trad-wives are often digital entrepreneurs who monetize their performances of domesticity through brand deals and platform algorithms. Hannah Neeleman and her “Ballerina Farm” provide one of the most egregious examples of this. This duplicity creates a “mirror world” where feminism is blamed for “degrading motherhood,” while the influencers themselves use feminist-won economic freedoms to sell the idea of submission.

The Role of Men and the Manosphere Connection

Research into the attitudes of men toward the #tradwife movement reveals that its popularity is deeply rooted in “hostile sexism”. A study by the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) found that men who espouse negative perceptions of women are the most likely to support trad-wife content. This is because the movement validates their desire for gender-role adherence and male dominance.

Researchers initially expected “benevolent sexism”, i.e. attitudes rooted in chivalry and “protection”, to drive male support, they found that “hostile sexism” was a much stronger predictor. Men who support trad-wives often believe they rely on women for intimacy but simultaneously “resent” this dependence, leading to a worldview where women must be controlled and kept within traditional roles to mitigate their perceived power over men. This dynamic is amplified by “manfluencers” like Andrew Tate, who promote a version of masculinity that treats women as inferior “sex objects” or “whores”.

For the hostile sexist, women are manipulative creatures who seek power, so he supports tradwives as a means of enforcing dominance and control. The benevolent sexist, on the other hand, romanticises the “helpmeet” role believing that women are delicate and need protection and is a weaker link to the movement, but the red-pill category or the manosphere, views tradwives as the “correct” version of womanhood, and uses them to try to shame feminists, their position being that women’s liberation is a “lie” that hurts men.

A critical but, paradoxically, very often overlooked aspect of the trad-wife phenomenon is its connection to “body fascism” and “thin supremacy”. Within far-right communities, thinness is not merely a beauty standard but a “moral imperative” that signifies dominance over the body and alignment with European aesthetic ideals.

For far-right women, the body is seen as a “vessel” for producing the next generation of “pure” children. Thinness is, surprisingly, associated with being “able-bodied” and “strong” enough to birth the nation. This “thin supremacy” feeds directly into white supremacy, as the type of slenderness privileged is one modeled specifically on the bodies of white women. Historically, fatness was linked to “racial groups adjudged to lack the capacity for self-government,” particularly Black people. Thus, the modern trad-wife’s pursuit of extreme thinness, often overlapping with imagery from “pro-ana” (pro-anorexia) communities, functions to police the borders of “delicate” and “feminine” white womanhood.

This idealized version of the trad-wife lifestyle that we see on our screens, is a “fantasy” that is inaccessible to the vast majority of women globally – including the vast majority of white women everywhere. Financial dependence on a husband is a “choice” available only to those with high-earning partners, effectively excluding working-class and disadvantaged families globally. In fact, for the vast majority of white women, it was never the reality. Ever.

For most women, leaving the labour market is not a choice but a result of “constraints” such as lack of childcare or inflexible working hours. The popularity of trad-wife content reflects a “quiet fury” against the failures of the modern workforce, but it redirects that anger toward feminism rather than the structural mechanisms of capitalist exploitation.

In an era of shrinking social safety nets and high divorce rates, financial dependence exposes women to extreme risks of poverty and abuse. A dual-income is a necessity for 90% of families, and for women there exists the critical need for independent credit and banking, for their safety and that of their children. Women of colour have historically always worked outside the home, and so the trad-wife in the US is predominantly white or Euro-centric because of historic and deeply entrenched social inequalities.

The “trad-wife” phenomenon is far more than a frivolous social media trend; it is a global “re-traditionalization” movement that leverages the crisis of neoliberalism to reassert patriarchal and white supremacist hierarchies. By aestheticizing submission and commodifying domesticity, the movement offers a seductive escape from the pressures of late capitalism while simultaneously reinforcing the structures of exclusion that define it.

In the Western context, tradwifery serves as a “shield” for the alt-right, allowing extremist ideologies to circulate through the “innocent” medium of home-making and child-rearing. Globally, the movement adapts to local nationalist projects, from Bolsonaro’s “Judeo-Christian” Brazil to the Han-centric middle-class domesticity of China. Across all regions, the movement relies on a selective, exclusionary version of “tradition” that privileges white/Western norms and marginalizes the labour and agency of non-white women.

As digital platforms continue to amplify these high-arousal, visually stunning performances of domesticity, the risk remains that a generation of young people will internalize these “authoritarian visions of the family” as the only path to stability and fulfillment.

Therefore, understanding the trad-wife as a “metapolitical” tool is essential for ecognizing how the “private” sphere of the home is being weaponized to transform the “public” sphere of global politics.

The trad wife conversation is already off track. It’s being framed as a question of preference. It isn’t. It’s a question of power, and most people discussing it are avoiding that word entirely.

The conversation is shallow. It stays at the level of aesthetics – linen dresses, slow mornings, fresh home baked bread, and soft voices - but that’s not where the truth lives. What they should really be looking at is questions about what power looks like in a woman’s life, and who is allowed to define it.

The modern trad-wife is not just living a traditional life; she is performing one, she is broadcasting it. It is filmed, edited, distributed, scaled and monetised. A life of supposed simplicity delivered through the most complex, global, algorithm-driven systems we have built. So we have to ask, is this a return to tradition or a rebrand of it, because when submission becomes content, it is no longer private, it is strategy.

The aesthetic is doing a lot of work, but with softness, slowness, care and devotion, and it’s compelling because it offers relief from decision fatigue, from competition, from the pressure to constantly hold our own position. But relief is not neutral. It is often purchased, and the currency is power. The aesthetic is soft, but the architecture is not. Power does not disappear because it is spoken about gently. It just reorganises itself.

So, let’s strip this back to structure. In any system, power sits somewhere. Not everywhere – somewhere very specific, and usually in just one place.

So the questions become very simple: Who earns the money? Who controls it? Who makes the final decisions? Who carries the risk if something breaks? Who has the viable exit?

These are not romantic questions; they are structural ones. Structure is where power lives, so if those answers are not equal, then neither is the power, no matter how peaceful it all might look.

So, now, we have a dynamic where submission is the message and control is the infrastructure, and that contradiction should not be ignored. The most common defence is, “Women are choosing this”, and sometimes it is true, but that is incomplete, because choice is never formed in isolation. Choice is always shaped by things like economic conditions, cultural narratives, personal fatigue, fear, desire, or perceived alternatives. When the world becomes unstable, people don’t just seek freedom, they seek structure. When the world feels chaotic, uncertain, and demanding, structure feels like relief; clearly defined roles feel like safety.

So, yes, some women are choosing this but there are questions to be asked because structure, when accepted without examination, often comes with hierarchy. Perhaps the most important of those questions would be: What conditions made this choice feel like the best one available?

There is also a psychological truth many will not say out loud; they avoid it because it is uncomfortable to admit. The appeal is not just aesthetic. For some women, the desire to be taken care of is real. The desire to step out of constant responsibility is real. The desire to be held, to be provided for, to be relieved of constant decision-making and not have to fight for authority in every space is real. There is nothing trivial about that desire. None of that is weakness. But, desire is not the same as strategy, and relief is not the same as power - and none of that removes the need to understand what is being traded. Something is always being traded.

The trad-wife model assumes something critical – stability. It assumes, for her, a husband with consistent and adequate income, a system that does not fail, and a relationship that does not fracture. But reality does not guarantee any of those things. The most under-discussed aspect of this model is not ideology, it’s exposure.

So the questions arise - What happens if the relationship ends? What happens if income disappears? If the system fails? What is the cost of re-entry? What leverage remains? What options are still available? Power is not tested when everything is working, is not proven when conditions are ideal, but rather when they are not.

“Soft life.” “Feminine energy.” “Peaceful living.” These are the words often used, and they are not meaningless, but they can obscure something important. “Peace” is often used as the closing argument, but peace is not a reliable indicator of power. Sometimes, peace is the result of alignment, and sometimes, it is the result of relinquishment. Those are not the same thing. They are not interchangeable.

Control in these dynamics is rarely loud. It does not show itself. It sits in aspects such as financial access, decision making, authority, dependency or exit options. A woman can feel peaceful, and still have limited control. She can feel provided for, and still be structurally vulnerable, these things can co-exist.

The trad wife conversation is not about whether a woman stays home. It is not about bread, or routine, or softness. It is not about cooking, cleaning, or raising children. It is about power. It’s about where power sits – who has it, who gives it up and who believes they never needed it in the first place – and whether that position can withstand pressure, because if it cannot, then what looks like peace is simply stability under perfect conditions, and perfect conditions do not last. Conditions change, and aesthetics are not protection, structure is.

And above all of this lies the reality that the return to tradition, to “better” times, is predicated on who thinks they have the right to determine what society should look like, and who precisely wants it to look like this, specifically. And the question there is, who was living better times in that time that is now past?

That’s what we will discuss in Part II.

If sex were only about desire, it would be easy; a simple equation of mutual attraction. It would be expressive, connected and driven by attraction and shared enthusiasm, but that is not how it consistently functions. In our current social fabric, sex does something more than just express desire. It shapes behaviour, dictates relationship hierarchies, and establishes a “position” between people.

Whether we name it or not, in many interactions, particularly those involving men’s behaviours toward women, sex functions as leverage. Leverage is the ability to influence an outcome through access, withholding, pressure, or reward. When sex is viewed through this lens, it ceases to be an act of intimacy and becomes a transactional tool.

In a patriarchal context, this leverage is often asymmetrical, because cultural scripts frequently tie male “status” to sexual conquest and female “worth” to sexual gatekeeping, so that sex becomes a currency. It is offered, pursued, negotiated, or expected not as a gift, but as a means to an end – to secure a man’s ego, validate his masculinity, or to exert dominance over a woman’s autonomy.

At the core of sexual violence lies entitlement – the belief, often reinforced by social conditioning – that a man is “owed” sexual access under specific conditions – after a date, for example, or a gift, or a certain period of time.

Entitlement creates a mental ledger. If a man feels he has “invested” time or resources, he may view a woman’s body as the return on that investment. When a man feels entitled, a woman’s “no” is not heard as a boundary to be respected, but as a “negotiation” to be won. This turns a refusal into a challenge, leading to the escalation of tactics to bypass her lack of consent.

Entitlement doesn’t always look like aggression, however. It is often presented as “confusion” when access is denied, or frustration framed as “unfairness.” In these moments, the man isn’t reacting to a lack of sex; he is reacting to a perceived loss of control.

We often view sexual violence as a singular, physical event, but, it is frequently the culmination of a coercion spectrum. This is where “persistence” is dangerously rebranded as romantic interest, and a man knowing what he wants and being man enough to go after it to triumph over hurdles “conquer”. Sometimes, the man exerts social or emotional pressure, framing sexual reluctance as “ruining the mood” or the woman being “frigid” or uses the threat of ending the relationship, or withdrawing emotional intimacy, as a way to force sexual compliance.

If a man is persistent enough, a woman may eventually yield simply to end the discomfort or the “pestering.” This is not consent; it is compliance born of exhaustion. When persistence is normalized, resistance becomes something a woman must “maintain” at a high emotional cost. Over time, this erosion of boundaries creates an environment where sexual violence is not just possible, but inevitable.

These noxious patterns are difficult to disrupt because we are fed “dating rules” that encourage men to be “the pursuer” and women to “play hard to get” which blurs the line between enthusiasm and coercion.

Admitting that power and leverage exist in the bedroom makes people uncomfortable, because it shatters the illusion of “natural” attraction and forces us to look at the darker undercurrents of domination and control. Furthermore, many women experience the pressure of leverage but lack the vocabulary to describe it. They feel an “imbalance” or “heaviness,” but without a framework for coercive control, they often blame themselves for not being “into it” enough.

Recognizing sex as leverage is a critical step in identifying the “red flags” of sexual violence. Violence is the ultimate form of leverage. It is the total removal of the other person’s agency to secure an outcome.

When we see behaviour as being about influence rather than connection, the mask falls off. We come to understand that persistence is often functioning as pressure; we begin to see how negotiation is violation, and expectation is actually entitlement.

Recognizing these dynamics does not mean assuming that every interaction is a battlefield. It does, however, mean expanding our interpretation of “consent.” True consent cannot exist in a vacuum of leverage. It requires the total absence of pressure, the removal of “debt,” and the absolute freedom to say “no” without social or emotional penalty.

Understanding how leverage works allows us to ask the hard question: Is this an act of shared desire, or is it an exercise of power? That clarity is the first step toward women reclaiming agency and dismantling the structures that allow sexual violence to thrive.

The geopolitical existence of Montserrat is defined by a profound and lingering structural paradox, a state of being that might be characterized as “Ethical Incarceration.” This condition arises from the tension of a population living as the biological and cultural descendants of two groups of peoples historically oppressed, marginalized, and enslaved by the English Crown, while simultaneously being legally and diplomatically represented by that same Crown in the modern international order.

This “Montserratian Dilemna” is not merely a question of constitutional status or administrative efficiency; it is an existential crisis of representation where the moral and political agency of what one might expect to be a pro-human, anti-colonial population is subsumed into the strategic objectives of “Global Britain”. For the inhabitant of this British Overseas Territory (BOT), the lack of sovereignty is not an abstract legal deficiency but a mechanism of involuntary complicity. When the United Kingdom exercises its “reserved powers” to project a foreign policy in West Asia or Africa that aligns with extractive or imperial interests, it effectively ventriloquises the Montserratian voice, forcing a people with a history of enduring and resisting “rapine” to appear as supporters of the systems their ancestors fought and died to escape and dismantle.

Central to the analysis of this phenomenon is the concept of “Triple Consciousness,” an expansion of the Du Boisian framework of double consciousness in African-Americans, which can account for the unique socio-historical layers of the Montserratian psyche. This consciousness is composed of a foundational African heritage, a complex and often contradictory Irish hybridity, and the restrictive British legal reality that governs the island today.

The African layer is rooted in the traumatic displacement of the transatlantic slave trade and the subsequent resilience of the plantation era, while the Irish layer reflects a 17th-century arrival of indentured servants and political prisoners who occupied a shifting space between the victimized and the overseer. The third layer, the British legal reality, provides the current framework of citizenship and internal self-governance, but denies the territory a seat at the United Nations or the African Union, effectively denying any ability to project an independent moral foreign policy.

I argue that the current status of Montserrat as a “colony acquired by settlement” under the Treaty of Breda functions as a form of modern-day “National Slavery,” where the territory’s international personality is held in trust by a metropole whose values frequently diverge from those of the territory. The UK’s tactical and diplomatic support for various global actions, in the context of Israeli military operations and extractive African policies, for example, creates an ethical rupture for a population that one would expect to identify with the occupied and the dispossessed. If they want to resolve this dilemna, Montserratians must engage in a process of “Intellectual Marronage,” a mental and ideological “opting out” from the boundaries set by the UK, reclaiming their narrative and maintaining an independent moral stance even while the legal path to sovereignty remains obstructed by economic and natural disaster-related dependencies.

The Ancestral Tapestry: African-Irish Hybridity

The Shared Victimhood of the 17th Century

The historical bedrock of Montserrat was laid in the 17th century through a confluence of imperial violence and forced labour. The island’s first European settlement in 1632 was composed primarily of Anglo-Irish Catholics who had been sent from neighbouring St. Kitts by Sir Thomas Warner, seeking refuge from the religious persecution and land-clearing policies of the English Protestant establishment. However, the population swelled significantly following the Cromwellian victory in Ireland in 1653, which resulted in the transportation of an estimated 10,000 Irish Catholics to the West Indies as political prisoners, vagrants, and indentured servants. This era established the Irish as the majority of Montserrat’s white population, which at one point accounted for 70% of the non-enslaved residents, the highest concentration of Irish ethnicity in any colony in the history of the British Empire!

During this period, the Irish experience was characterized by a profound sense of shared victimhood with the arriving African population. Both groups were targets of Cromwellian cruelty and English “Western Design” objectives, which viewed both the “native Irish” and the “Sub-Saharan African” as interchangeable labour units on the plantations. Irish indentured servants were often described as “white slaves,” subjected to brutal conditions, working “in the parching sun without shirt, shoe or stocking,” and being “domineered over and used like dogs” by Anglican masters.

This shared proximity to suffering and social exclusion led to significant intermarriage and cultural fusion between the Irish and African communities, the results of which are still visible today in the phenotype of many Montserratians, individuals with dark skin and red hair highlights, and a few with light-coloured eyes. It is also observable in cultural expressions such as the masquerade dance, which blends Irish step dance with African rhythms.

The Overseer Paradox and the Plantation Hierarchy

Despite the narratives of shared victimhood, the historical record in Montserrat is complicated by what some writers have called the “Overseer Paradox.” As the 17th century progressed and the economy transitioned from tobacco and indigo to large-scale sugar cultivation, the Irish population began to fill every level of the social strata, from the indentured servant to the governor. Many of them remained very poor, but an elite class of Anglo-Irish merchant families emerged who proved to be “as effective and as unfeeling colonists as the English and the Scottish” so that by the late 17th century, over a third of the island’s sugar estates were run by Irish families who utilized their knowledge of efficiency to become successful slave masters.

Historical evidence reveals that some of the most brutal treatment of enslaved Africans in the Caribbean occurred under the supervision of Irish overseers. In a chilling account from 1667, a French priest, Father Antoine Biet, documented an Irish master on a sugar plantation in Barbados, who forced an enslaved man to eat his own roasted ear after days of torture for the theft of a pig. Montserrat carries the dubious distinction of being on par with Barbados, in this respect.

Montserrat’s legal records from the period, such as the case of Sweeny v. Lynch (1752–1754), further illustrate this dehumanization; Andrew Lynch beat to death an enslaved man named Sampson and was sued for “trespass”, highlighting that the murder was treated legally as property damage rather than a crime against a human being.

This history demonstrates that the Irish on Montserrat were not a monolithic group of victims but were often the “middle-management” of the plantation system, actively participating in the codification of racialized chattel slavery through laws designed to restrain “unchristian-like association” between white people and Africans.

The “Emerald Isle” Myth and Cultural Erasure

The modern branding of Montserrat as the “Emerald Isle of the Caribbean” is a cultural myth that frequently romanticizes this complex history to mask the brutal power dynamics of the original colonial project. While the island is undeniably green and maintains clear Irish cultural markers, such as the shamrock stamped in visitors’ passports and place names like Kinsale and Cork Hill, anthropological readings suggest that this branding often traps the island in a “subordinate exotic” or “comic exotic” status.

The “Black Irish” identity is frequently treated by travel writers as an “odd ethnic spectacle” or a “cultural freak-show,” where the intersection of African phenotype and Irish surnames like Ryan, Sullivan, O’garro, and Riley is used for comical effect rather than for understanding a history of resistance and forced adaptation.

Montserratian scholars Fergus and Irish, have critiqued the “Irish Myth,” noting that enslaved Africans were often identified by the names of the plantations on which they were held, and so, many of Montserrat’s Irish surnames come from the fact that they were formally adopted after emancipation in 1834, rather than because of any deep, biological “Black Irish” lineage. The celebration of St. Patrick’s Day in Montserrat provides a potent example of this tension; while it is promoted globally as a celebration of Irish heritage, it was established locally in 1985 to commemorate the 1768 uprising.

The uprising was planned specifically for March 17th because the Africans knew that their Anglo-Irish masters would be distracted by drinking and dancing, and yet now, that day has been sanitized and commercialised into a tourism event featuring Guinness and leprechauns alongside African “Slave Feasts” and European-style “traditional dress” made of madras fabric stamped in the colours of the Irish flag, a distinctively Montserratian convergence of coloniality and opportunistic adaptation.

We’ve mostly been taught to think about sex in a very particular way. We’ve been encouraged to see it primarily as desire, attraction, chemistry or connection. We’ve been told that it is also an expression of love, and that is true. Those things are real. They matter and they explain part of what happens between people, but not all of it.

There is another force operating in sexual dynamics that is rarely named clearly, and when it is, it’s often isolated, softened, minimised, or pushed to the edges.

Power.

We have been systematically and purposefully steered very far away from paying attention to the relationship between sex and power.

The Frame We’re Given, and What It Leaves Out

Most mainstream conversations about sex are held inside a very narrow frame. The discussion goes that people are drawn to each other, this attraction leads to intimacy, and intimacy is mutual, expressive, and relational. Even in those instances when the conversation becomes more complex, when it centres around issues of consent, communication, or compatibility, for instance, it still largely sits within this same restricted structure.

When you look closely at how sexual dynamics actually play out in dating, deeper relationships, and broader culture, the idea that sex is something that emerges from desire starts to feel incomplete, because it doesn’t account for pressure that is exerted, or expectations that are considered to be givens. Nor does it generally include investigations of issues like negotiation, status or control.

It seldom ever accounts for the ways that sex can shape behaviour, influence decisions, or establish “position” between people, and when those elements do show up – as they often do – they are either minimized, misunderstood, or treated as exceptions.

What Sexual Violence Makes Obvious

There is one area, however, where this becomes undeniable, and that is in considerations of sexual violence. It is generally understood and often explicitly stated – even if regularly dismissed or glossed over – that sexual violence is not primarily about desire, but is really about power and control.

The intention, in sexual violence, is not mutual connection. It is dominance, assertion, violation, and enforcement. That understanding is clear, but it is also contained and often treated as unusual, extreme, deviant and somehow separate from “normal” sexual dynamics. It’s viewed as something that sits outside the everyday; outside normalcy.

The Problem With Treating It as Separate

The problem with that treatment is that when we isolate sexual violence from the rest of sexual behaviour, we create a gap in our understanding. We end up with two completely different explanations for it. In one, sex is about desire and connection, while in the other, it is about power and control, and we do not generally ask how those two realities relate to each other. We don’t ask whether they exist on a spectrum, and we don’t examine what happens in the space between them.

Of course, not all sexual dynamics are violent, but many are not purely - or even primarily - about desire, either. This type exists in a middle space where both attraction and power operate at the same time, where sex is initiated with intent, shaped by expectation, influenced by status, and where it is negotiated – implicitly or explicitly

In that space, power doesn’t disappear. It just becomes less visible. If we look closely, we see that it shows up in who is expected to initiate the activity and who is expected to respond; in what is considered normal persistence, what is framed as “chemistry” and what is tolerated, pressured, or assumed.

It shows up in how people interpret signals, in how they push, pull, withhold, or reward. It evidences itself in how parties read the situation, and how they act within it, but because we don’t have a clear language for this layer, it often goes unnamed, and is therefore not discussed.

If you only understand sex through the lens of desire, you will misread a significant portion of what is happening. You might interpret pressure as attraction, persistence as interest or intensity as connection. Furthermore, you might miss the signals that indicate when behaviour is about influence rather than mutuality, when dynamics are being shaped rather than shared, or when you are being positioned, not simply engaged with.

When something doesn’t fit the recognised “desire” narrative, it becomes harder to name and interpret, and therefore, harder to respond to clearly.

Including power in the analysis of sex and sexual behaviours does not mean reducing everything to control or dominance, though. Logically. What it does mean, is recognizing that sexual dynamics can operate on multiple levels at once.

Desire can be present, connection can be real, and power can still be operating within that – subtly or overtly, and sometimes in ways that are normalized enough to go unquestioned.

A More Accurate Starting Point

If we want to understand what is actually happening across relationships, dating, and broader culture, therefore, we need a more complete frame.

We need one that includes desire, attraction and emotional connection, as well as power, positioning and influence. They can’t be seen as categories that are separate and distinct, but must be engaged as interacting forces, because when you do include power, patterns that once seemed confusing finally begin to make sense.

Where This Goes Next

If sex can function not only as expression, but also as influence, if it can shape behaviour, establish roles, and affect decision-making, then the next series of questions would be:

How does it do that?

How is sex used, implicitly or explicitly, as a form of leverage?

How does it create pressure, reinforce expectations, or establish control?

That’s what we’ll look at in Part II.

The evolution of the British Empire from a collection of fragmented 17th-century trading outposts into a global hegemon covering nearly a quarter of the world’s land surface is written into Western history as the most significant structural transformation in modern history.

At its territorial peak in 1920, the empire exerted authority over 412 million people, leaving an indelible imprint on the constitutional, legal, and linguistic frameworks of 57 now-independent nations. This dominance was not merely a matter of military conquest; it was facilitated by a sophisticated “architecture of dependency” that integrated mercantile interests, naval supremacy, and bureaucratic innovations.

The transition from direct colonial administration to post-colonial statehood did not erase these structures; rather, it transmuted them into modern systems of financial subordination, cartographic instability, and racialised immigration policies. The contemporary challenges facing the United Kingdom, from the “small boats” crisis to the societal fracture over the genocide in Palestine, are deeply rooted in this imperial legacy, reflecting a persistent struggle to reconcile a “Global Britain” narrative with the enduring realities of coloniality.

The Genesis of Hegemony: From Mercantilism to Territorial Sovereignty

The foundations of the British Empire were laid during the 16th and 17th centuries, an era characterized by fierce competition among European powers – Spain, Portugal, France, and the Netherlands,in particular – for control over global trade routes. The establishment of the East India Company (EIC) in 1600 and the first permanent settlement in Jamestown on the American continent in 1607, marked the beginning of a shift from maritime exploration to a settler-colonial and extractive enterprise.

Initially, the EIC operated as a purely commercial entity, but following Robert Clive’s victory at the Battle of Plassey in 1757, it transformed into a military and political power with the right to collect territorial revenues in Bengal, India. This transition highlights a fundamental characteristic of British expansion: the outsourcing of imperial costs and risks to private chartered companies, which performed “government-like functions” to pave the way for formal Crown rule.

The 18th century saw the newly-united Great Britain rise to become the world’s dominant colonial power, with France becoming its main rival on the imperial stage. The Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 significantly enlarged the empire’s territorial holdings, granting Britain control over Newfoundland, Acadia, Gibraltar, and Menorca. Perhaps more crucially, in that Treaty, Britain acquired from Spain, the Asiento de Negros – the very lucrative, exclusive right to sell enslaved Africans in Spain’s colonies in America – institutionalizing the slave trade as a cornerstone of its imperial wealth. For more than a century, Britain was the primary slave-trading nation in the Atlantic world, trafficking roughly 3.25 million Africans to the Americas.

The defeat of France in the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) further consolidated British control over North America and India, although the subsequent loss of the Thirteen Colonies during the American Revolution (1775–1783) forced a strategic pivot toward the “Second British Empire” centred on Asia and Africa.

The 19th century, often termed “Britain’s Imperial Century,” witnessed an unprecedented acceleration of this expansion. Following the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, Britain emerged as the world’s unrivaled naval and economic power, maintaining the Pax Britannica, a century of relative peace between major powers that facilitated deep colonial penetration. This era saw the consolidation of the British Raj in India and the “Scramble for Africa,” where Britain laid claim to a vast swathe of territory from the Cape to Cairo.

The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 and Britain’s subsequent acquisition of controlling shares in 1875, served as a geopolitical catalyst, offering a speedier passage to India and precipitating the annexation of Egypt and Sudan.

The Mechanics of Rule: Law, Education, and the Social Engineering of Empire

The maintenance of a global empire required more than raw military force; it necessitated the creation of institutional frameworks capable of governing diverse populations with minimal expenditure.

In the Indian subcontinent, the British utilized a three-pronged strategy involving the manipulation of socio-cultural diversity, the implementation of a specific educational model, and the imposition of a Westernized legal system. The “divide and rule” policy was particularly effective in fracturing national cohesion by reifying religious and caste identities that had previously been fluid and integrated. For example, the 1905 Partition of Bengal was a project designed with the specific purpose of stifling emerging nationalism by separating the Muslim-majority eastern areas from the Hindu-majority western areas. Following the 1857 rebellion, where Hindu and Muslim soldiers had unified against the EIC, the British administration became explicitly wary of such coalitions, intentionally devising programmes that pit these groups against each other, so as to maintain a balance of power in British favour.

Educational reforms, most notably those championed by Thomas Babington Macaulay, were designed to produce an “elite buffer class” of individuals who were “Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect”. This “filtration model” of education ensured that Western values and the English language became the prerequisites for social advancement, thereby alienating the educated elite from the broader populace and fostering a sense of “native inferiority”. This dual system – mainstream English instruction for the elite and traditional religious schools for the masses – has left a legacy of social unrest, radicalization and internecine bloodshed that continues to plague post-colonial South Asian states to this day.

Furthermore, the imposition of British common law replaced indigenous legal traditions with a “positivistic and predictable” framework intended to ensure “order” and facilitate the extraction of land revenue. While framed as a “civilizing” gift based on Bentham’s liberal ideas, these laws were frequently used as instruments of repression. Draconian measures were codified to suppress anti-British agitation and armed uprisings, effectively criminalizing dissent under the guise of the rule of law.

In Africa, the British favoured “indirect rule,” particularly in Nigeria and Kenya, which co-opted local chiefs and traditional rulers to govern on behalf of the Crown. This system created a “bifurcated state” where bureaucratic rules applied to the colonial administration while “decentralized despotism” was the reality for the colonized subjects. The position held by these chiefs was based primarily on patrimonialism and their willingness to collaborate with colonial officials, a structure that undermined indigenous social organizations and left a legacy of institutional fragility and corruption that is today, weaponised against the governments of these countries, and deemed characteristics peculiar to the peoples of the Continent.

The Economic Underbelly: From Slave Profits to the Architecture of Dependency

The primary objective of the British colonial project was the systematic extraction of wealth to fuel domestic industrialization and maintain imperial power. The prosperity of British financial institutions, including banks like Barclays and Lloyds, was built directly on the financing of slave ships and plantations in the Caribbean. Even the abolition of slavery in 1833 reinforced economic inequality; the UK government compensated British slave owners with £20 million – approximately £2 billion in today’s terms – while the formerly enslaved people received nothing, and were often forced to continue working in harsh plantation labor under low wages in a system referred to, euphemistically, as “apprenticeship”.

In India, the “Drain of Wealth” theory, articulated by Dadabhai Naoroji, argued that British rule was a process of “capital accumulation on the British side and a drain of wealth from the Indian side”. This drain operated through three primary channels: oppressive land taxes that weakened local agriculture, unproductive military and administrative expenditures for imperial purposes, and the systematic unrequited export of goods for which Britain “did not pay”.

The results were catastrophic; Indian agriculture suffered from low productivity and diminishing returns, leading to a series of devastating famines. The Great Bengal Famine of 1770, which killed ten million people, stands as a stark testament to the consequences of a colonial economy that prioritized revenue maximization over human survival.

Colonial economies were restructured around the production of monocrop commodities, such as sugar in Guyana, bananas in the Windward Islands, and cocoa in West Africa, to feed the global market. These systems were denied the linkages necessary for value addition and broad-based diversification, ensuring that post-colonial states remained structurally tied to the export of primary products. The transition to formal independence in the mid-20th century did not result in economic liberation; instead, the “architecture of dependency” persisted through the reconfiguration of coercion.

This structural underdevelopment is exacerbated by the “brain drain,” wherein the Global North siphons off skilled labour – doctors, nurses, engineers, and teachers – whose education was financed by the cash-strapped Global South. In the modern era, debt has replaced physical chains as the primary instrument of subjugation, with Global South countries objectively unable to service extortionate foreign currency debt, systematically denied participation in the world’s higher level financial systems, and consequently, and relentlessly denied opportunities for genuine development.

Cartography and the Geopolitics of Partition: A Legacy of Fragmentation

The arbitrary borders drawn by colonial powers remain a primary source of instability in the post-colonial world. In Africa, the borders established at the Berlin Conference ignored all pre-existing ethnic, cultural, and political realities, leading to a “cartographic violence” that split communities like the Somalis among five different jurisdictions. This fragmentation of pre-colonial political entities, such as the Ashanti Empire and the Sokoto Caliphate, has fueled persistent intra-state ethnic conflicts and secessionist movements. The Sudanese civil wars and the eventual secession of South Sudan in 2011 can be traced directly back to British colonial policies that privileged northern Arab elites while marginalizing southern populations.

The decolonization of South Asia and Palestine in 1947–1948 represents one of the most traumatic examples of colonial partition. The Partition of India was characterized by mass migration and ethnic cleansing along the newly drawn borders, resulting in an estimated two million deaths and the displacement of 14 million people. This process created a “post-colonial climate of ethnic and religious nationalism” that has been the basis for multiple wars between India and Pakistan, and continues to undermine the rights of minorities today. Similarly, the British abandonment of the Palestine Mandate in 1947, exhausted by the competing nationalisms of Zionists and Palestinians, set the stage for the 1948 War and the displacement of nearly a million Palestinians.

The British Palestinian Committee draws an even more explicit link between these events, noting that during the late 1930s, British army officers directly taught techniques of colonial oppression to Zionist military leaders. These strategies, refined during the suppression of the Arab Revolt, continue to “inform present-day operations of Israeli occupying forces” in Gaza. This reframes the contemporary situation in Palestine not as a conflict between equal warring states, but as a continuation of over a century of “settler colonialism” enabled, funded and institutionalized by British imperial policy.

The Empire Comes Home: Immigration, the Windrush Generation, and the Hostile Environment

The “Empire comes home” era (1945–1962) saw a wave of immigration from the Caribbean and South Asia as Britain sought to address post-war labor shortages. The British Nationality Act 1948 granted “Citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies” (CUKC) status to everyone born in a British colony, encouraging nearly half a million people to settle in the UK between 1948 and 1970. However, as the non-white population grew, the political discourse shifted toward “closing the borders”. Every major immigration or citizenship law between 1950 and 1981 was designed, at least in part, to limit the number of non-white individuals entering or staying in the UK.

The “Windrush Scandal,” which broke in 2018, exposed the devastating human cost of this legacy. Individuals who had migrated legally and lived in the UK for decades, were wrongly detained, denied healthcare, lost their homes, and in at least 83 cases, were wrongly deported. This was a direct result of the “Hostile Environment” policy instituted by Theresa May, which required private citizens – landlords, employers, and bankers – to perform immigration checks.

An internal Home Office report, which the government fought to keep secret, confirmed that the “roots of the Windrush scandal” lay in a political and social legacy of the British Empire, in which racism was built into the immigration process. The scandal revealed a “culture of disbelief” within the Home Office and a systematic refusal to recognize the legal rights of Black Britons.

In the contemporary context, the immigration debate has been dominated by the “small boats” crisis in the English Channel. The number of arrivals has increased substantially since 2018, with approximately 41,500 people detected in 2025 alone. While the government has framed this as a problem of “vile gangs” and “illegal migrants,” the data show that the majority of those crossing are from countries like Afghanistan, Eritrea, Sudan, and Syria – nations where British colonial legacies of conflict and instability are paramount.

The Gaza Crisis and the Fracture of British Society

The ongoing genocide in Gaza has exposed a deep divide within British society and a “chasm between peoples and their governments”. While successive UK governments have provided diplomatic, military, and economic support to Israel, public opinion has shifted dramatically toward the Palestinian cause. By June 2025, polls indicated that 55% of Britons were against Israel’s military actions, with 82% of those opponents characterizing the onslaught as genocide.

The framing of the conflict by UK political leaders and traditional media has been heavily criticized for reproducing colonial tropes that dehumanize Palestinians. By portraying Palestinian civilians as “human shields” and the violence as a “battle of civilization against barbarism,” politicians seek to “sanitise violence and preserve public support”. This dehumanization is identified by scholars as a “multifaceted process deeply rooted in colonialism, racism, and political ideologies”.

The Museum of Plunder: Artefact Repatriation and Cultural Decolonization

The debate over the repatriation of colonial-era artefacts represents a cultural extension of the decolonization struggle. The British Museum, which holds 75 meters of the Parthenon Frieze and over 900 Benin Bronzes, is at the centre of this international dispute. Proponents of repatriation argue that artifacts removed during armed conflict or in a colonial environment are “looted treasures” that should be returned to their countries of origin as an acknowledgment of wrongful acquisition.

In 2025, negotiations over the Parthenon Marbles – referred to for some time as the Elgin Marbles, for having been removed from the Parthenon by a man called Lord Elgin – reached a “landmark” stage, with reports suggesting they could return to Greece as part of a long-term loan or cultural swap. However, the British Museum Act 1963 remains a significant legal hurdle, as it prohibits the permanent removal of items from the collection.

The Benin Bronzes present an even more stark case of colonial violence. Looted in 1897 following a “punitive expedition” that destroyed the Kingdom of Benin, these artefacts are viewed as “manifestations of Edo ancestors”. While countries like Germany and the Netherlands have returned their collections to Nigeria, the British Museum has remained a “holdout,” claiming that the objects are better preserved in a “universal” museum.

Conclusion: Reconciling with the Imperial Past

The history of British colonialism is not a series of distant events but a continuous and evolving structure that defines modern geopolitics and social relations. The “architecture of dependency” established in the 17th century has transmuted into modern financial systems that perpetuate Global South indebtedness, while the artificial borders drawn in the 19th century continue to ignite 21st-century conflicts.

The United Kingdom’s difficulty with reconciling its “Global Britain” ambitions with the enduring realities of coloniality is evident in the racialized approach to immigration and the visceral societal reaction to the crisis in Palestine. The Windrush scandal and the “small boats” crisis are symptoms of an imperial hangover, where the state remains wedded to a supremacist understanding of citizenship and belonging. Simultaneously, the demands for artefact repatriation and the mass protests against the genocide in Gaza reflect a growing public demand for a “moral reckoning” with the imperial past.

If the United Kingdom wants a flourishing post-Brexit future, it will have to move beyond “nostalgic character and necessary changes”. It will need to acknowledge that the “rule of law” was often an instrument of colonial repression. It must concede that modern prosperity was built on the “financial rape” of the periphery, and it must agree to measures of reparation for the persisting harm. Until the UK addresses the insalubrious structural remnants of its colonial rule, both domestically and internationally, it will remain caught in the “imperial shadow,” and will struggle to find a coherent path in a multi-polar global order.

Next: Geopolitical Risk and Historical Reckoning: The Challenge of Reparative Justice in Britain’s Multi-polar Strategy

As the international system transitions toward a multipolar configuration, characterized by a diffusion of material power and an ideological shift toward the Global South, the demands for reparatory justice for the transatlantic slave trade have intensified. These calls are no longer confined to civil society or academic discourse but have been elevated to the highest levels of intergovernmental diplomacy, as evidenced by the African Union’s designation of 2025 as the year of “Justice for Africans and People of African Descent through Reparations”. Concurrently, domestic political responses within the UK, ranging from the Labour government’s “forward-looking” pragmatism to Reform UK’s proposed punitive visa measures, reveal a nation deeply divided on how to reconcile its imperial past with its strategic future.

Western supremacist patriarchy claims that history is a male invention. Science says otherwise.

All human DNA traces back to one source: a Black woman in Africa. She is the ‘Mitochondrial Eve.’ She is the blueprint. To claim supremacy over her descendants isn’t just a lie—it’s a biological impossibility.

For Black History Month, we aren’t just celebrating the past. We are honouring the lineage of the women who used the DNA of revolution to dismantle empires.

These are the stories of the Black Women fighters, thinkers, and artists who turned ‘impossible’ into ‘independence’ inspiring women across the centuries.

Welcome to The Architects of Resistance. Part 5“ 27 Women. One Unbroken Thread.

These aren’t just biographies—they are the blueprints of three women who redefined how we understand power, identity, and in the words of bell hooks, the “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy.

The Intellectual Architects

The Foundation. The scholars and theorists who took the tools of the academy and turned them into sledgehammers. They provided the language for the overthrow, grasping oppression at its root and designing the new systems of collective care.”

1. Angela Davis: The Structural Demolitionist

Born in the “Dynamite Hill” neighbourhood of Birmingham, Alabama, Davis grew up in the epicentre of racial terror, which forged her into a master strategist of systemic change. A philosopher, scholar, and former political prisoner, she became a global icon of resistance in the 1970s.

· The Blueprint: Davis is the primary architect of Abolition Feminism. She taught us that “radical” simply means “grasping things at the root.” She doesn’t just want to fix the system; she wants to dismantle the carceral state and build a society rooted in collective care.

· Mitochondrial Link: She carries the “warrior-scholar” DNA, proving that the mind is the first territory that must be liberated.

2. bell hooks: The Cartographer of the Heart

Born Gloria Jean Watkins, she adopted her great-grandmother’s name in lowercase (bell hooks) to keep the focus on the “substance of books, not the worth of the person.” She was a prolific theorist who bridged the gap between the academy and the street.

· The Blueprint: She famously coined the phrase “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy” to describe the interlocking systems of our oppression. hooks argued that “love as the practice of freedom” is the only foundation strong enough to support a true revolution.

· Mitochondrial Link: She focused on the “Internal Architecture”—healing the psychic wounds of the Diaspora and reclaiming the right to self-love as a political act.

3. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: The Narrative Weaver

A Nigerian powerhouse who brought African feminism to the global “pop culture” stage, Adichie is the architect of the Multi-Dimensional Story. Her work refuses to allow the West to flatten the complex reality of Black womanhood into a “single story” of catastrophe.

· The Blueprint: Through works like Half of a Yellow Sun and Americanah, she rebuilds the narrative walls of the African continent. She reminds us that “We Should All Be Feminists” because gender, as it is currently constructed, is an architectural flaw in the human experience.

· Mitochondrial Link: Living between the US and Nigeria, she represents the modern return to the source—connecting the contemporary global struggle back to the literal soil where our common ancestor first walked.

These three women represent the “Modern Archive” of our series, since they are the “Foundational Thinkers”.

They say history is written by the victors. But the truth? The truth is written in our marrow, he marrow of the people of Africa, Black people.

Western science spent centuries trying to engineer a hierarchy to justify the scourge of racism that it has inflicted upon the world, but in doing so, it stumbled upon a fact it couldn’t erase: Humanity began with a Black woman. Every human being drawing breath today carries the genetic signature of ‘Mitochondrial Eve’—the common maternal ancestor of us all, who walked the African continent 200,000 years ago. We are all her children.

It is the ultimate audacity: that the very men who claim supremacy are merely guests in a house built by the Black women they tried to silence. But while they were busy claiming the crown, Black women were busy building the resistance.

From the first breath of our species to the front lines of every revolution, the thread of defiance has remained unbroken. These aren’t just stories of ‘activism’—they are the continuation of a biological legacy of power.

Global Revolutionary Thinkers

The Pathfinders. The women who carved freedom out of the shadows. They operated in the dark so we could live in the light. They built the underground networks and the international alliances that proved our resistance has no borders.

19. Paulette Nardal (Martinique, 1896–1985)

Bio: An intellectual and journalist who co-founded the Revue du Monde Noir and was a pioneer of the Négritude movement.

The Literary Salon: Her salon in Paris was the melting pot where the fathers of Négritude (Césaire Aime Poet and former President of the Regional Council of Martinique, he coined the word negritude,

· , Leopold Senghor the 1st president of senegal) first met.

· Intersectionality: She was one of the first to articulate the specific double-burden of race and gender for Black women.

· Suffrage: She worked to ensure Martinican women gained the right to vote in 1944.

20. Wangari Maathai (Kenya, 1940–2011)

Bio: An environmental and political activist who founded the Green Belt Movement.

· Ecofeminism: She linked environmental conservation with women’s rights and democracy and made it so that today the Green belt movement has planted more than 57 million trees and restored five million hectares of degraded forests and landscapes

· Direct Action: She famously stood her ground against government developers, even when the police beat her up.

· Nobel Success: She was the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

21. Queen Mother Moore (USA, 1898–1997)

Bio: An activist for over 70 years who is considered the “Mother of the Reparations Movement.”

· Reparations Pioneer: She was the first to formally petition the UN for reparations for descendants of enslaved people. Her early work stated the movement that has brought us to today where reparations are being sought by the descendants of Africans enslaved all around the world, and the African Union has declared the enslavement of Africans a crime against humanity and Ghana is petitioning the UN to do the same

Pan-Africanism: She mentored Malcolm X and was a leading figure in the UNIA and the Republic of New Afrika.

· Grassroots Teacher: She spent her life educating Black youth about their African identity and economic self-sufficiency.

22. Solitude (Guadeloupe, c. 1772–1802)

Bio: A legendary figure of the resistance against the re-imposition of slavery by Napoleon’s troops.

· Fierce Combatant: Though pregnant at the time, she fought in the front lines of the 1802 uprising against enslavement by the french.

· Symbolic Martyr: Her execution (the day after she gave birth) made her the eternal symbol of Guadeloupean freedom.

· Inspirational Figure: Her story was finally immortalized in literature and statues in the late 20th century.

23. Marie-Jeanne Lamartinière (Haiti, fl. 1802)

Bio: A soldier in the Haitian Revolution who fought famously at the Battle of Crête-à-Pierrot.

· Military Bravery: She wore a male uniform and was noted for her skill with a rifle and her ability to boost troop morale during the siege.

· Cross-Role Success: She acted as both a nurse and a frontline combatant.

· Legendary Status: She is celebrated as “Haiti’s Joan of Arc.”

24. Catherine Flon (Haiti, fl. 1803)

Bio: A seamstress and revolutionary who is credited with sewing the first Haitian flag.

· The Act of Creation: She famously sewed the blue and red bands together after the white band (symbolizing the French) was cut out.

· Unity Symbol: The flag she made represented the alliance between Black and biracial (mulatto) revolutionaries.

· National Icon: She appears on the Haitian 10-gourde banknote.

The Frequency. The High Priestesses of Song and Stone. These women understood that the patriarchy can control a border, but it cannot control a vibration. They used melody and canvas to decolonize the mind and remind us that our DNA is the masterpiece.”

13. Nina Simone (USA, 1933–2003)

Bio: The “High Priestess of Soul” who transitioned from a classical piano prodigy to the voice of the Civil Rights Movement.

· Musical Protest: Songs like “Mississippi Goddam” became anthems that channeled the rage and urgency of the movement.

· Sacrifice: She famously said, “An artist’s duty... is to reflect the times,” even when it cost her commercial success.

· Global Influence: Her music provided the emotional soundtrack for liberation movements worldwide.

14. Miriam Makeba (South Africa, 1932–2008)

Bio: Known as “Mama Africa,” she was a singer who used her global platform to campaign against Apartheid.

· Exile as Activism: After testifying against Apartheid at the UN, her South African citizenship was revoked; she spent 30 years in exile.

· Cultural Ambassador: She brought African music to the world stage, blending it with messages of political freedom.

· Resilience: She successfully navigated professional blacklisting in the US due to her marriage to Stokely Carmichael.

15. Josephine Baker (France/USA, 1906–1975)

Bio: A world-famous dancer who served as a spy for the French Resistance during WWII.

· Subversive Espionage: She carried secret messages written in invisible ink on her sheet music and pinned to her underwear.

· Civil Rights Warrior: She refused to perform for segregated audiences in the US and spoke at the March on Washington.

· The “Rainbow Tribe”: She adopted 12 children of different ethnicities to prove that racial harmony was possible.

16. Victoria Santa Cruz (Peru, 1922–2014)

Bio: A choreographer, poet, and activist who spearheaded the Afro-Peruvian cultural renaissance.

· “Me Gritaron Negra”: Her rhythmic poem/performance became a global Black feminist anthem about reclaiming identity.

· Cultural Reclamation: She founded the first Black theater company in Peru to recover “lost” ancestral rhythms.

· Intellectual Power: She taught at Carnegie Mellon, influencing generations of actors with her theories on “internal rhythm.”

17. Elizabeth Catlett (USA/Mexico, 1915–2012)

Bio: A sculptor and printmaker whose work focused on the struggles and dignity of Black women.

· Art as a Weapon: She believed art should be used for social change and made her prints affordable for working-class people.

· Political Exile: She was declared an “undesirable alien” by the US government due to her leftist activism and lived most of her life in Mexico.

· Iconography: Her depictions of Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth remain some of the most powerful in art history.

18. Faith Ringgold (USA, 1930–2024)

Bio: An artist and author best known for her “story quilts” that challenge racial and gender stereotypes.

· Medium as Resistance: She used quilting—a traditional “domestic” craft—to tell epic, revolutionary stories of Black life.

· Activist Organizing: She led protests in the 1960s and 70s to demand that museums include Black and female artists.

· Educational Impact: Her books, like Tar Beach, have introduced millions of children to Black history and imagination.

They call Africa the ‘Cradle of Humanity,’ but they often forget who was rocking the cradle.

We’re told that history belongs to the ‘conquerors’ and the ‘supreme,’ but the biology says otherwise. All human life is a direct line back to one woman. One Black woman. We are all her descendants.

Isn’t it fascinating? That men have spent millennia claiming to be the architects of civilization, when they are merely the guests in a house built by Black women. The patriarchy claims the crown, but Black women have always held the scepter.

This series isn’t about victims; it’s about Architects. For Black History Month, we are honoring the lineage of the frontline. From the savannas of the African Continent, to the Maroon mountains to the Parisian salons, these are the Black women who dismantled the structures meant to cage them, and built something better in their place.

These are “the women who...“

The Throne. These are the Strategists of State. They navigated the master’s own courts, out-negotiated empires, and protected the ‘Soul’ of their nations. They didn’t just lead armies; they led civilizations, proving that power is a maternal inheritance.”

7. Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti (Nigeria, 1900–1978)

Bio: A teacher and political campaigner who founded the Abeokuta Women’s Union (AWU).

· Mass Mobilization: She led 10,000 women in protests against unfair taxes, eventually forcing a local traditional king to abdicate.

· Pan-Africanist: She traveled the world advocating for women’s rights and was the first Nigerian woman to drive a car (a symbol of her independence).

· Feminist Blueprint: She integrated traditional African female power structures with modern political activism.

8. Winnie Madikizela-Mandela (South Africa, 1936–2018)

Bio: Known as the “Mother of the Nation,” she was a key anti-Apartheid leader while Nelson Mandela was imprisoned.

· Frontline Activism: She endured banishment, torture, and solitary confinement but never stopped organizing the resistance.

· Grassroots Power: She kept the ANC’s mission alive domestically when other leaders were in exile or prison.

· Uncompromising Stance: Her militant approach was a necessary counterweight to the diplomatic efforts of the era.

·

9. Shirley Chisholm 1924 - 2005

If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.” — Shirley Chisholm

The Hook: Born in Brooklyn NY to a Guyanese father and a Barbadian mother, Shirley Chisholm was forged in the strict, academic excellence of the Caribbean. She returned to the U.S. with a “British-Barbadian” accent and a refusal to bow to the mediocre expectations of the American patriarchy.

The Success: Shirley didn’t just “run” for President; she succeeded in creating a blueprint for every woman of color who has held office since. “Unbought and Unbossed”,

she moved the needle of history.

10. Marielle Franco (Brazil, 1979–2018)

Bio: A politician and human rights activist from the Maré favela who fought against police brutality and for LGBTQ+ rights.

· Voice of the Marginalized: She used her seat in the Rio de Janeiro council to expose state violence in the favelas.

· Intersectionality: Her identity as a Black, queer woman from the slums made her a revolutionary threat to the status quo.

· Global Impact: Her assassination sparked a worldwide movement, making her a permanent symbol of Brazilian resistance.

11. Ida B. Wells-Barnett (USA, 1862–1931)

Bio: An investigative journalist and educator who led the anti-lynching crusade in the United States.

· Journalistic Resistance: She used data and primary sources to prove that lynching was a tool of economic and social control, not “punishment” for crimes.

· Suffrage Leader: She refused to march in the back of suffrage parades, asserting Black women’s place at the front of the movement.

· Founder: She was a founding member of the NAACP.

12. Claudia Jones (Trinidad/UK, 1915–1964)

Bio: A communist activist and journalist who was deported from the US for her politics and became a leader in the UK.

· Intersectionality Pioneer: She wrote “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!” in 1949.

· Notting Hill Carnival: She founded the carnival as a joyful, defiant response to racist riots in 1960’s London.

· The West Indian Gazette: She founded the first major Black newspaper in Britain.

Every strand of DNA in every human being on this planet traces back to a single common ancestor—Mitochondrial Eve—who walked the African continent roughly 200,000 years ago. Science proves that Black women are the literal authors of the human species. And yet, the patriarchy has the audacity to claim supremacy over the very source of its existence.

But Black women didn’t just give the world life; they taught the world how to defend it.

History tells us that empires were built by men and that the history of men is a story of war and domination. But there has been resistance. And that resistance? That was forged by the women who refused to be the foundation for someone else’s throne. Across the savannas of the African Continent, the mountains of Jamaica, the salons of Paris, and the streets of Rio de Janeiro, Black women have been the architects of revolution against empire, against enslavement, against exploitation. They didn’t just survive; they succeeded. These women didn’t just participate in movements; they led them, shaped them, and often won.

This Black History Month, we aren’t just looking back; we aren’t just celebrating the past; we are looking at the blueprint. We are honouring 27 of the Black women who took the DNA of revolution, led armies, taught communities, fought empires, built thriving societies, and redefined what it means to be free.

These are the stories of the Black Women fighters, thinkers, and artists who turned ‘impossible’ into ‘independence’ inspiring women across the centuries.

The Architects of Resistance.“ 27 Women. One Unbroken Thread.

IN BRIEF:

Resistance Fighters & Military Leaders

The Shields.

These are the women who realized that a house cannot stand if it cannot be defended. From the mountains of Jamaica to the quilombos of Brazil, they turned the environment into a weapon and their bodies into fortresses. They proved that sovereignty isn’t given—it’s taken.”

1. Queen Nzinga Mbande (Angola, 1583–1663)

Bio: A brilliant diplomat and military strategist of the Ndongo and Matamba Kingdoms who fought Portuguese colonial expansion for 40 years.

· Tactical Genius: She famously used guerrilla warfare and forged strategic alliances with the Dutch to keep her kingdom semi-independent.

· Political Defiance: In a famous meeting, when the Portuguese governor refused her a chair, she had a servant kneel to create a human throne, asserting her equality.

· Legacy of Sovereignty: Her success kept Matamba as a powerful state long after her death.

2. Nanny of the Maroons (Jamaica, c. 1686–1733)

Bio: The spiritual and military leader of the Windward Maroons, a community of formerly enslaved people who lived in the Jamaican mountains.

· Guerrilla Warfare: She mastered “camouflage” tactics, dressing her soldiers in branches to ambush British troops.

· The 1739 Treaty: Her resistance was so effective the British were forced to sign a peace treaty granting the Maroons land and autonomy.

· National Hero: She remains Jamaica’s only female National Hero.

3. Yaa Asantewaa (Ghana, 1840–1921)

Bio: The Queen Mother of Ejisu who led the Ashanti rebellion against British colonialism in 1900.

· The War of the Golden Stool: When men hesitated to fight, she gave a famous speech shaming them and took up arms herself to protect the Ashanti’s sacred symbol.

· Military Commander: She led an army of 5,000 in a siege against the British fort in Kumasi.

· Symbol of Courage: Though eventually exiled, she is the ultimate symbol of Ghanaian resistance to foreign rule.

4. Harriet Tubman (USA, 1822–1913)

Bio: An escaped enslaved woman who became the most famous “conductor” of the Underground Railroad.

· Unbeaten Record: She led approximately 70 people to freedom and “never lost a passenger.”

· Civil War Spy: She was the first woman to lead an armed assault during the Civil War (the Combahee River Raid), liberating over 700 people.

· Humanitarian: After the war, she fought for women’s suffrage and opened a home for the elderly.

5. Dandara of Palmares (Brazil, d. 1694)

Bio: A warrior-leader of Quilombo dos Palmares, a massive fugitive community in colonial Brazil.

· Total Resistance: She refused to accept any peace treaty with the Portuguese that didn’t include the total abolition of slavery.

· Military Expertise: She was a master of Capoeira and led both the cavalry and infantry in defense of the quilombo.

· Sacrifice for Freedom: She chose death over re-enslavement, jumping from a cliff when the settlement was finally breached.

6. Carlota Lukumí (Cuba, d. 1844)

Bio: A Yoruba woman who led a major slave uprising at the Triunvirato sugar mill in Matanzas.

· Inter-Plantation Coordination: She organized a network of multiple plantations to rise up simultaneously.

· Symbol of the Revolution: She is now the namesake of Cuba’s “Operation Carlota” (the 1970s intervention in Angola).

· Defiance to the End: Her rebellion struck such fear into the colonial government that it led to “La Escalera,” a period of intense repression.

One of the psychological advantages of the phrase “gender-based violence” is that it spreads blame across everyone, and the net effect is that, therefore, it reaches no one. But collective blame is c…

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