This final chapter investigates what Pepys’s famously frank and comprehensive diary does not say – and how readers have dealt, or failed to deal, with those omissions. The focus is on a selection of the people mentioned in Pepys’s papers whose lives are barely mentioned in official documents or who went otherwise unrecorded: his wife Elizabeth, women and girls in whom he had a sexual interest, and certain of the Black people who worked for him or lived near him. Pepys’s diary and his other surviving records contain valuable information on their lives – information which shows Pepys to have been a sexual predator and an enslaver. For a range of reasons, these are aspects of his life missing from his popular reputation. Getting the most from the diary, and using it to explore the lives of others, requires understanding and countering influential traditions about Pepys and how his diary should be read.

This chapter explores the complex interplay between love, desire, responsibility, and violence in intimate relationships, focussing on Sierra Leone. It emphasises the need to examine the acceptance of violence without excusing it, advocating for a local, phenomenological perspective. It highlights gendered expectations and experiences of violence, acknowledging the impact of historical, sociocultural, political, economic, and legal factors on agency. In Freetown, violence is not seen as separate from love but can co-exist within relationships. Within a moral economy of relationships, careful distinctions are made between acceptable forms of violence to protect and sustain relationships and unacceptable forms that rupture and destroy. External observers frequently misconstrue these dynamics, perceiving them as excessively violent and uncritical. Considering embedded agency and intersectional factors is crucial when addressing relationship violence and developing effective policies. Intimate violence is a multifaceted, dynamic phenomenon that necessitates nuanced understanding of meaning-making and experience.

Around 30% of women worldwide have been subjected to either physical or sexual intimate partner violence (IPV) in their lifetimes. In Europe, one in 20 women over the age of 15 has been raped. Meanwhile gross misogyny and sexual violence against women is becoming more normalised in society. When women have been victims of physical, sexual violence, emotional abuse or coercive control the impact on their mental health can be severe.The sense of shame can be overwhelming. Mental health problems are not an inevitable consequence of IPV but anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, psychosis, self-harm, substance misuse and getting a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder (BPD) are all more common. Domestic violence can also result in suicide and is linked to murder-suicide and ‘honour’ killing. However, women who have killed abusive men have been repeatedly denied justice. Mental health services need training about IPV and sexual violence and to make strong links with organisations in the community. Each of us needs to ensure that we would know what we would do to help a friend, family member or colleague who is experiencing domestic violence or sexual assault.

This essay interrogates the queer history of slavery through close readings of nineteenth century literature. Specifically the texts Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) by Harriett Jacobs, Our Nig (1859) by Harriett E. Wilson, “The Heroic Slave” (1853) by Frederick Douglass, as well as the pro-slavery text, The Partisan Leader (1836) by Nathaniel Beverly Tucker are placed in conversation and tension to examine how cruelty against slaves and free Black people expose the vexed queer encounters of the antebellum period. Rather than thinking of queerness as solely same-sex sexual acts, this argument extends a theory of racial sexuation that considers violence extended by masters, mistresses, and non-slave owning whites as imbued by fantasies and desires about Blackness as sexually open, unruly gendered, and innately erotic. Lastly, in reading texts pertaining to the conditions of slaves and free Black people, this essay interrogates how the racial sexual relations that are present under slavery extend beyond the confines of the plantation.

During the two World Wars sexuality was fundamental to how both conflicts were planned, conducted, and experienced. The sexual body was an ever-present target of military policy as a potential polluter of the race, a danger to colonial order, sexual mores, or gender hierarchy; it was an object of intervention and mutilation, even annihilation. Nonetheless, war also offered opportunities for new, hitherto illicit sexual encounters. Individuals experienced sexuality in two opposing ways: as a source of immense suffering but also of erotic excitement and love. Changes in sexual attitudes, regulation, and practices must be understood through the filters of gender, class, race, sexual orientation, religion, and regional variations. Between 1918 and the `sexual revolution” of the 1960s a profound shift in sexual mores and attitudes took place in all bellicose nations. The millions of deaths on the battlefields, the suffering at home, the unprecedented mass movement within and between countries had sufficiently ruptured the social fabric to unleash a wide-spread liberalisation of sexuality. The steeply declining birthrate was the most dramatic expression of changing ideals. Yet, liberalisation was at best ambivalent as many traditional attitudes and regulations resurfaced and women and queer people struggled to fit back into a state-sanctioned `normal” life.

This chapter charts sexual violence over time and place, showing substantial shifts in thinking about sex as violence, rape as an assault on property, emerging ideas of consent, and changing attitudes towards the victim and the offender. It traces how sexual violence was defined and understood, in both society and law, from the classical world to today, examining case studies that include rape, sodomy and offences against children. It examines the structural impediments to the prevention of sexual violence, and the social and legal barriers to justice when a crime did occur. It highlights the fact that responses to sexual violence vary between individuals and communities, though survivors reveal that many forms of sex might be experienced as violent or traumatic, regardless of whether the acts were normalised or criminalised. Ideas of sexual violence are read through intersectional lenses, highlighting the idea that normative ideas of gender, sexual identity, race and class heightened the potential for sexual exploitation of marginalised groups. Limited, fragmented or unrepresentative sources make it challenging to trace sexual violence in history, but it is imperative to do so, as sexual crimes have had a substantial impact on the life experiences of individuals and their families and communities.

This chapter finds in the Bible a diversity of views about sexuality, gender, marriage, divorce, celibacy, virginity, and the human body. It next traces in early Christianity an aversion towards same-sex relationships, abortion, and contraception, and a growing gynophobia combined with a growing devotion to the Virgin Mary. It discusses the association between sexuality and original sin, and between misogyny and the invention of the witch, together with the negation of sexual pleasure, the confinement of sexual relations to procreation within marriage, and the struggles of monks with their erotic desires. A painful incompatibility between the sexual practices of colonized peoples and missionary expectations and behaviour is noted. Through to the present time, different models of marriage and attitudes towards same-sex relationships are found within Christianity. The early diversity of views about sexuality is shown to be unresolved, re-appearing in the culture wars of the present century. While attitudes to cohabitation, divorce and masturbation are generally more liberal than in the past, global Christianity still retains a strong antipathy towards loving same-sex relationships, abortion, and even the ordination of women.

This chapter explores the linkages between Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 3 ‘Health’ and SDG 5 ‘Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls’. We argue that health equity and gender equality are ‘twin forces’ that are historically connected and cannot be separated, creating either strong co-benefits or a ‘double jeopardy’ scenario for health and gender equality. Developments at the cross-roads of SDG 3 and SDG 5 are never ‘gender neutral’ and need attention for two reasons: to strengthen the health policy co-benefits and to prevent and mitigate adverse effects if gender equality is ignored. We introduce a conceptual model of researching co-benefits that expands the focus on macro-level co-benefits towards more complex governance processes and outcomes, including gender mainstreaming approaches. Selected empirical case studies consider major targets of SDG 5 and related SDG 3 sub-goals, illustrating different scenarios of implementation of health and gender co-benefits in a range of policy and governance contexts. The empirical cases illustrate that governance actions and intersectoral structures/institutional pathways shape the ‘windows of opportunity’ for co-benefits, yet co-benefits remain contested and must be re-assured, a lesson most recently learned from the COVID−19 pandemic.

At a time in U.S. politics when advocacy groups are increasingly relying on supporters to help advance their agendas, this chapter considers how intersectional advocates are mobilizing their supporters in Chapter 6. While membership in women’s advocacy organizations has decreased over the years, supporters that volunteer their time to advocacy organizations to advance their policy goals has been largely overlooked. Yet, these supporters are important contributors to intersectional advocacy. In Chapter 6, two original survey experiments are presented with the supporters from this organization that also engages in intersectional advocacy. Each experiment contain authentic policy platforms that either present an intersectional advocacy approach or a traditional single issue policy approach to supporters. The findings from these experiments answer the final question: does intersectional advocacy resonate with the intersectionally marginalized populations it aims to serve, and if so, to what extent does it mobilize them to participate in the policymaking process? This chapter highlights the role of supporters in advancing these policy efforts while showcasing tangible