This thesis studies the American Equal Rights Association (AERA), 1866 to 1870, and argues for its historical distinctiveness and significance. The AERA was the only organisation in nineteenth-century America that explicitly campaigned for the rights of men and women on the same platform. Formed in the immediate aftermath of the American Civil War, the AERA joined the discussion of how to reconstruct the war-torn nation, demanding political rights to be extended to all American citizens based on their common humanity. As the first academic study to focus purely on the AERA, this thesis presents a series of new findings and interpretations about the association. It studies the creation, exploits, and demise of the AERA, highlighting and analysing key aspects of the association’s character, from its membership and ideas, to its campaigning and organisational dynamics. It also broadens the source base beyond the two figures of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, who have long dominated writings on the woman suffrage movement. Instead, the thesis examines the AERA membership as a whole. In so doing, it argues three main points: first, the association was more than just the vehicle for the woman suffrage movement at this time; second, the association worked well and was not constantly beset by divisions and disputes, and third, the final collapse of the association was due more to the actions of individuals than to wider historical or contextual forces. Besides arguing for the historical distinctiveness and significance of the AERA, this focus on the association itself provides a new angle on wide-ranging questions, concerning Reconstruction history, political relations between men and women and the role of men in movements for gender equality.

This covering statement introduces the nine published outputs in this submission, and explains their genesis. It considers the implications of the growing visibility of the sexual orientation strand for individuals and organisations operating in the UK context before and after the introduction of the Employment Equality (Sexual Orientation) Regulations 2003 (hereafter the Regulations). The PhD advanced knowledge and understanding of the following: the rationale for and drivers of sexual orientation equality work in UK trade union, public, private and voluntary sector organisations over the last two decades; the equality/diversity structures, policies and practices introduced by organisations in order to become more inclusive of lesbian gay and bisexual (LGB) people; LGB people’s perceptions and experiences of these sexual orientation equality and diversity policies and practices; LGB people’s voice, activism and agency in influencing the changes which have been taking place. The covering document provides details of the research projects and the interpretivist case study methodology on which the published outputs draw. It summarises and links the aims and principal findings of each output demonstrating that they form a coherent body of work. It concludes that although the introduction of the Regulations has been a positive trigger to sexual orientation equality work in the UK, progress remains uneven within and across organisations. Thus, it identifies voice mechanisms such as LGBT trade union and company network groups as key tools for inclusion. The conclusion locates the PhD as an original contribution to the advancement of sexual orientation organisation equality/diversity research. It does so by discussing its empirical and theoretical contributions to a sexual orientation research agenda which has been developing in waves subject to social, political and legal change and mobilisation in LGBT communities in different parts of the world.

This dissertation aims to defend an egalitarian conception of global distributive justice. Many hold that the scope of egalitarian justice should be defined by membership of a single political community but my dissertation will challenge this view. I begin by considering three distinctive arguments against the ideal of global equality. They maintain that egalitarian obligations of justice apply only to those people who are subject to the same sovereign authority which coerces them to abide by its rules; or to those who contribute to the preservation of each other’s autonomy through collectively sustaining a state; or to those who belong to the same nation. The first three chapters deal with these arguments respectively. Central to these arguments is the assumption that the domestic and the global contexts are different in some morally relevant way so egalitarian principles of justice apply to the former but not the latter. After rebutting these anti-egalitarian arguments I turn to the more constructive task of developing a form of global egalitarianism that is grounded in the value of equality as a normative ideal of how human relations should be conducted. I argue in Chapter 4 that relational equality—that is, standing in relations of equality to one another (rather than relations characterized by domination or exploitation)—is a demand of justice in the global context. This ideal of relational equality has distributive implications. In Chapter 5 I try to spell out these implications by defending a set of principles of global distributive justice that would follow from our commitment to global relational equality. In the sixth and final chapter, I discuss what responsibilities we have in relation to global injustice, how to distribute the burdens associated with these responsibilities, and whether they are excessively demanding on complying agents.