Other second and third generation feminists, particularly those emerging from revolutionary liberation movements, are informed by socialist political philosophy. As such they are aligned with male contemporaries also investigating global systems and social and economic class structures. However, feminist scholars have added much to the Marxist political economies of the 1970s and 1980s, moving beyond structural determinism to raise questions about agency, subjectivity, social and personal relationships and kinship networks, as well as the day-to-day livelihoods and material histories of women. Feminists on the continent have used innovative methods to uncover the histories of movements and the life histories of women, recovering a body of knowledge on feminist consciousness and organizing in African and pan-African movements throughout the twentieth century. However, it has not been the African past so much as the challenges of the present and desires for a better future that have provided impetus to feminists mobilizing across the African world.  
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[^0]:    5 Amadiume $(1987,2004)$ pursues the thesis that indigenous African societies were matriarchal on the basis of anthropological study of the Nnobi Igbo community. Oyewunmi (1991) argues that 'gender did not exist' in African societies prior to colonialism, drawing her evidence from the gender-neutral features of the Yoruba language spoken in the Old Oyo Kingdom. Boyce Davies (2015) provides a well-argued and more detailed discussion of the limitations of culturalist feminism.