Abolition. Feminism. Now.

The three clipped words of Abolition. Feminism. Now. announce an argument while recovering a history that has often been erased. Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth E. Richie reject the idea that abolition and feminism are competing projects—as if one concerned prisons and police while the other addressed gender violence, or as if reducing punishment necessarily meant abandoning survivors. They argue that contemporary abolition was made possible by the long work of Black women, women of color, queer and trans organizers confronting state and intimate violence together. The periods separate the terms only to make their interdependence newly visible.

The book is first a movement genealogy, not a history of a slogan invented after the protests of 2020. It traces how anti-prison, anti-violence, anti-capitalist, internationalist, and grassroots feminist struggles formed one another. It also records practices that official histories classify as service rather than theory: accompanying survivors, fighting for housing and benefits, visiting prisoners, organizing bail, caring for children whose parents were taken by the state, and building mutual-aid and political-education networks. Abolition feminist knowledge emerged from repeated experiments in survival where trustworthy institutional protection was absent, not only from concepts developed in universities.

Its central analysis holds state violence and violence in intimate relationships within the same frame rather than using one to conceal the other. Mainstream anti-violence movements won public recognition through mandatory arrest, enhanced sentences, prosecution, and police partnerships, but those tools created additional risk for Black women, migrants, sex workers, disabled people, and queer communities. A person seeking help might lose housing, children, immigration status, or freedom, and could be arrested as the aggressor. Police and prisons are violent institutions; family and community harm is also real. Because both facts matter, safety cannot be outsourced to one of the structures producing violence.

“Abolition” therefore does not mean removing an institution and leaving a void. It is simultaneous dismantling and construction: reducing the power of police, prisons, and family regulation while moving resources toward housing, healthcare, education, income, disability support, childcare, and durable relations of accountability. Preventing violence requires altering the material conditions that force people to depend on dangerous relationships. Responding to harm requires survivor choice, safety planning, repair, and sustained limits on the person responsible. This work is slow and its results may be less visible than an arrest, but it comes closer to making harm less likely to recur.

Internationalism enlarges the map further. The authors connect the U.S. prison-industrial complex to borders, military occupation, colonial governance, capital flows, and global resistance. Punishment does not stop at the prison wall: school policing, family surveillance, immigration detention, and overseas military violence all distribute sacrifice through the language of protection. A feminism that asks only for women’s equal participation in police, militaries, and prison administration may gain representation without changing how those institutions manufacture insecurity.

The collaborative form is itself a method. Grassroots movements do not appear as raw cases awaiting scholarly interpretation; organizers’ illustrations, slogans, educational materials, and campaign experience are treated as theory. “Now” does not suggest that a world without prisons can be completed immediately. It refuses to postpone the building of other relations forever. Every effort that blocks a jail expansion, secures housing, or creates accountability without default banishment rehearses a different institution. Abolition becomes both a long horizon and a way to judge whether a present policy expands or contracts punitive capacity.

The book is not a crisis-response manual that can be copied everywhere, which is both honest and limiting. A survivor facing ongoing lethal violence may need immediate separation, legal protection, or state resources. Communities can protect prestigious abusers and turn “repair” into pressure to forgive. Without stable funding, expertise, and checks on power, alternative practices can return excessive care labor to Black women, queer people, and disabled organizers. The authors supply political principles and historical coordinates while leaving many operational questions in high-risk situations to local movements.

For FemRes readers, the book is most useful not as a test of whether one “supports abolition,” but as a discipline for evaluating safety proposals. Does a measure increase the capacity of police, prisons, borders, or family surveillance? Does it give survivors meaningful choices? Does it change the housing, income, health, and care conditions that allow violence to persist? Who carries the time and risk of accountability? Read with concrete transformative-justice cases, survivor advocacy, and local legal resources, Abolition. Feminism. Now. refuses the false choice between taking gender violence seriously and opposing the violence of the state.