In this vividly written and amply illustrated book, Gay L. Gullickson analyzes the representations of women who were part of the insurrection known as the Paris Commune. The uprising and its bloody ...suppression by the French army is still one of the most hotly debated episodes in modern history. Especially controversial was the role played by women, whose prominent place among the Communards shocked many commentators and spawned the legend of the pétroleuses, women who were accused of burning the city during the battle that ended the Commune. In the midst of the turmoil that shook Paris, the media distinguished women for their cruelty and rage. The Paris-Journal , for example, raved: Madness seems to possess them; one sees them, their hair down like furies, throwing boiling oil, furniture, paving stones, on the soldiers. Gullickson explores the significance of the images created by journalists, memoirists, and political commentators, and elaborated by latter-day historians and political thinkers. The pétroleuse is the most notorious figure to emerge from the Commune, but the literature depicts the Communardes in other guises, too: the innocent victim, the scandalous orator, the Amazon warrior, and the ministering angel, among others. Gullickson argues that these caricatures played an important role in conveying and evoking moral condemnation of the Commune. More important, they reveal the gender conceptualizations that structured, limited, and assigned meaning to women as political actors for the balance of the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century.
The life of legendary revolutionary fighter and journalist Larisa Reisner (1895-1926) is set against the world-shaking events of 1917, and draws on material recently released from the Soviet archives ...to tell her story through the memories of those close to her, her own voluminous writings, and her six books, to be published together in translation for the first time by Brill with this biography.
The Saigon Sisters offers the narratives of a group of privileged women who were immersed in a French lycée and later rebelled and fought for independence, starting with France's occupation of ...Vietnam and continuing through US involvement and life after war ends in 1975. Tracing the lives of nine women, The Saigon Sisters reveals these women's stories as they forsook safety and comfort to struggle for independence, and describes how they adapted to life in the jungle, whether facing bombing raids, malaria, deadly snakes, or other trials. How did they juggle double lives working for the resistance in Saigon? How could they endure having to rely on family members to raise their own children? Why, after being sent to study abroad by anxious parents, did several women choose to return to serve their country? How could they bear open-ended separation from their husbands? How did they cope with sending their children to villages to escape the bombings of Hanoi? In spite of the maelstrom of war, how did they forge careers? And how, in spite of dislocation and distrust following the end of the war in 1975, did these women find each other and rekindle their friendships? Patricia D. Norland answers these questions and more in this powerful and personal approach to history.
The participation of women in armed insurgencies calls into question a widespread belief that women are inherently more peace loving than men on account of their hard-wired caring disposition. To ...explain why women engage in political violence, existing research either ignores the fundamental collective action problem involved because of motivations focused on the value of the cause, or looks for selective incentives in the form of loot and appropriation, which often cannot be found. This paper offers a simple gendered model of the supply of violence that can account for both peaceful and violent choices and make sense of the apparent extremism of some choices as rational, not fanatical behaviour. Crucially, it regards the individual reward for violence as not material gain, but the possibility of women of breaking out of the cage of traditional gender roles and making a statement by their deeds, thereby joining a cult of heroes and martyrs. For evidence, we turn to the extraordinary involvement of women in the Russian revolutionary movement leading up to the 1917 revolution.
“Finally! The majority of students—by which I mean women—will have the opportunity to read biographies of women from our nation’s past. (Men can read them too, of course!) The Lives of American Women ...series features an eclectic collection of books, readily accessible to students who will be able to see the contributions of women in many fields over the course of our history. Long overdue, these books will be a valuable resource for teachers, students, and the public at large.”
—COKIE ROBERTS,
author of Founding Mothers and Ladies of Liberty
“Just what any professor wants: books that will intrigue, inform, and fascinate students! These short, readable biographies of American women—specifically designed for classroom use—give instructors an appealing new option to assign to their history students.”
—MARY BETH NORTON,
Mary Donlon Alger Professor of American History, Cornell University
“For educators keen to include women in the American story, but hampered by the lack of thoughtful, concise scholarship, here comes Lives of American Women, embracing Abigail Adams’s counsel to John—‘remember the ladies.’ And high time, too!”
—LESLEY S. HERRMANN,
Executive Director, The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History
“Students both in the general survey course and in specialized offerings like my course on U.S. women’s history can get a great understanding of an era from a short biography. Learning a lot about a single but complex character really helps to deepen appreciation of what women’s lives were like in the past.”
—PATRICIA CLINE COHEN,
University of California, Santa Barbara
“Biographies are, indeed, back. Not only will students read them, biographies provide an easy way to demonstrate particularly important historical themes or ideas…. Undergraduate readers will be challenged to think more deeply about what it means to be a woman, citizen, and political actor…. I am eager to use this in my undergraduate survey and specialty course.”
—JENNIFER THIGPEN,
Washington State University, Pullman
“These books are, above all, fascinating stories that will engage and inspire readers. They offer a glimpse into the lives of key women in history who either defied tradition or who successfully maneuvered in a man’s world to make an impact. The stories of these vital contributors to American history deliver just the right formula for instructors looking to provide a more complicated and nuanced view of history.”
—ROSANNE LICHATIN,
2005 Gilder Lehrman Preserve American History Teacher of the Year
“The Lives of American Women authors raise all of the big issues I want my classes to confront—and deftly fold their arguments into riveting narratives that maintain students’ excitement.”
—WOODY HOLTON,
author of Abigail Adams
This book vividly evokes radical women's integral roles within France's
revolutionary civil war known as the Paris Commune. It demonstrates the breadth,
depth, and impact of communard feminist ...socialisms far beyond the 1871 insurrection.
Examining the period from the early 1860s through that century's end, Carolyn J.
Eichner investigates how radical women developed critiques of gender, class, and
religious hierarchies in the immediate pre-Commune era, how these ideologies emerged
as a plurality of feminist socialisms within the revolution, and how these varied
politics subsequently affected fin-de-siècle gender and class relations. She
focuses on three distinctly dissimilar revolutionary women leaders who exemplify
multiple competing and complementary feminist socialisms: Andre Leo, Elisabeth
Dmitrieff, and Paule Mink. Leo theorized and educated through journalism and
fiction, Dmitrieff organized institutional power for working-class women, and Mink
agitated crowds to create an egalitarian socialist world. Each woman forged her own
path to gender equality and social justice.
The Berlin council movement of 1919-20 proves that there was a left alternative beyond Social Democracy and Stalinism in the German Revolution. Here, the movement is systematically analysed for the ...first time in all its diversity and on the basis of a broad range of sources.
In Black Women, Citizenship, and the Making of Modern
Cuba , Takkara Brunson traces how women of African descent
battled exclusion on multiple fronts and played an important role
in forging a modern ...democracy. Brunson takes a much-needed
intersectional approach to the political history of the era,
examining how Black women's engagement with questions of Cuban
citizenship intersected with racial prejudice, gender norms, and
sexual politics, incorporating Afro-diasporic and Latin American
feminist perspectives.
Brunson demonstrates that between the 1886 abolition of slavery
in Cuba and the 1959 Revolution, Black women-without formal
political power-navigated political movements in their efforts to
create a more just society. She examines how women helped build a
Black public sphere as they claimed moral respectability and sought
racial integration. She reveals how Black women entered into
national women's organizations, labor unions, and political parties
to bring about legal reforms. Brunson shows how women of African
descent achieved individual victories as part of a collective
struggle for social justice; in doing so, she highlights how racism
and sexism persisted even as legal definitions of Cuban citizenship
evolved.
