She Who Struggles: Revolutionary Women Who Shaped the World

by Marral Shamshiri (editor), Sorcha Thomson (Editor)

Rosa Luxemburg, Claudia Jones, and Leila Khaled may have joined Lenin, Mao, and Che in the pantheon of twentieth-century revolutionaries, but the histories in which they figure remain unjustly dominated by men.

She Who Struggles sets the record straight, revealing how women have contributed to revolutionary movements across the world in endless ways: as leaders, rebels, trailblazers, guerrillas, and writers; revolutionaries who also navigated their gendered roles as women, mothers, wives, and daughters.

Through exclusive interviews and original historical research, including primary sources never before translated into English, readers are introduced to largely unknown revolutionary women from across the globe. The collection ultimately presents a hidden history of revolutionary internationalism that will be a must-read for activists engaging in feminist, anti-colonial, and antiracist struggles today.

Genres: Feminism, Nonfiction, Biography, History, Politics

248 pages, Paperback

Published September 20, 2023

Reviews

[Malcolm · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a critique of the masculinist dominance of narratives of struggle, of change, of revolution, a comment by Shamshiri and Thomson about the Cuban revolutionary leader Melba Hernández cuts to the quick: “Her life directs us to the work of solidarity- even on grand intercontinental scales – as grounded in everyday activities, in times of abeyance between landmark moments [my emphasis], where women played an essential role in the sustenance of the revolutionary movement.” (p 6) Whereas these landmark moments may provide telling insights to particular struggles, their contexts, significances, and trajectories, they all too often omit the years of hard graft, of mundane organising, of preparation and movement building that make those moment landmarks. The patriarchal character of much of the Left, despite our protestations, and a scholarly over-emphasis on ideology and ideological struggle, effectively obscures women in struggle on two fronts – as the ones who do much of that mundane graft and the ones whose voices are sidelined in the scholarship. Tellingly, in a discussion of the historiographical obscuring of women, the closing line of the book – a comment by Tooba Syed, an activist in the Women Democratic Front in Pakistan, effectively underscores and undercuts that exclusion: “we end up writing our own history the very moment we stand on the frontlines of this struggle” (p 221).

Between these two comments Shamshiri and Thomson have pulled together a compelling collection of biographies, analyses of women in struggle, and explorations of women in specific movements, read through a broad Marxist-feminist lens to challenge many of the ways we understand national and global struggles for liberation and justice. These are in part ‘recovery’ histories, highlighting both the roles women play and played in revolutionary movements as leaders, organiser, fighters, advocates and more, and in part transformative histories, demanding that we see those movements in different lights to recognise the potential for and limits of transformed gender orders in those movements. The range is impressive, from places we would readily recognise as associated with post-war revolutionary efforts at transformation – such as Cuba, Vietnam, Palestine, Kurdistan – to those where struggles are likely to be seen as less-than-revolutionary or successful – including Japan, El Salvador, Philippines, Mali.

As is always the case with collections of this kind, some cases stand out more. For me this included Shamshiri’s discussion of Iranian urban guerrilla Marizyeh Ahmadi, killed in a shootout with the Shah’s secret police in 1974, where the analysis focuses as much on the way Ahmadi is remembered, not just in Iran but also in India and Afghanistan, for her poetry (including poetry by others attributed to her) as she is for her organising, her leadership, and her sacrifice. Here we see the revolutionary as cultural icon. Similarly, Kanwal Hameed and Sara Salem’s consideration of biographical accounts of women-in-struggle in West Asia and North Africa, drawing mainly but not exclusively on Egypt, is a telling account of ways and limits of remembering, as well as the dangers and effects of sectarianism. Also important is Molly Todd’s account of the US El Salvador solidarity movement’s ‘sistering’ with El Salvadorian communities rebuilding after attacks by reactionary paramilitary groups as ‘city-to-city’ citizen diplomacy as an important instance of solidarity activism.

This book barely scratches the surface, while reminding us of the potential of Marxist feminist outlooks to provide insight to significant transformative movements. It joins other recent valuable publications dealing with women in revolutionary struggles, such as Verso’s recent republication of Andreé Blouin’s autobiography My Country, Africa , Kristin Ghodess’s Red Valkyries , and Yasmin El-Rifae’s brilliant but harrowing Radius among many others. Inspiring reading, that is also good for the soul.

[Ciaran · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential reading (yah I know, how cliche) for those intimately concerned with justice.

‘She Who Struggles’ reinstates the female utterances of revolution, which are so often elided in the characteristically chauvinist leftist canon.

This dismissiveness of a Marxist Feminist approach by traditional Marxists is well elucidated by Delia Aguilar who notes,

“The subject of debate is the economic base/superstructure metaphor in orthodox interpretations of Marxism which uphold the absolute priority of class struggle and in which a change in the former, being determinant, is believed to lead to change in the latter, being its mere reflex. In the Third World where, indeed, class antagonism are indisputably acute, revolutionary movements of necessity pose strategies for action where economic issues assume ascendancy and are given the corresponding label ‘primary’ while other struggles, the ‘superstructural’ ones under which rubric women’s oppression, the family, ideology, and social relations are subsumed, acquire a ‘secondary’ character.”

The ready dismissal of this. position by others on the left adds weight to the need for a socialist-feminism. Aguilar’s leftist critics dismiss her proposed anti-colonial feminism as “exacerbated by affliction with the individualistic character of bourgeois feminism [after her years spent in the US, and resulting in] estrangement from one’s native culture.”

One thing I really appreciated about this book is how it ended with an Interview with the Women’s Democratic Front [of Pakistan], discussing actually existing socialist-feminist realities in Pakistan today, and how their imaginaries can create the liberational world we wish to see in the future, based on a realistic, historically informed Utopianism - Gramsci’s Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will comes to mind.

Importantly, whilst we must be historically-grounded, we cannot fixate on relitigating past confrontations, and our focus must be on changing the future.

In that vein, a parting quote from WDF member Ismat Shahjahan is very pertinent -

“Reclaiming or rewriting history is not an option for me. Change the history instead of rewriting it - this is my political position.”

[Mansoor · Rating 1 out of 5]

🤮

نویسنده‌ی چفیه‌پوش چنان اسب توهم را در میدان تعصب تازانده که خیال برش داشته می‌تواند یک چریک تروریست متعفن را به عنوان قهرمان آزادی جا بزند


Screenshot from The Unbelievable Truth (Hal Hartley, 1989)

[KT · Rating 3 out of 5]

A decent, wide-ranging collection of essays shining light on third world revolutionary women typically ignored by mainstream western literature
Thematically rooted in marxist feminism and its tension with western feminist and vulgar marxism
I found the chapters on Shigenobu Fusako and Delia Aguilar particularly good

[Azkha Khokhar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Men could literally never.