Writing about changes in the notion of womanhood, Denise Riley examines, in the manner of Foucault, shifting historical constructions of the category of “women” in relation to other categories central to concepts of personhood: the soul, the mind, the body, nature, the social. 

Feminist movements, Riley argues, have had no choice but to play out this indeterminacy of women. This is made plain in their oscillations, since the 1790s, between concepts of equality and of difference. To fully recognize the ambiguity of the category of “women” is, she contends, a necessary condition for an effective feminist political philosophy.

If you were an independent, adventurous, liberated American woman in the 1920s or 1930s where might you have sought escape from the constraints and compromises of bourgeois living? Paris and the Left Bank quickly come to mind. But would you have ever thought of Russia and the wilds of Siberia? This choice was not as unusual as it seems now. As Julia L. Mickenberg uncovers in American Girls in Red Russia, there is a forgotten counterpoint to the story of the Lost Generation: beginning in the late nineteenth century, Russian revolutionary ideology attracted many women, including suffragists, reformers, educators, journalists, and artists, as well as curious travelers. Some were famous, like Isadora Duncan or Lillian Hellman; some were committed radicals, though more were just intrigued by the “Soviet experiment.” But all came to Russia in search of social arrangements that would be more equitable, just, and satisfying. And most in the end were disillusioned, some by the mundane realities, others by horrifying truths.

Mickenberg reveals the complex motives that drew American women to Russia as they sought models for a revolutionary new era in which women would be not merely independent of men, but also equal builders of a new society. Soviet women, after all, earned the right to vote in 1917, and they also had abortion rights, property rights, the right to divorce, maternity benefits, and state-supported childcare. Even women from Soviet national minorities—many recently unveiled—became public figures, as African American and Jewish women noted. Yet as Mickenberg’s collective biography shows, Russia turned out to be as much a grim commune as a utopia of freedom, replete with economic, social, and sexual inequities.

American Girls in Red Russia recounts the experiences of women who saved starving children from the Russian famine, worked on rural communes in Siberia, wrote for Moscow or New York newspapers, or performed on Soviet stages. Mickenberg finally tells these forgotten stories, full of hope and grave disappointments.
 

"This book offers something that has been very much needed in Garvey scholarship—an accessible reader of Amy Jacques Garvey’s editorials aimed both for the general reader and the college classroom. Parascandola does a service by selecting from a broad range of topics and presenting Jacques Garvey’s editorials in an easily read and intellectually challenging format.”
—Barbara Bair, historian at the Library of Congress and associate editor with Robert Hill and others of The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers

Amy Jacques Garvey was one of the most prolific women within any Black nationalist group, yet she has largely only been discussed in relationship to her husband, Black nationalist Marcus Garvey, and as the editor of the Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey. Much of her writing has remained unavailable to the public, lost to the archives, until now. Amy Jacques Garvey: Selected Writings from the Negro World, 1923–1928 seeks to fill this void by making her writings in the Negro Worldwidely available for the first time.

Editor Louis J. Parascandola compiles a wide swath of Jacques Garvey’s work in this groundbreaking collection. Born and educated in Jamaica, Jacques Garvey’s atypical opportunity to receive education at elite Jamaican schools, along with her later jobs as a clerk and secretary, prepared her for future positions as journalist and political administrator. She also possessed the rhetorical skills and independent thinking that would help her challenge Marcus Garvey and the other men in Garvey’s organization, the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA). In allowing Jacques Garvey’s work to largely speak for itself, the volume reveals that she concerned herself with a diversity of important and often controversial political and social issues rather than the stereotypical domestic matters expected of most woman’s pages of the time period.

By examining her selected writings in the Negro World, this volume affords its readers a better understanding of Jacques Garvey’s powerful contribution not only to Garveyism but also to the growth of Black radical thought, anti-imperialist ideology, and the rights of third-world women. This timely study sheds new light on Jacques Garvey’s pivotal role as a Black female writer and thinker during the twenties.

LOUIS J. PARASCANDOLA is a professor of English at Long Island University. He is the author of “Puzzled Which to Choose”: Conflicting Sociopolitical Views in the Works of Captain Frederick Marryat, editor of a book on Coney Island, and editor or coeditor of four critical editions of Caribbean immigrant writing.

First formed in the early twentieth century, the ANC Women’s League has grown into a leading organization in the women’s movement in South Africa. The league has been at the forefront of the nation’s century-long transition from an authoritarian state to a democracy that espouses gender equality as a core constitutional value. It has, indeed, always regarded itself as the women’s movement, frequently asserting its primacy as a vanguard organization and as the only legitimate voice of the women of South Africa. But, as this deeply insightful book shows, the history of the league is a more complicated affair—it was neither the only women’s organization in the political field nor an easy ally for South African feminism.

A groundbreaking volume introduces the unique feminist thought of the longstanding Italian group known as Diotima

 

Introducing Anglophone readers to a potent strain of Italian feminism known to French, Spanish, and German audiences but as yet unavailable in English, Another Mother argues that the question of the mother is essential to comprehend the matrix of contemporary culture and society and to pursue feminist political projects. 

Focusing on Diotima, a community of women philosophers deeply involved in feminist politics since the 1960s, this volume provides a multifaceted panorama of its engagement with currents of thought including structuralism, psychoanalysis, linguistics, and Marxism. Starting from the simple insight that the mother is the one who gives us both life and language, these thinkers develop concepts of the mother and sexual difference in contemporary society that differ in crucial ways from both French and U.S. feminisms. 

Arguing that Diotima anticipates many of the themes in contemporary philosophical discourses of biopolitics—exemplified by thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Antonio Negri, and Roberto Esposito—Another Mother opens an important space for reflections on the past history of feminism and on feminism’s future. 

Contributors: Anne Emmanuelle Berger, Paris 8 U–Vincennes Saint-Denis; Ida Dominijanni; Luisa Muraro; Diana Sartori, U of Verona; Chiara Zamboni, U of Verona.

In the 1990s, a generation of women born during the rise of the second wave feminist movement plotted a revolution. These young activists funneled their outrage and energy into creating music, and zines using salvaged audio equipment and stolen time on copy machines. By 2000, the cultural artifacts of this movement had started to migrate from basements and storage units to community and university archives, establishing new sites of storytelling and political activism.

 

The Archival Turn in Feminism chronicles these important cultural artifacts and their collection, cataloging, preservation, and distribution. Cultural studies scholar Kate Eichhorn examines institutions such as the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture at Duke University, The Riot Grrrl Collection at New York University, and the Barnard Zine Library. She also profiles the archivists who have assembled these significant feminist collections.

 

Eichhorn shows why young feminist activists, cultural producers, and scholars embraced the archive, and how they used it to stage political alliances across eras and generations.

A volume in the American Literatures Initiative