BOOK TALK
Anarchist Federation present:
‘Revolutionary Women’
with Nick Heath
Wednesday 3rd February, 7pm
Entry £3, redeemable against any purchase
Housmans Bookshop, 5 Caledonian Rd, London N1 (nearest tube Kings Cross)
“[We] women must simply take our place without begging for it.”
– Louise Michel
Anarchism proclaims itself against all hierarchies which would include the oppression of women. Women were to enter the anarchist movement precisely because they were attracted by these new liberating ideas of emancipation and equality. But the subordination of women was at best a peripheral concern of the anarchist movement as a whole.
Most anarchists refused to recognise the specificity of women’s subordination, and few men were willing to give up the power over women they had enjoyed for so long. Everywhere women were forced to fight against the hidebound attitudes and prejudices of their male comrades. Nevertheless they persisted. Emma Goldman, Voltairine de Cleyre, Louise Michel, and Lucy Parsons are the names that come to mind if one thinks of anarchist women but there were many others just as determined, devoted and courageous.
Nick Heath discusses the new Anarchist Federation pamphlet ‘Revolutionary Women’ (2015, £2) which makes an attempt to illuminate the lives of these lesser known women anarchists, such as Clara Gilbert Cole, Virginia Bolten, Victorine Brocher-Rouchy and Johanna Lahr, to mention just a few.