Women and Revolutionary Violence, 1916-21
| Project responsable | Veronika Helfert |
| Team member | Tiina Litunen |
| Abstract |
Women’s opposition to militarism did not necessarily preclude their
involvement in revolutionary violence, whether directly as bearers
of arms, or indirectly, as smugglers of weapons and providers of
logistical support to left-wing insurgents fighting in Dublin,
Berlin, Vienna, Munich, Budapest, the Ruhr and elsewhere in
1916-21. Indeed, for some revolutionary women, support for violence
was not only essential to defeat counter-revolution, but also an
important means of disassociating their anti-war/anti-imperialist
activism from ‘bourgeois’ pacifism. Much of the previous
historiography has focused on men as the perpetrators and women as
victims of post-war political/paramilitary violence, as seen in the
work of Klaus Theweleit and, more recently, Mark Jones. On the other
hand, political militancy during this period is usually associated
with extreme nationalist women; left-wing women’s direct
participation in revolutionary violence outside Russia is dismissed
as a right-wing ‘myth’ or reduced to a ‘performative gesture’
without direct or lasting political significance. Yet as this
chapter will show, younger revolutionary women in particular felt
that they had been brutalised by their experience of war, poverty,
the death or imprisonment of male relatives, and the ferocity of
pre- and post-war police repression of their anti-war activism.
They were determined to take part in armed struggle for, or in
defence of, revolution and the open-ended possibilities for
democracy and social justice that the end of the war entailed; and
to criticise and challenge male prejudice against women’s presence
on the frontline in the physical as well as the political battle
against militarism and reaction. |
| Keywords |
Revolution, women, socialism, violence, first world war |
| Type of project | Dissertation project |
| Research area | History |
| Status | Ongoing |
| Start of project | 6-6-2019 |
| End of project | 31-7-2021 |
| Contact | Clotilde Faas |