Review Communist and the Communist's Daughter.pdf

Aspasia, 2016

International Labor and Working-Class History, 1995

Book Reviews 137 hierarchy." In her reading this becomes exclusion "from the Saint-Simonian organization^' (88, my emphasis). Moses's earlier work referred to this as "Enfantin's 'call' that [women], rather than men, should define the appropriate relationship of the sexes for the new world order" (51) and then requoted the whole of Enfantin's decree: "Woman is still a slave; we must set her free" (56). Of course, this was probably self-serving and Rabine rightly points out that Enfantin's decree excluded real women from the search for the female Messiah. Her argument is that the decree "transposes the desires which structure romantic fiction into the realm of social action" and "this transposition renders obvious the unconscious workings of Oedipal subjectivity" of romantic writing (89). Rabine argues that the autobiographies of Flora Tristan and Suzanne Voilquin illustrate diverging variants of Philippe Lejeune's autobiographical pact. She contrasts these women's autobiographies with those of Rousseau and Chateaubriand, for whom the pact meant a male complicity in the Oedipal triangle. Voilquin, a Saint-Simonian woman who wrote her autobiography for her niece many years after the movement flourished, undoubtedly does deploy, as Rabine argues, a strategy of feminine voices encouraged by the complicity between reader and writer. Rabine uses Flora Tristan partly as a foil to Voilquin. Tristan was a gifted writer and a flamboyant agitator for women's and workers' rights. In Rabine's reading, Tristan's writing combines masculine textual strategies with feminine identification. Here as elsewhere Rabine's analysis is stimulating, but it is undercut by her repeated disregard for the words of her texts, for the women behind the texts, and above all for the historical circumstances in which the texts were produced. Those interested in the women's movement may use Moses's earlier work and her essay in this book, which-thanks in large part to its primary texts-will be a valuable tool for feminist scholars. They may turn with greater profit to Susan Grogan's incisive and lucid study, French Socialism and Sexual Difference: Women and the New Society, 1803-1844 (1992). Those interested in the struggles of the Saint-Simonians and in their romantic connection may turn to Robert Carlisle's The Proffered Crown: Saint-Simonianism and the Doctrine of Hope (Baltimore, 1988).

Der Donauraum, 2016

The Palgrave Handbook of Communist Women Activists around the World, 2023

The Introduction argues that we need to understand communist women’s lives, contributions, struggles, and world views from a global, a non-teleological, and a critical feminist perspective; secondly, that we need to move away from the male-centrism of the mainstream literature, and from these women’s assumed anti-feminism, the emphasis on the failures of communism, and assumptions about communist women functionaries as conservative apparatchiks in the women’s and gender history scholarship. The essay first introduces the three global foremothers: the German Clara Zetkin (1857–1933), the Russian Alexandra Kollontai (1872–1952), and the Trinidad-born Claudia Jones (1915–1964). Part II briefly presents three other women included in this book: the Malinese Aoua Keita (1912–1980), the Cuban Vilma Espín (1930–2007), and the Vietnamese Nguyễn Thị Bình (born in 1927). Part III is a short historiographical section. Part IV discusses these women’s motivations, their contributions, and how they achieved those results. Part V outlines the book’s set-up and aims.

Aspasia, 2020

The authors in this volume have, each in their own way, tried to crack a rather tough nut. To what extent, they ask, did communism or socialism (as it was variously called) in different East European countries succeed in "emancipating" women, leveling the playing field, allowing them to reach their full potential? This conundrum itself has many aspects. How do you define what "emancipation" meant in the first place? How do you find out what really happened in these societies that were dominated by propaganda trumpeting success? How do you measure what was a success or at least progress? In the end, the most interesting puzzle the question of agency dominates all others: how well were women and some men able to create changes in gendered social structures in societies with strong, some would say totalitarian, controls in the party structures, both local and national? The volume consists of fourteen articles covering women's history, literature, and memoirs in the interwar and postwar periods in Poland (4), Romania (3), Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Italy, and the Soviet Union. The authors take a variety of approaches, including studying legislation and practices, developing collective biographies and analyzing memoirs of women communists, and examining literary images of women and women's publications.

International Review of Social History, 2008

Taking the communist memoir as a sub-genre of working-class autobiography, the article analyzes, first, the characteristics of the communist autobiography, the conditions under which such works were produced, and their intended functions. Second, the article considers some personal dimensions of American communist history and how this more subjective side of the history relates to the more familiar political narrative of the movement. Recent feminist and other theory of autobiography are employed to analyze approximately forty communist autobiographies and other personal narrative material to analyze personal love and marriage, child rearing and family life, and self-identity within the party. I N T R O D U C T I O N Amid calls for global approaches to the study of history, some labor historians have turned to the more personal dimensions of working-class life through the study of biography and autobiography. While an emphasis on social process, collective experience, and material conditions has largely defined social history for a generation, recent theory, the decline of the labor movement, and political transformations have encouraged some to consider the more subjective aspects of working peoples' lives. At the same time, the history of American communism has enjoyed a renaissance, with a new generation of anti-communist scholars contending with aging New Left interpreters over the meaning of communism in the broader sweep of US history. One contention concerns the very nature of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). The new anti-communists have documented at length the espionage activities of party members and have returned us to a

Like most people on our side, I had internalized oppression. The [Berlin] Wall was already inside me, the bricks and mortar of my eleven-year-old self. The Wall wasn't a place or even a symbol any more. It was a collective state of mind, and there is something cosy, something reassuring in all things collective.

"Acta Poloniae Historica", 2023

This review article discusses two newly-released publications on communist women activists: Kristen Ghodsee's "Red Valkyries: Feminist Lessons from Five Revolutionary Women" and "The Palgrave Handbook of Communist Women Activists around the World," edited by Francisca de Haan. It focuses on questions of narrative and the persuasive function of the reviewed works, asking how and for whom one should write about communist women today. It brings to light methodological challenges, as well as those related to access to sources on communist women. It also refl ects on the place that publications which tell stories of communist women who challenged gender, class, and racial inequalities in the past occupy in the perception of contemporary readers, so often confronted in these times with experiences of inequality and violence.

end of communism