Socialist Women and the Great War, 1914–21: Protest, Revolution and Commemoration, ed. Corinne Painter, Ingrid Sharp and Matthew Stibbe

Inspired by the title of a recent book—Olga Shparaga’s The Revolution Has a Female Face (2021)—this volume has Chaim Soutine’s 1928 portrait Eva on its cover. The volume aims at and succeeds admirably in dissecting this generalised face and reviving the individual appearances and particular activities of hundreds of previously invisible women. It does so by drawing on case-studies from several European countries (Austria, Germany, Britain and British-ruled Ireland, Finland, Sweden, Switzerland, Hungary and Yugoslavia), and by organising the material thematically and comparatively.

Chapter One serves as an introduction to the whole volume, highlighting its critique of the existing literature and its particular gender specific contribution. It rightly identifies the Great War era as part of a larger revolutionary period around three key events that serve as intertextual nodes—1905, 1914 and 1917—and where 1905 appears as a critical transnational juncture. In fact, the period before 1914 appears so actively in many of the research chapters, that it is only excessive modesty that has confined the title of the book to 1914–1921. The introduction also appropriately points out how the subsequent chapters can come into conversation with each other. The erroneous attribution of the 1903 murder of Alexander I of Serbia and his wife Draga to socialists (the army officers who organised the coup would be outraged) is a rare glitch in this enlightening chapter (p. 17). Equally, while Irish events are accurately confined to British-ruled Ireland, it would not be amiss to specify that the pioneering Finnish female suffrage was achieved in Russian-ruled Finland.

Strikes, hunger riots, anti-war protests in the largely feminised urban and suburban neighbourhoods of war-ridden Europe are the subject of Chapter Two. It was women and teenagers who were in the forefront of the anti-military campaigns, and they forged important links beyond national borders and across the line separating neutral from belligerent countries. At the same time, these struggles exposed starkly the fissures within the socialist movement, between social democrats and communists, nationalists and pacifists. Defying the standard narrative of revolutionary violence as exclusively male, with women allotted only auxiliary roles, Chapter Three focuses on how wartime shaped women both as receivers of violence in its different guises (economic, physical, sexualised or retributive gendered violence by the state), and in their activist reactions to it. These differed according to context: pacifist, as in civil war Finland, militant in Ireland and Weimar Germany, or class-informed and ready for violent revolutionary response, as in Austria. Sadly, the misogynist stereotypes that pathologised revolutionary women were shared by males across the ideological spectrum.

Chapter Four, devoted to suffrage and citizenship, and based on case-studies stemming from Britain, Germany, Hungary and Yugoslavia, is evocative of the ambivalence of women towards suffrage, given the limitations, fluidity and prejudice of the post-war period. Nevertheless, inclusive suffrage and social justice remained central demands of the socialist women’s movement. Exploring the life trajectories of several revolutionary women, Chapter Five extends the lifetime of revolutionary activity and of self-understanding as revolutionary. It also vividly documents how these women transcended national boundaries, woven into partnerships and families, and how appreciating these dynamics changes the overall understanding of revolution. In jumping a century ahead to the centenary of the revolutionary events, Chapter Six concludes that even today women are largely excluded from commemorations of the Great War and almost entirely from the commemoration of revolution. Moreover, revolution itself is preferred to be forgotten.

There are at least two aspects which make this volume original, even unique. The first is the close attention to ‘ordinary’ women, their concerns and emotions, without necessarily de-privileging the important contribution of educated women in leadership roles. This has been achieved as a result of patient and painstaking research in archives, the contemporary press, court records, pamphlets, biographies, autobiographies and oral interviews. Now we no longer have a generalised and abstract portrait of Woman to whom we pay lip-service, but an array of colourful, complex and interesting individuals, even as they flash sometimes very briefly through the narrative. The other aspect is equally impressive. It concerns the architecture of the volume. Twelve contributors are the authors of six chapters, almost all of them co-authors of two or three individual chapters. Here, on the contrary, the stress is not on individual contributions, but on collaboration, debate and compromise. It is not simply stitching together individual research coming from different European areas, but genuinely thinking over, debating and agreeing on the most important patterns and main categories of analysis.

In conclusion, this volume ably covers a number of topics related to genres of protest and attitudes to change and revolution, as well as commemorative repertoires. It takes a deliberately broad, ‘capacious’ (p. 12) conceptualisation of ‘socialist women’, including middle-class suffragists, pacifist groups, liberal progressive feminists, anarchists, trade-union activists, community organisers or simply indignant citizens, as well as those who explicitly identified as socialists. This, of course, allows for fruitful comparisons, pointing at the fluidity of self-identification and solidarity, collaboration, and informed alliances (but also fissures). Yet it still raises the question: why is it ‘socialist’ women and not protesting, opposing, demonstrating, resisting women confronting authority or, simply, women’s political agency in the period under review? Implicitly, the authors recognise the hegemony of socialism by quoting and agreeing with Dan Diner that street demonstrations ‘took on a pronounced social-revolutionary character and availed themselves of the language of class’ (p. 49). And as such, by reading against the grain and taking a close look at the lived experience of women, this book offers a valuable contribution to our understanding of socialist revolutionary movements in early twentieth-century Europe.