Red Valkyries
Feminist Lessons From Five Revolutionary Women
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
The lives of five socialist women and their legacy for modern-day feminists
Red Valkyries explores the history of socialist feminism in Eastern Europe. Through the revolutionary careers of five prominent socialist women active in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—the aristocratic Bolshevik Alexandra Kollontai; the radical pedagogue Nadezhda Krupskaya; the polyamorous firebrand Inessa Armand; the deadly sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko; and the partisan, scientist, and global women’s activist Elena Lagadinova—Kristen Ghodsee tells the story of the personal challenges faced by earlier generations of radicals.
None of these women was a perfect leftist. Their lives were filled with inner conflicts, contradictions, and sometimes outrageous privilege. But they managed to fight for their own political projects with perseverance and dedication. Always walking a fine line between the need for class solidarity and the desire to force their sometimes callous male colleagues to take women’s issues seriously, these women pursued novel solutions with many lessons for those who might follow in their footsteps.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In these informative if somewhat dry biographical sketches, Ghodsee (Taking Stock), a professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, describes the careers of five socialist women who fought for revolutionary change in Russia and Bulgaria in the first half 20th century and influenced women's movements abroad. Soviet diplomat Alexandra Kollontai, "enigmatic" Russian political activist Inessa Armand, education reformer Nadezhda Krupskaya (who also was Lenin's wife), WWII sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko, and Bulgarian scientist and politician Elena Lagadinova pushed for women's equality while engineering a future socialist society. Some, including Kollontai and Pavlichenko, even toured in the West and became media sensations for their achievements. Ghodsee is careful to distinguish these women from many of their counterparts in the West, noting that "liberal feminism supports a worldview wherein everything is just fine as long as women have better access to wealth and power," whereas her heroines "imagined a political project that challenged the exploitation of unpaid labor in the private sphere as part of a wider program to overcome the injustices perpetuated by a free market system that produces systemic forms of discrimination." Though Ghodsee lucidly explains the era's revolutionary politics, she struggles to convey these women's lives beyond their résumés. Still, this is an eye-opening deep dive into an underexamined aspect of feminist history.
