Coming soon: Remembering Revolutionary Women

The Cultural Afterlives of Louise Michel, Emma Goldman and Sylvia Pankhurst

By Clara Vlessing.

Remembering Revolutionary Women considers the afterlives of individual revolutionary women and proposes that to understand how they are remembered requires a focus on the active role of remembering subjects and the groups they form; not only asking how memory persists but also why – what motivates people to make the effort to remember revolutionary women? This question is addressed through a comparative analysis of the cultural remembrance of three committed revolutionaries: Louise Michel (1830–1905), Emma Goldman (1869–1940) and Sylvia Pankhurst (1882–1960). The book takes a plurimedial approach to understanding the cultural afterlives of these three women, drawing from biographical works, artistic installations, performances, portraits and archives. It demonstrates the selective process whereby particular moments or themes in an individual’s life are remembered with greater frequency and affective charge than others.

Remembering Revolutionary Women raises critical questions about the consequences – whether appropriation, sanitisation, individualisation or feminisation – of reclaiming historic women for political ends, bringing original insights to studies of cultural memory, activism, life writing studies and gender.

Clara Vlessing is an FWO Marie Curie Seal of Excellence postdoctoral fellow at Ghent University. She researches the relationship between memory and social movements with particular attention to the role of gender. Her current project looks at the remembrance of leading figures associated with the Women’s Liberation Movement – such as Audre Lorde (1934-1992), Germaine Greer (1939-) and Andrea Dworkin (1946-2005) – in twenty-first century feminist cultural production. She has previously held a postdoctoral position within the NWO NWA-ORC project Heritages of Hunger at Radboud University, Nijmegen, and her PhD, completed in 2023, was part of the ERC project Remembering Activism at Utrecht University.