Review | She Who Struggles

In She Who Struggles, Marral Shamshiri and Sorcha Thomson have curated 15 essays exploring the role of women in twentieth-century revolutionary and national-liberation movements. The book aims to highlight the role of women whose struggles are often forgotten or ignored. The book is not just to remember the lives of these fighters, activists and intellectuals but to guide the movement now. 

Revolutionary women need to be written into history so we can learn more about their multifaceted struggles, their radical traditions, and the ways in which the woman question was grappled with. However, this isn’t just women’s history. In fact, we learn more about revolutionary movements as a whole when we pay attention to women in the story.

The book features revolutionary women from Cuba, Ghana, Mali, Ireland, Palestine, Japan, Iran, Vietnam, South Africa, Egypt and the Philippines. It spans political activities from the 1930s to the present day. The women featured are socialists and communists who played crucial roles in national liberation struggles, built international solidarity, fought against oppression, used art to describe and inspire struggle and fought for women’s liberation to be an integral element of radical movements. Within radical movements, women’s liberation was often seen as a deviation from the main goal or something to be considered after national liberation or social transformation had been achieved. In addition, women often faced gendered and sexualised oppression in the movements they were members of. 

The real strength of the book is in the variety of women whose stories are shared. Despite learning about women from around the world, involved in different struggles at different times, there are some key themes that emerge. 

All eyes on Palestine

The book includes testimony from Jehan Helou who was displaced from Palestine to Lebanon by the 1948 Nakba. Jehan Helou describes the work she did to organise women in the Fatah movement and the creation of The General Union of Palestinian Women (GPWU). The GPWU was a grassroots organisation focusing on the advancement of the social, political and economic rights of all Palestinian women. Helou also talks in detail about international solidarity work she was involved in which included fundraising, consciousness raising and work within international institutions. However, the most powerful parts of this work are when Helou describes the solidarity between oppressed people across the world. 

Helou is the only Palestinian woman with a chapter in the book. However, Palestine is a recurring theme throughout. The chapter on Madame Binh and Madame Nhu describes how Vietnamese and Palestinian activists found points of connection between their movements and created independent circuits of solidarity. This chapter also included a fascinating segment describing how Palestinian activists used images of Vietnam in their propaganda. 

Art 

Another theme throughout the book is the use of art as an integral part of the revolutionary practice of many women described in the book. The book features Marziyeh Ahmadi Osku’i, an Iranian Marxist killed by the secret police at the age of 29. Her legacy lives on in Afghanistan and India through poetry and street theatre. 

Lindiwe Mabuza was born in 1938 in apartheid South Africa and foregrounded women’s concerns in the struggle against apartheid. Lindiwe Mabuza argued: 

Poetry is part of the struggle. You use the armed struggle; you use political methods … You recite a poem. It’s better than a three-hour speech. It gets to the heart of the matter. It moves people.’

The chapter on Arwa Salih highlights the importance of autobiography in learning about revolutionary women’s struggles. Arwa Salih was a leader of the Egyptian student movement in the 1970s. In her memoir The Stillborn she describes the challenge of being communist and feminist and the impact of defeat. 

The role of film and oral history is explored in the excerpt about the film Ahki Yaa Tair (Tell Your Tale Little Bird) directed by Arab Loutfi. Ahki Yaa Tair is a documentary about Palestinian women fighters. Filmed in 1993, it explores the lives of seven militant Palestinian women involved in the national liberation struggle during the 1960s and 70s. Arab Loutfi captures the importance of filmmaking in highlighting the role of women in the following quote: 

The peculiarity of my film is in a confident, unapologetic and even proud female narrative. …. The film confirms the presence of the memory of the resistance and its penetration into the depth of the female self, its spread through oral literature, and its continuation as a political act. 

Challenging the movement

A common theme throughout the book is that women involved in radical struggles for national liberation or social transformation had to fight for the wider movement to take women’s liberation seriously. Sakine Cansiz, a Kurdish revolutionary who was murdered by the Turkish state in 2013, is described as ‘fighting the fascism of the Turkish state from without, and patriarchy from within, she established a model of revolutionary struggle that placed women’s liberation at the heart of a radical vision of postcolonial freedom.’

Delia Aguilar, a revolutionary woman born in the Philippines, describes working within the Filipino Marxist movement in which the ‘women’s question’ was seen as a diversion or a threat to the movement: 

… here we were, talking about fighting for a more humane society, one in which class differences would eventually be eliminated and where women would gain equality with men. However, I saw that the way we were conducting ourselves contrasted greatly with these stated goals. Without question, men consistently took leadership positions …while women were relegated to traditional support roles.

Aguilar also participated in Marxist feminist reading groups that became dominated by professional white women who were sometimes implicitly racist. Aguilar describes the importance of study groups and friendships in her struggle to develop Third World feminist understandings.

She Who Struggles is a fascinating book that highlights and celebrates the role of women in revolutionary history. We can use the experiences of the fighters, activists and intellectuals described in the book to influence our own practice to ensure that women are the centre of our own revolutionary movements. 

She Who Struggles is published by Pluto Press, copies are also available to order from rs21.