Anarchist Women 1870 1920

"The anarchist-feminists and their ideology possess a significance that extends beyond anarchism and nineteenth-century popular images of it. This book examines the women who espoused anarchism and what they believed, but more importantly it seeks to understand the unique ways in which a group of women responded to the social, sexual, and economic upheavals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The antistatist, antiauthoritarian, decentralist visions of the anarchists are an integral part of our intellectual heritage. What the women anarchists tried to do is an important part of the history of the intellectual roots of the women's movement"--Jacket.

This handbook unites leading scholars from around the world in exploring anarchism as a political ideology, from an examination of its core principles, an analysis of its history, and an assessment of its contribution to the struggles that face humanity today. Grounded in a conceptual and historical approach, each entry charts what is distinctive about the anarchist response to particular intellectual, political, cultural and social phenomena, and considers how these values have changed over time. At its heart is a sustained process of conceptual definition and an extended examination of the core claims of this frequently misunderstood political tradition. It is the definitive scholarly reference work on anarchism as a political ideology, and should be a crucial text for scholars, students, and activists alike.

Among the political ideologies generally considered to be of continuing significance, anarchism alone has never been implemented. Perhaps its rigors are too strong and its advocates are too weak. That it is still considered worth studying is testimony to its intellectual credibility, particularly its single-minded emphasis on individual liberty. Obsession with liberty and skepticism of government are as alive today as they were in the nineteenth century. This book offers a comprehensive introduction to anarchism in the United States, revealing its historical roots and relevance to today's problems. The relationship between anarchy and individualism in the nineteenth century is well known. How this affected the larger system is what the bulk of the anthology is about. "Liberty "was a magazine featuring some of the outstanding anarchist thinkers in America at the turn of the century. This anthology offers a selection of writings spanning the magazine's twenty-seven year life and features some of its major writers: Benjamin Tucker, Victor Yarros, Steven Byington, John Beverley Robinson, and Gertrude Kelly. The chapters are divided into four sections: political theory, economic theories and reforms, social implications, and strategies of individualist anarchism. The authors criticize censorship, state support of patriarchal marriage, and the general invasion of privacy. Though quite radical, the writers were not revolutionaries in a conventional sense; they emphasized passive resistance, rather than violent assault, as proper. The Individualist Anarchists is not merely of historical Interest, but offers a fundamental critique of government and authority--one that remains a relevant part of today's libertarian movement. It will be of Interest to political theorists, economists, sociologists, and scholars of American history; above all, to those who may not yet have appreciated the worth of an analysis made so many years ago.

Bearded bomb-throwers, self-indulgent nihilists, dangerous subversives.these characteristic clichés of anarchists in the popular imagination are often reproduced in the cinema. In Film and the Anarchist Imagination, the first comprehensive survey of anarchism in film, Richard Porton deconstructs such stereotypes while offering an authoritative account of films featuring anarchist characters and motifs. From the early cinema of Griffith and René Clair, to the work of Godard, Lina Wertmüller, Lizzie Borden and Ken Loach, Porton analyzes portrayals of anarchism in film, presenting commentaries and critiques of such classics as Zéro de Conduite, Tout Va Bien, and Love and Anarchy. In addition, he provides an excellent guide to the complex traditions of anarchist thought, from Bakunin and Kropotkin to Emma Goldman and Murray Bookchin, disclosing a rich historical legacy that encompasses the Paris Commune, the Haymarket martyrs, the anarcho-syndicalists of the Spanish Civil War, as well as more familiar contemporary avatars like the Situationists and the enragés of May 1968.

This is the first critical, in-depth study of the anarchist movement in Cuba in the three decades after the republic’s independence from Spain in 1898. Kirwin Shaffer shows that anarchists played a significant—until now little-known—role among Cuban leftists in shaping issues of health, education, immigration, the environment, and working-class internationalism. They also criticized the state of racial politics, cultural practices, and the conditions of children and women on the island. In the chaotic new country, members of the anarchist movement reinterpreted the War for Independence and the revolutionary ideas of patriot José Martí, embarking on a nationwide debate with the larger Cuban establishment about what it meant to be “Cuban.” To counter the dominant culture, the anarchists created their own initiatives—schools, health institutes, vegetarian restaurants, theater and fiction writing groups, and occasional calls for nudism—and as a result they challenged both the existing elite and the occupying U.S. military forces. Shaffer also focuses on what anarchists did to prepare the masses for a social revolution. While many of the Cuban anarchists' ideals flowed from Europe, their programs, criticisms, and literature reflected the specifics of Cuban reality and appealed to Cuba’s popular classes. Using theories of working-class internationalism, countercultures, popular culture, and social movements, Shaffer analyzes archival records, pamphlets, newspapers, and novels, showing how the anarchist movement in republican Cuba helped shape the country’s early leftist revolutionary agenda. Shaffer’s portrait of the conflict between anarchists and their enemies illuminates the multiple forces that pervaded life on the island in the twentieth century, until the rise of the Gerardo Machado dictatorship in the 1920s. This important book places anarchism in its rightful historical role as a vital current within Cuban radical political culture.

Peasants, religious heretics, witches, pirates, runaway slaves, prostitutes and pornographers, frequenters of taverns and fraternal society lodge rooms, revolutionaries, blues and jazz musicians, beats, and contemporary youth gangs--those who defied authority, choosing to live outside the defining cultural dominions of early insurgent and, later, dominant capitalism are what Bryan D. Palmer calls people of the night. These lives of opposition, or otherness, were seen by the powerful as deviant, rejecting authority, and consequently threatening to the established order. Constructing a rich historical tapestry of example and experience spanning eight centuries, Palmer details lives of exclusion and challenge, as the "night travels" of the transgressors clash repeatedly with the powerful conventions of their times. Nights of liberation and exhilarating desire--sexual and social--are at the heart of this study. But so too are the dangers of darkness, as marginality is coerced into corners of pressured confinement, or the night is used as a cover for brutalizing terror, as was the case in Nazi Germany or the lynching of African Americans. Making extensive use of the interdisciplinary literature of marginality found in scholarly work in history, sociology, cultural studies, literature, anthropology, and politics, Palmer takes an unflinching look at the rise and transformation of capitalism as it was lived by the dispossessed and those stamped with the mark of otherness.

Brill’s Companion to Anarchism and Philosophy offers a broad thematic overview of the relationship between anarchism and philosophy.

More than an account of Emma Goldman's legendary career as a political activist, this biography offers an intimate look into her tumultuous affair with Chicago activist and red-light-district gynecologist Ben Reitman. As it charts her twin passions for Reitman and for social reform, it provides new insights into a brilliant, complex woman.