Women Fight Women Write

Today, the "fight to write"—the struggle to become the legitimate chronicler of one’s own story—is being waged and won by women across mediums and borders. But such battles of authorship extend well beyond a single cultural moment. In her gripping study of unsung female narratives of the Algerian War, Mildred Mortimer excavates and explores the role of women’s individual and collective memory in recording events of the violent anticolonial conflict. Presenting close readings of published works spanning five decades—from Assia Djebar’s 1962 Children of the New World to Zohra Drif’s 2014 Inside the Battle of Algiers: Memoir of a Woman Freedom Fighter— Women Fight, Women Write traces stylistic and material transformations in Algerian women’s writings as it reveals evolving attitudes toward memory, trauma, historical objectivity, and women’s political empowerment. Refuting the stale binary of men in battle, women at home, these testimonial texts let women lay claim to the Algerian War story as participants and also as chroniclers through fiction, historical studies, and memoir. Algeria’s patriarchal norms long kept women from speaking publicly about private matters, silencing their experiences of the war. Still, the conflict has ceaselessly sparked creative work. The country’s dark decade of violent struggle between the Algerian army and Islamist fundamentalists in the 1990s brought the liberation struggle back into focus, inspiring and emboldening many more women to defiantly write. Women Fight, Women Write advances the broken silence, illuminating its vital historical revisions and literary innovations.

"Fighting Forces" offers an in-depth feminist reading of the traumatic nature of women's experience during the First World War and illuminates the complex ideological structures within which women sought an identity during the war. In this period of both idealism and devastation, women often found themselves wanting to join their male compatriots in the trenches. Instead, they gained temporary powers of citizenship, privileges which were again exclusive to men after the Armistice. "Fighting Forces" ranges over the works of several women writers of the period: from Jeannie Maitland, author of "Woman's Own," to Virginia Woolf. Unpublished memoirs, diaries and stories by both famous and little-known writers provide a fascinating spectrum of female responses to the war. Propaganda and institutional directives inspire the work of Vera Brittain; pacifist rhetoric emerges in the writings of Rose Maculay, while Virginia Woolf contests the propagandist discourse of her male contemporaries.

This volume contains writings of or about war from the following authors : Nina Macdonald, Rebecca West, Vera Brittain, Edith Wharton, Mary Borden, Ellen La Motte, Colette, Helen Zenna Smith, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Amy Lowell, Willa Cather, Mary Lee, Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, Gertrude Stein, Kathe Kollwitz, Charlotte Mew, Katherine Mansfield, Louise Bogan, Toni Morrison, Jane Addams, Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Martha Gellhorn, Frances Davis, Dorothy Parker, Gertrud Kolmar, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Thompson, Ding Ling, Anna Akhmatova, Olivia Manning, Elizabeth Bowen, Bryher, H.D., Mary Lee Settle, Elizabeth Vaughan, Iris Origo, Christabel Bielenberg, Etty Hillesum, Sara Nomberg-Przytyk, Charlotte Delbo, Elsa Morante, Mitsuye Yamada, Hirabayashi Taiko, Kikue Tada, Doris Lessing, Kathryn Hulme, Kay Boyle, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marguerite Higgins, Martha Gelhorn, Mary McCarthy, Grace Paley, Huong Tram, Lady Borton, Margaret Atwood, Muriel Rukeyser, Susan Griffin, Karla Ramirez, Margaret Thatcher, Molly Moore, Fadwa Tuqan, Dahlia Ravikovitch, Meena Alexander, Marta Traba, Lina Magaia, and Margaret Drabble.

This gripping insider's account chronicles how and why a young woman in 1950s Algiers joined the armed wing of Algeria's national liberation movement to combat her country's French occupiers. When the movement's leaders turned to Drif and her female colleagues to conduct attacks in retaliation for French aggression against the local population, they leapt at the chance. Their actions were later portrayed in Gillo Pontecorvo's famed film The Battle of Algiers. When first published in French in 2013, this intimate memoir was met with great acclaim and no small amount of controversy. It is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand not only the anti-colonial struggles of the 20th century and their relevance today, but also the specific challenges that women often confronted (and overcame) in those movements.

Whether a side-street skirmish or an all-out war, fight scenes bring action to the pages of every kind of fiction. But a poorly done or unbelievable fight scene can ruin a great book in an instant. In Fight Write you'll learn practical tips, terminology, and the science behind crafting realistic fight scenes for your fiction. Broken up into "Rounds," trained fighter and writer Carla Hoch guides you through the many factors you'll need to consider when developing battles and brawls. • In Round 1, you will consider how the Who, When, Where, and Why questions affect what type of fight scene you want to craft. • Round 2 delves into the human factors of biology (think fight or flight and adrenaline) and psychology (aggression and response to injuring or killing another person). • Round 3 explores different fighting styles that are appropriate for different situations: How would a character fight from a prone position versus being attacked in the street? What is the vocabulary used to describe these styles? • Round 4 considers weaponry and will guide you to select the best weapon for your characters, including nontraditional weapons of opportunity, while also thinking about the nitty-gritty details of using them. • In Round 5, you'll learn how to accurately describe realistic injuries sustained from the fights and certain weapons, and what kind of injuries will kill a character or render them unable to fight further. By taking into account where your character is in the world, when in history the fight is happening, what the character's motivation for fighting is, and much more, you'll be able write fight scenes unique to your plot and characters, all while satisfying your reader's discerning eye.

The story and WWI reportage of Mary MacLeod Moore, Beatrice Nasmyth, and Elizabeth Montizambert. The three women reported from Britain and France during the First World War, for various Canadian publications. Their articles offer insightful, moving, funny, and compelling observations of a devastating conflict.

United by a common focus on writing by and about women, this collection of contemporary essays, spanning the novel, poetry, drama, film and criticism, emphasises some of the problems of theory and practice posed by writing as a woman and by women's representation in literature. The subjects of individual essays range from the nineteenth and twentieth century novel to avant-garde film, and from Victorian women poets to Russian women poets of today. Drawing on structuralism, psychoanalysis, semiotics, socio-linguistics and Marxist analyses of literature, the diverse essays suggest the variety and vigour of contemporary feminist literary criticism, as well as representing the debates animating it. Successfully bridging the gap between literary criticism and literary production, the scope of this collection will be of considerable interest to those concerned with developments in literary criticism as well as to those in the field of women's studies.

The National Book Critics Circle Award–winning author delivers a collection of essays that serve as the perfect “antidote to mansplaining” (The Stranger). In her comic, scathing essay “Men Explain Things to Me,” Rebecca Solnit took on what often goes wrong in conversations between men and women. She wrote about men who wrongly assume they know things and wrongly assume women don’t, about why this arises, and how this aspect of the gender wars works, airing some of her own hilariously awful encounters. She ends on a serious note— because the ultimate problem is the silencing of women who have something to say, including those saying things like, “He’s trying to kill me!” This book features that now-classic essay with six perfect complements, including an examination of the great feminist writer Virginia Woolf’s embrace of mystery, of not knowing, of doubt and ambiguity, a highly original inquiry into marriage equality, and a terrifying survey of the scope of contemporary violence against women. “In this series of personal but unsentimental essays, Solnit gives succinct shorthand to a familiar female experience that before had gone unarticulated, perhaps even unrecognized.” —The New York Times “Essential feminist reading.” —The New Republic “This slim book hums with power and wit.” —Boston Globe “Solnit tackles big themes of gender and power in these accessible essays. Honest and full of wit, this is an integral read that furthers the conversation on feminism and contemporary society.” —San Francisco Chronicle “Essential.” —Marketplace “Feminist, frequently funny, unflinchingly honest and often scathing in its conclusions.” —Salon