In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, radical women’s movements and the avant-gardes were often in contact with one another, brought together through the socialist internationals. Jill Richards argues that these movements were not just socially linked but also deeply interconnected. Each offered the other an experimental language that could move beyond the nation-state’s rights of man and citizen, suggesting an alternative conceptual vocabulary for women’s rights.
Rather than focus on the demand for the vote, The Fury Archives turns to the daily practices and social worlds of feminist action. It offers an alternative history of women’s rights, practiced by female arsonists, suffragette rioters, industrial saboteurs, self-named terrorists, lesbian criminals, and queer resistance cells. Richards also examines the criminal proceedings that emerged in the wake of women’s actions, tracing the way that citizen and human emerged as linked categories for women on the fringes of an international campaign for suffrage.
Recovering a transatlantic print archive, Richards brings together a wide range of activists and artists, including Lumina Sophie, Ina Césaire, Rosa Luxemburg, Rebecca West, Angelina Weld Grimké, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Hannah Höch, Claude Cahun, Paulette Nardal, and Leonora Carrington. An expansive and methodologically innovative book, The Fury Archives argues that the relationship of women’s rights movements and the avant-gardes offers a radical alternative to liberal discourses of human rights in formation at the same historical moment.
- Table of Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I. Sex and Citizenship in the Atlantic Archives
- 1. The Fury Archives: Afterlives of the Female Incendiary
- 2. The Long Middle: Militant Suffrage from Britain to South Africa
- Part II. The Reproductive Atlantic
- 3. The Art of Not Having Children: Birth Strike, Sabotage, and the Reproductive Atlantic
- 4. Rhineland Bastards, Queer Species: An Afro-German Case Study
- Part III. Convergences in Institutional Human Rights
- 5. Surrealism’s Inhumanities: Chance Encounter, Lesbian Crime, Queer Resistance
- 6. The Committee Form: Négritude Women and the United Nations
- Epilogue. Social Reproduction and the Midcentury Witch: Leonora Carrington in Mexico
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Text
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