This thesis is about women in revolutionary struggle. More specifically, it is about women who, locally, nationally, and internationally, are set on building a new and better world. My overall objective is to enrich our understanding of how and why their contributions as historical ‘agents of revolutionary change’ are critical to the history of ideas on revolution.
The existing literature provided fruitful material for this aim, but I found little on such women, other than as dramatic icons or in non-essential roles, so peripheral to the ideas, arguments and theories on revolution. Further research indicated that, as Louise Raw has argued, many such women are not just absent, neglected, or forgotten, within revolutionary history, they are ‘hidden’ both from and by it (Raw, 2011).
This insight informs the preliminary ideas on the adoption of the concept of ‘embodiment’ as the basis for a for a theoretical framework of analysis and the development of a broad definition of revolution applicable to women. This incorporates consideration of the sources, processes and possible consequences of women’s invisibility for the theory and practice of revolution. It, however, moves beyond it to embody women’s revolutionary actions with the aim of re-envisioning them as active subjects within revolutionary history. I have drawn on Raya Dunayevskaya’s (1991) description of such women as both revolutionary “Reason and force” (author’s capitals). This signals that, as well as being a force for change, they have the capacity for developing ideas and theories that are grounded in, but go beyond, their revolutionary experiences.
To draw the strands together, a case study of a strike in 1888 led by women in the match-making industry is included. Its primary function is to illustrate, within a real-life context of women’s collective revolutionary action, how the identified research problem of theoretical ‘blindness’ serves to render women invisible as historical agents of revolutionary change. It is also to reflexively link theory and practice and the role of revolutionary women in deepening our understanding of both.
