This book vividly evokes radical women's integral roles within France's revolutionary civil war known as the Paris Commune. It demonstrates the breadth, depth, and impact of communard feminist socialisms far beyond the 1871 insurrection. Examining the period from the early 1860s through that century's end, Carolyn J. Eichner investigates how radical women developed critiques of gender, class, and religious hierarchies in the immediate pre-Commune era, how these ideologies emerged as a plurality of feminist socialisms within the revolution, and how these varied politics subsequently affected fin-de-sià ̈cle gender and class relations. She focuses on three distinctly dissimilar revolutionary women leaders who exemplify multiple competing and complementary feminist socialisms: Andre Leo, Elisabeth Dmitrieff, and Paule Mink. Leo theorized and educated through journalism and fiction, Dmitrieff organized institutional power for working-class women, and Mink agitated crowds to create an egalitarian socialist world. Each woman forged her own path to gender equality and social justice.

This book vividly evokes radical women's integral roles within France's revolutionary civil war known as the Paris Commune. It demonstrates the breadth, depth, and impact of communard feminist socialisms far beyond the 1871 insurrection. Examining the period from the early 1860s through that century's end, Carolyn J. Eichner investigates how radical women developed critiques of gender, class, and religious hierarchies in the immediate pre-Commune era, how these ideologies emerged as a plurality of feminist socialisms within the revolution, and how these varied politics subsequently affected fin-de-siecle gender and class relations. She focuses on three distinctly dissimilar revolutionary women leaders who exemplify multiple competing and complementary feminist socialisms: Andre Leo, Elisabeth Dmitrieff, and Paule Mink. Leo theorized and educated through journalism and fiction, Dmitrieff organized institutional power for working-class women, and Mink agitated crowds to create an egalitarian socialist world. Each woman forged her own path to gender equality and social justice.

Feminism's Empire investigates the complex relationships between imperialisms and feminisms in the late nineteenth century and demonstrates the challenge of conceptualizing "pro-imperialist" and "anti-imperialist" as binary positions. By intellectually and spatially tracing the era's first French feminists' engagement with empire, Carolyn J. Eichner explores how feminists opposed—yet employed—approaches to empire in writing, speaking, and publishing. In differing ways, they ultimately tied forms of imperialism to gender liberation. Among the era's first anti-imperialists, French feminists were enmeshed in the hierarchies and epistemologies of empire. They likened their gender-based marginalization to imperialist oppressions. Imperialism and colonialism's gendered and sexualized racial hierarchies established categories of inclusion and exclusion that rested in both universalism and ideas of "nature" that presented colonized people with theoretical, yet impossible, paths to integration. Feminists faced similar barriers to full incorporation due to the gendered contradictions inherent in universalism. The system presumed citizenship to be male and thus positioned women as outsiders. Feminism's Empire connects this critical struggle to hierarchical power shifts in racial and national status that created uneasy linkages between French feminists and imperial authorities.

The Virtues of Violence studies a pervasive but misunderstood image of violence in modern French thought: popular violence as social regeneration. It argues that this vision of violence was not a niche phenomenon, but central to the momentous developments of modern French politics. It appealed to thinkers across the spectrum because it answered fundamental dilemmas at the heart of democratization. Understanding its pervasive appeal, Duong argues, reveals howdemocracy was never simply a struggle for justice or a new legal regime, but also liberating visions of the social bond.

Socialism has been an influential force for social change for almost two centuries. Its philosophy and ideology have inspired millions while simultaneously arousing fear and revulsion in its enemies. Having emerged after the French Revolution in the effort to build upon and develop the egalitarian ideas of the Enlightenment, socialism has taken many forms. It has, furthermore, sometimes been manipulated and reformulated by opportunists who have built authoritarianism and totalitarian dictatorships in its name. Opponents seize on such examples to frighten away people who may otherwise have found socialism attractive. Socialism has survived such criticism and misrepresentation as its core principles have struck a chord with generations of people concerned with social justice. Historical Dictionary of Socialism, Fourth Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, a glossary, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 500 cross-referenced entries on activists, politicians, political thinkers, political parties and organizations, and key topics, concepts, and aspects of socialist theory. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about socialism.

The dominant view of the Russian Revolution of 1917 is of a movement led by prominent men like Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky. Despite the demonstrations of female workers for ‘bread and herrings’, which sparked the February Revolution, in most historical accounts of this momentous period, women are too often relegated to the footnotes. Judy Cox argues that women were essential to the success of the revolution and to the development of the Bolshevik Party. With biographical sketches of famous female revolutionaries like Alexandra Kollontai and less well-known figures like Elena Stasova and Larissa Reisner, The Women’s Revolution tells the inspiring story of how Russian women threw off centuries of oppression to strike, organize, liberate themselves and ultimately try to build a new world based on equality and freedom for all.

At the end of World War II, France discarded not only the Vichy regime but also the austere ideology behind it. Under the veneer of a conservative vision of family characterized by the traditional structure of a male breadwinner and female homemaker, the conception of love, marriage, and parenting began changing in the years immediately after the Liberation. In the 1950s, France experienced rapid economic development alongside a baby boom, changing from a rural country worn out by economic depression, war, and occupation into an urban, industrial, and affluent nation. Meanwhile, the works of Sigmund Freud, Simone de Beauvoir, and Alfred Kinsey began to influence popular culture and shape how people thought about their partners, their children, and themselves. Little more than twenty years after Vichy was abolished, France had already entered the early phases of a dramatic sexual revolution, laying the groundwork for the turmoil of May 1968. From Vichy to the Sexual Revolution explores the factors that led to such radical changes in French notions of gender roles, family structures, and sexuality. Sarah Fishman follows French women's path toward emancipation from winning suffrage in 1945 to the social movements of 1960s, painting a broad view of shifting habits and ideas about love, courtship, sex, marriage, parenting, childhood, and adolescence. She surveys a wide range of sources, including juvenile court cases, inexpensive guidebooks on marriage and childbirth, and popular magazines--Marie Claire and Elle most notably, where iconic columnists such as Marcelle Auclair and Marcelle Ségal answered readers' letters and dispensed intimate and inspirational advice to millions of women. Fishman deftly links economic, political, and social transformations, showing how the vision of family shifted away from a rigid structure dominated by the authority of the father toward a more dynamic group characterized by engaged relationships between parents and children. A sweeping social history of postwar France, this book illuminates the extraordinary impact that national policies have on ordinary lives.