Rosa Luxemburg, Claudia Jones, and Leila Khaled may have joined Lenin, Mao, and Che in the pantheon of twentieth-century revolutionaries, but the histories in which they figure remain unjustly dominated by men. In this talk, activists Sorcha Thomson and Marral Shamshiri set the record straight, revealing how women have contributed to revolutionary movements across the world in endless ways: as leaders, rebels, trailblazers, guerrillas, and writers; revolutionaries who also navigated their gendered roles as women, mothers, wives, and daughters. Their book, She Who Struggles: Revolutionary Women Who Shaped the World, introduces largely unknown revolutionary women from across the globe, a hidden history of revolutionary internationalism that taps into feminist, anti-colonial, and antiracist struggles today.
Marral Shamshiri is a researcher and activist. She is Managing Editor of the journal Cold War History and Council Member of the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies. She is active in the international solidarity campaign for Palestinian liberation, the refugee and migrant justice movement, and the movement to decolonise universities.
Sorcha Thomson is a researcher and activist. She is a member of the Entangled Histories of Palestine and the Global New Left research project at Roskilde University, and an Associate Research Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London. She is co-editor of the book Palestine in the World and an editor of the History Workshop digital magazine. She has previously written for The Sunday Times, The Scotsman and other publications.
