The Fury Archives: Female Citizenship, Human Rights, and the International Avant-Gardes by Jill Richards

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Fury Archives: Female Citizenship, Human Rights, and the International Avant-Gardes by Jill Richards Linda Roland Danil, Dr. (bio) Jill Richards, The Fury Archives: Female Citizenship, Human Rights, and the International Avant-Gardes (Columbia University Press 2020), ISBN: 9780231197113 (paperback), 344 pages. Already at the outset of her rich and varied book, Jill Richards makes her intent clear: her aim is to “assemble a transatlantic archive of female citizenship.”1 Richards’ analysis is contextualized in wider narratives of women’s rights [End Page 831] during the period generally referred to as feminism’s first wave during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Moreover, rather than focus on female citizenship as a priori constituted through shared histories of exclusion and as being underpinned by histories and experiences of shared pain and suffering—Richards focuses on the female/woman as a subject of action. Richards therefore considers women arsonists, industrial saboteurs, queer resistance cells, and suffrage rioters, among others. The thesis of Richards’ book is that women’s rights movements and the historical avant-gardes became entangled in “an often vexed but hugely influential relationship of reciprocal construction.”2 In her analysis, Richards further draws on a wide range of sources, and includes parliamentary inquiries, police reports, mug shots, and propaganda booklets, among others. Specifically, Richards’ book is situated within the historical timeframe when first wave feminism and institutional human rights emerged at the same time as Dada and surrealism, and asks—how can these currents be understood alongside each other and as part of the same historical period? More specific still, Richards focuses on the little-known but significant entanglement between women’s rights movements and the international avant-gardes, with that interweaving having partly arisen through a mutual dependence on a socialist international that provided financial backing for the distribution of radical newspapers, journals and pamphlets across the Atlantic. The individuals (not always women) that populate the book’s pages are endlessly fascinating, intelligent, creative, and principled. In the analysis of the intersection between art and politics, Richards writes about women such as Paulette Nardal, who produced a black feminist periodical and served as an area expert for the newly founded United Nations; Leonora Carrington, the surrealist painter, was a refugee a number of times over and fled to Mexico in fear of reprisal for her involvement in anti-government protest meetings; Til Brugman joined the Dutch resistance; the Dada artist Hannah Höch was an advocate for birth control reform and her work was condemned as ‘degenerate art’ by the Nazis; the novelist Rebecca West rioted with the suffragettes. Other individuals include the gender non-conforming artist Claude Cahun and their partner, Marcel Moore— who were both sent to a prisoner of war camp for their participation in the French resistance. Not all of the individuals in question were admirable or even remotely likable, however—think of the despicable Marie Huot, the nineteenth century secretary of the League Against Vivisection—who claimed to have disposed of new-born puppies by tying a heavy stone around their necks and then tossing them into a body of water. In another anecdote, Huot apparently imparted the advice that housecat populations could be controlled by directly taking the kittens away from the mother and drowning them in a pot of water closed with a heavy lid. Huot allegedly argued that the same could be done for unwanted human infants, and further advocated for the entire extinction of humanity through the use of birth control. In an engaging discussion in which Huot is first brought up, Richards discusses the notion of proletarian “birth strikes” or womb strikes, in which women would deploy birth control as a form of strike against the production of people to feed [End Page 832] to future war machines and the industrial production of commodities. Through this view, “the limitation of reproduction would deprive capitalism of workers and soldiers to exploit, eventually resulting in a world-wide revolution.”3 Here, workers took control of (self)reproduction in a biopolitical form of resistance against the state, and rather than reproductive rights being framed through the language of the human right to privacy to be granted by the...