As a companion to the Frondeuse series, I’ve assembled a collection featuring Stepniak’s “A Female Nihilist,” an account of the life of Olga Liubatovitch, together with a selection of poems and popular journalism relating to other women involved in the struggles against the Czars and their government. The popular accounts naturally made the most of the apparent contrasts between the beauty and education of those women, and the violence of their acts.
Black and Red Feminism
Jenny d’Héricourt contra Proudhon
Jenny P. d’Hericourt on Proudhon Proudhon’s anti-feminism is one of those issues that is generally brought up without much understanding of his actual positions. Most of his writings on women and marriage remain untranslated. We […]
poetry
Sir Henry Parkes, “The Beauteous Terrorist” (Sophie Perovskaya, 1885)
“She was beautiful. It was not the beauty which dazzles at first sight, but that which fascinates the more, the more it is regarded. “A blonde, with a pair of blue eyes, serious and penetrating, […]
Saint Ravachol
Stepniak, “A Female Nihilist” (1886)
A FEMALE NIHILIST I. On the 27th of July, in the year 1878, the little town of Talutorovsk, in Western Siberia, was profoundly excited by a painful event. A political prisoner, named Olga Liubatovitch, miserably […]