A transcript of my talk on ‘’Women and Armed Struggle’’ at the 2015 London Anarchist Bookfair

Disclaimer: Only discussing Late 19th Cen Onward, going to be pretty Eurocentric

Not an attempt to tell a history, first such would be impossible and second it would be to abstract the reality of these women. Instead I will briefly discuss why women’s armed struggle is so transgressive, then tell a series of historical stories that I think show certain things.

To take up arms is one of the last areas within the Western World where it is still seen as reasonable to exclude all women.

Modern Western Capitalism has been magnimonous enough to allow a small number of those they see as women to enter basically all fields. From low status jobs seen as inherently male due to their ‘’dirtiness’’ and physical nature, such as waste disposal, to high status jobs seen as inherently male due to supposed rationality and unemotional nature needed, such as CEO, a small number of women have been allowed to enter all of these roles on a supposedly equal basis, as to allow for the illusion of equality liberal feminism has granted us to persist.

Front line combat is one of very very few roles where women are still legally excluded, and a desire to end such does not seem to be something that is present in Liberal Feminism.

Of course as intersectional Feminists we don’t want women’s role in Western Militaries to be expanded. As they are first a tool for waging Imperialist war on elements in the 3rd world that dissent against western hegemony, and second for the repression of revolutionary movements in their own nation.

Simply to note why Women taking up arms and fighting by any means in our world is so transgressive, and why is has led to so much pathologisation and fetishisation of them.

An idea was present in the early feminist movement that women should be allowed to participate in the ‘normal’ political field because they were ‘more able’ to participate in politics than men, due to having a less violent nature, but struggling women smashed such notions more or less instantly with revolutionary violence.

With fire, broken windows and bombs the suffragettes fought, and the struggle was escalating immensely by the outbreak of WW1. At which point immense pressure was put on to pacify all kinds of resistance, and it was preached that women would gain the recognition of their male peers through the ‘good work’ of running the war industry.

If the militancy of a struggle could be measured in quantitive terms (Which it can’t be) this would be the ‘height’ of women’s militant struggle in Britain, as far as I am aware while women has planted plenty of bombs in Britain since then, but not with explicitly feminist aims.

Outside the metropole though such struggle did go on, such as the Igbo Women’s war. In 1929/30 Britain faced serious revolts in Ibgo majority areas of Nigeria as they attempted to impose a Western Political System here, which implied the removal of Women from the mainline political sphere. Ibgo women reacted with violent struggle, destroying courts, attacking the homes of the ‘’native’’ political leadership that cooperated with the British and looting European factories.

The struggle was broadly successful, with women allowed ‘inside’ the mainstream British political system in Nigeria, and inspired various women’s struggle throughout the rest of British rule.

Such struggles make obvious the falsehood of the European idea of women’s passivity, and the notion that Western Society, it the most progressive, especially in the gender field. During a period when Britain was giving more political rights to women within Britain it was taking them away in Nigeria, and only through violent struggle were they were kept.

The idea of Women’s passivity is façade that the European System is incredibly desperate to maintain, taken extreme measures to maintain such.

Massive efforts were launched to pathologise, (I.e. to make a medical issue of) Revolutionary Fighters like Ulrike Mienhof’ of the Red Army Faction commitment to revolutionary struggle. Because by the standards of the Western Imperialist system it was impossible for Women to be a consistent revolutionary fighter like Ulrike was, the only possible way this could be true was for her to be medically and scientifically deviant, i.e. insane and the correct answer to this would be a medical solution, in this case lobotomy.

For anyone who doesn’t know a lobotomy is the removal of certain vital areas of the brain in order to alter their personality. In other terms the state was so eager to ‘correct’’ Ulrike to her ‘natural state’ of passivity that they were willing to crack open her skull, remove part of her brain, and display such a horrific medical creation as the ‘’natural state of women’’. Of course she is not a unique case, and such procedures was used on a mass scale to inflict passivity on women, non-whites, homosexuals and other social ‘deviants’.

The state’s campaign against Ulrike’s defiance and spefically her defiant womanhood did not stop there. Rumours were spun about an apparent love jealously between her and two fellow guerrillas Baader and Ensslin who were lovers. The secret service instructed the bourgeoisie press to print the notion that there was a break within the Red Army Faction based on Ulrike being jealous of the two, and that this had caused her to become depressed and isolated. At the height of such rumours the state murdered her in prison and declared that she had committed suicide.

The period of popularity of Urban Armed Struggle also led to the creation of the Rota Zora. Coming out of the Anarchist Armed Struggle group, ‘’Revolutionary Cells’’ who were a large decentralised network of armed cells throughout Germany. Rota Zora were an all-women’s group who used similar tactics to RZ, but against ‘’patriarchal’’ targets as oppose to capitalist ones. Such as those who participate in the trade of women, doctors who force sterilise women, courts of judges who were active in the retention of the abortion ban, drug company which distributed drugs which caused birth defects and famously the offices of Alder, who were repressing women Workers in Korea, and through a combined struggle in Korea and Germany forced the company to accede to the demands. This was something of a perfection of the Western Urban Guerrilla seeing themselves as operating in the ‘’back area’’ of Imperialist conflict.

Rota Zora were an important development in terms of being an all-women group, and that the struggle for women’s liberation is not just outside of the Armed Struggle but inside.

This has come to the fore in the Kurdish struggle. Many women entered the Kurdish struggle in the 90s, but found themselves struggling against old fashioned attitudes from their male compatriots who wished to press them back into the roles that they were fighting against.

This triggered the desire to set up autonomous structures within the Kurdish struggle that would be all women. From the militant structures of the HPG (Armed wing of the PKK) it has spread through Bakur and Rojava, (North and West Kurdistan) not only in the military structures but throughout the society, with a whole women’s parallel society now existing in Rojava, and the Women’s assemblies have a veto over the general assemblies. This demonstrates the ability of an armed minority to engage in explemary action, which in Rojava has led to a immense rebalancing in gender power.

Questions to talk about.

How to react to and combat fetishisation of Women Fighters?

Why do present Armed Factions seem to be more male, or certainly no less Male? Is it because Anarchist armed struggle has moved from Germany to places like Greece and Chile, where overt patriarchy and machismo is more integrated in revolutionary movements?

How to dismantle the idea of violence as an inherently male tool?