Why is Society Afraid of Radical Women?
Eating at the gaps in historical consciousness
BY WINKS
Why is society afraid of radical women? Because if the most “feeble”, “fragile”, and “supple” members of society can do it, then anyone else can.
An anarchic editor, insuppressible speaker, and martyr’s wife who became a founding member of the most influential labor union in the world. Lesbian anticolonial snipers who trained to free Ireland by throwing dynamite in the mountains. A fervent disseminator of birth control and draft-dodging resources who participated uplifted revolutions wherever she went. A Dakota Sioux woman who exposed the cruelty of boarding schools and reservations, then fought the government for Indigenous and women’s rights and won. These are just a few of the most influential women who lived over a century ago; however, countless other equally influential women were unnamed, erased, or misattributed in the historical record.
Poisoned by the Great Man theory, the dominant historical narratives we are conditioned to believe clearly do not belong to the people, but rather to rich, white male egoists. Even now, with the entirety of the internet at our fingertips, we struggle to search or even uncover any information about those who really helped create our “progressive” (respecting human rights is not progressive, but common sense) culture: the women, the queers, the non-white; the revolutionaries, the anarchists, the abolitionists; the gang members, the strikers, and the sex-workers.
It’s no surprise that the narratives of the respective and aforementioned Lucy Parsons, Margaret Skinnider, Emma Goldman, and Zitkala-Ša are not widely known nor taught: their contemporary rulers were afraid of them—their mere mention challenges the unquestioned existence and authority of the status quo.
When the book bans build; when queer, racial, and revolutionary histories are banned from classrooms; when the highest courts strip our rights to bodily autonomy, freedom of assembly, and gender identity, the true shape of history reveals itself: progress isn’t a “straight arrow,” but a “governed” people eternally striving for survival and autonomy, and a “governing” body cyclically brutalizing those beneath, seeking to protect only its own power and property.
This is the ever-estranged and ahistorical now: where the oral traditions are lost, and the segregation baked into our centuries-old city planning bears its malicious fruit; where the Phyllis Wheatley Houses are bulldozed, and campuses are increasingly insulated from the salt of the city.
Contemporary inclusion, “equality,” or liberalism are not enough—as long as racists, bigots, misogynists, transphobes, xenophobes, fascists, landlords, capitalists, or lobbyists hold any office, we are not free nor fairly represented; all power corrupts indefinitely, regardless of initial ideology or intention.
This is not the indeterminate and revolutionary nowtime that our ancestors and activists survived for, died for, and defined. We must connect to our collective pasts and Benjaminian constellations of hope; we must realize the latent power within each and every “governed” body; we must stop the clocks—we must tear these structures down.
Learn about the Easter Rising, the Haymarket Affair, the Kronstadt Rebellion, the Paris Commune, the Harlem Renaissance, the Mexican Revolution, the 1919 Egyptian Revolution, Red Cloud’s War, and any other movement in which gender roles and other social fictions fell aside for solidarity in revolutionary action.
We must take it into our own hands to horizontally organize ourselves as our forebears did: we must create communities, salons, art collectives, and unions; reading groups, affinity groups, resource pools, and independent agriculture. At first, it can be as simple as hosting a clothing swap, skill share, or cooking party— even getting to know your unhoused neighbor.
How will we ever support or reform our communities if we never get to know those within them?
We must refuse to fall into the everestranged and undefining voids of whiteness, misogyny, and media. We must resist and persist in decolonization in every sector of our lives, whether it is in our bodies, relationships, communities, or minds. Even if we cannot topple this death-machine “democracy,” we can create our own temporary autonomous zones of radical joy, reverent memory, and revolutionary existence.
Just don’t let the bastards grind you down— you’re continuing the work of the millions who died before you—don’t let their undying anger nor ambition go to waste— and don’t forget to pass on the torch either.