Fighting Women

Description

This series of interviews with participants in the Spanish Civil War offers a unique insight into the two-front revolution that women were trying to achieve in the 1930s, putting their lives on the line to fight fascism while confronting men whose commitment to liberation too often stopped at their own front door.

Undertaken from the late 1990s through to the 2010s, Isabella Lorusso’s work was sadly timely, taking place even as the last members of that generation who participated in the conflict passed away. An informal interviewer, she captures the humanity of these remarkable people in a way that other historic texts cannot — and often highlights the flaws and conflicted realities that bubbled under the surface of complex events.

Lorusso’s work, translated into English for the first time, stands as both a tribute and social history for these revolutionaries, whose actions and visions of the future continue to inspire and inform today.

Review of the Spanish version in El Pais:

“She scratched through history to find the Republican women who had fought tooth and nail during the conflict and whose memory was lost. Anarchist, militia, Marxist or Communist women, of different ideologies but with the same common denominator: making their voice heard.”