Remembering Revolutionary Women: The Cultural Afterlives of Louise Michel, Emma Goldman and Sylvia Pankhurst

Abstract

‘Remembering Revolutionary Women’ contributes to a growing body of scholarship, positioned at the intersection of cultural memory studies and social movement studies, that shows the importance of memory to activism. Understanding the remembrance of oppositional figures, for whom there appears to be little moral imperative or state agenda to ensure their sustained remembrance, requires a new approach to the workings of cultural memory. I argue that the remembrance of contentious individuals depends on their salience to subsequent social movements and demonstrate how that salience is brought out through an interaction between the work of “mnemonic stakeholders”, on the one hand, and the availability of symbolic resources created during a figure’s lifetime, on the other. This argument is developed through a comparative analysis of the cultural afterlives of Louise Michel (1830–1905), Emma Goldman (1869–1940) and Sylvia Pankhurst (1882–1960): three revolutionaries who were remarkable for their energetic pursuit of many causes and campaigns over an extended period. My sources include biographical works, artistic installations, performances, portraits and archives, with a focus on those longform versions of Michel, Goldman and Pankhurst’s lives in which a prevailing representation is in some way challenged and changed. I make use of methods drawn from cultural memory studies, alongside insights from studies of auto/biography and reputation, to analyse narrative and rhetorical patterns across mediations and remediations of these figures’ lives. Using a model of path-dependency (which shows how the choices available to mnemonic actors in each period are bound by the previous uses to which a figure has been put) I consider variations in how Michel, Goldman and Pankhurst have been remembered along axes of salience, valence and ownership, tracing their territorialisation, de-territorialisation and re-territorialisation in accordance with the needs and desires of later actors and movements. The argument that builds over the course of my chapters gives a new understanding of the hard-won remembrance of figures of resistance. I demonstrate the multi-agential cultural memory work whereby Michel, Goldman and Pankhurst come to be remembered as individuals, as revolutionaries and as women. The cultural afterlives of individual revolutionary women endure because of an encounter between significant representational resources from their lifetimes and the commitment of later memory workers. That memory is only likely to grow further if its salience to a social movement is proved.