Dora García: Love with Obstacles (Labels)

Love with Obstacles Chart, 2020
From the series Mad Marginal Charts, 2014–present Graphite on wallpaper Courtesy the artist and ProjecteSD, Barcelona

The series Mad Marginal Charts arose from a conversation between Dora García and the curator Guillaume Désanges concerning the latter’s invitation to collaborate in a presentation, “Curated Session #1: The Dora García Files,” at the Pérez Art Museum Miami in 2014. The premise was that García should explain the complex research that had given rise to her four books titled Mad Marginal between 2010 and 2014. Mad Marginal was a tentacular project that ranged from antipsychiatry (especially the democratic psychiatry of Franco Basaglia and of the Trieste psychiatric hospital), to Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed, García’s own 2011 The Inadequate project, and the Italian marginal artists, taking in Bertolt Brecht, Antonin Artaud, Jack Smith, and Lenny Bruce, and continuing as far as extreme revolutionary movements, such as the Baader- Meinhof Group (a.k.a., the Red Army Faction, or RAF), intentional communities like Kommune 1, and the Situationist International. 

For the presentation in Miami, García prepared a set of patterns, annotations, and drawings that she accompanied with live explanations. As she read and developed her thesis, she began to add new annotations. She then started to transfer her notes directly from the page to the wall. Since graphite did not write well on the bare wall, she first used paper and later switched to a special type of wallpaper. So began Mad Marginal Charts—a series of reflections by García on her own work, using the format of large wall drawings (diagrams, photographs, lists, charts, schematic drawings, texts). These charts evolve and adapt according to the evolution of the work, and therefore for the Rose exhibition there is an old though updated chart titled Anna Livia Plurabelle, a character in James Joyce’s novel Finnegans Wake who stands for the eternal and universal female. And a second, new chart referring specifically to the train of thoughts (e.g., socialism, non-European feminisms, literature, letters, poetry, and revolt through writing), that originated the present exhibition.

ALP (ANNA LIVIA PLURABELLE), 2020
From the series Mad Marginal Charts, 2014–present Graphite on wallpaper Courtesy the artist and ProjecteSD, Barcelona

She has many names, 2020
From the series Golden Sentences, 2005–present
Gold leaf on glass
Courtesy the artist and ProjecteSD, Barcelona 

The Golden Sentences series began in 2002 with gold letters on cloth-covered board (much like a hardcover book), and continued in 2005 with gold leaf applied directly to the wall. The idea is to literalize the expression “a golden sentence,” a thought to guide our lives that is architecturally fixed, not unlike the mottos on family crests or the daily aphorisms found in diaries and page-a-day calendars. These sentences express a motivation, an idea, or the conduct of a person, a group, an institution, a state, or a family. Since 2005, Dora García has produced about thirty golden sentences. Typically, they are borrowed lines gathered from the most diverse sources. Since 2005, the Golden Sentences series has evolved a great deal, becoming more and more abstract and developing sometimes paradoxical and enigmatic relations to their context and situation. The new golden sentence realized in this exhibition at the Rose Art Museum: She has many names, is an enigmatic and polysemic statement that might evoke a powerful woman deity, a mysterious woman spy, or an elusive, feminine principle, one that escapes classification and is therefore uncontainable.

On Reconciliation, 2018
Facsimiles of letters between Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt
Courtesy ProjecteSD, Barcelona © Klostermann, Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach

On Reconciliation consists of several facsimiles of a selection of letters from the correspondence between Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt, a reading of the selected correspondence, and the conversations between the readers and the spectators that emerge from this reading. The importance of this epistolary exchange runs through the history of the twentieth century and the question of responsibility in intellectual practice, which could be said to be the fundamental question of artistic practice, and is ultimately another way of talking about the complex relationship between art and politics.

In 2014, after the German publication of Martin Heidegger’s Black Notebooks (Heidegger’s private journal entries beginning in 1931 and written over the course of forty years), something that was already known during the author’s lifetime became notorious among the public at large: his anti-Semitism and affiliation with the Nazi Party—for which he never apologized. The repercussions were significant. Günter Figal, a professor at the University of Freiburg and former chair of the Martin Heidegger Society, renounced his chairmanship, and after his retirement, the university considered eliminating the chair dedicated to the philosopher. The city of Freiburg meanwhile proposed removing Heidegger’s name from the street named after him. The questions, dilemmas, and debates aroused by this evidence are numerous. Do great thinkers whose personal behavior is less than acceptable deserve our admiration? Can the quality of someone’s intellectual work be separated from their personal behavior? For continental philosophy, in which Heidegger is a key figure, life and work cannot be separated. For Anglo-Saxon or analytical philosophy, the philosopher’s life is beside the point, in fact, to emphasize its relevance could constitute an ad hominem argument.

In the center, as a refection of all these paradoxes, is the relationship between Arendt, a greatly admired and very cosmopolitan Jewish writer and political theorist, and Heidegger, the most essential philosopher of the twentieth century, whose involvement with Nazism relegated him to a period of academic and intellectual ostracism after the war. Their friendship, which at first took the form of a clandestine love affair, lasted for fifty years, as the correspondence mentioned above shows. In italics whose´s involvement wondering about the reasons that might explain, or at least make it understandable, why Arendt wanted to reconnect after the war with this married and antiSemitic former lover and teacher, García came across the notion of “reconciliation” proposed by Arendt in her diary:

“One who reconciles voluntarily takes on his shoulders the weight which he otherwise bears. That is, he restores equality. Reconciliation is thus the exact opposite of forgiveness, which generates inequality. The burden of injustice is for he who has committed it, that which he has laden on his shoulders; on the other hand, for the one who reconciles, it is that which has been delivered to him. . . . One decides to be co-responsible, but under no circumstances co-guilty."

Martin Heidegger to Hannah Arendt, February 10, 1925
Facsimile. Original letter, handwritten

Martin Heidegger to Hannah Arendt, February 27, 1925
Facsimile. Original letter, handwritten

Martin Heidegger to Hannah Arendt, May 21–22, 1925
Facsimile. Original note, handwritten

Hannah Arendt, April 22, 1928
Facsimile. Draft letter, handwritten

Hanna Arendt, no date (likely 1929)
Facsimile. Draft letter, handwritten

Hannah Arendt, no date (likely September 1930)
Facsimile. Draft letter, handwritten

Martin Heidegger to Hannah Arendt, no date (likely winter 1932–1933)
Facsimile. Original letter, handwritten

Martin Heidegger to Hannah Arendt, February 7, 1950
Facsimile. Original letter, handwritten

Martin Heidegger to Hannah Arendt, February 8, 1950
Facsimile. Original letter, handwritten

(The girl from abroad) Hannah Arendt to Martin Heidegger, February 9, 1950
Facsimile. Copy of letter, typed

Hannah Arendt to Elfride Heidegger, February 10, 1950
Facsimile. Copy of letter, typed

Martin Heidegger to Hannah Arendt, May 6, 1950
Facsimile. Original letter, handwritten

Martin Heidegger to Hannah Arendt, May 16, 1950
Facsimile. Original letter, handwritten

Hannah Arendt to Martin Heidegger, October 28, 1960
Facsimile. Copy of letter, typed

Hannah Arendt to Martin Heidegger, September 24, 1967
Facsimile. Original letter, with enclosure, typed

Hannah Arendt to Martin Heidegger, November 27, 1970
Facsimile. Original letter, typed

Martin Heidegger to Hannah Arendt, July 30, 1975
Facsimile. Original letter, handwritten

Exile, 2012–present
Installation composed of postal items sent by different authors to the institution exhibiting the piece</br /> Courtesy the artist and Galería Juana de Aizpuru, Madrid

In 2012, Steve Henry Madoff invited Dora García to take part in an exhibition he was curating at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Host & Guest. García traveled to Israel with other invited artists, and used the journey to find out about the local creative scene and the territory in a broad sense. Her experiences, particularly crossing the checkpoint between Israel and the West Bank, produced feelings in her of discomfort, distance, alienation, and exile vis-à-vis the project, the institution, and the context, even though she still appreciated the work of Madoff and the other participants. She then decided to use the problematics it implied to work on the basis of a strategy suggested to her a year earlier by the practice of Aldo Piromalli. García had contacted Piromalli, a major figure in marginal situations within artistic practice, when she was preparing The Inadequate, a project for the Spanish Pavilion at the 2011 Venice Biennale. Despite García’s best efforts, Piromalli only agreed to participate in her project if he could use the format he had been developing for years: This was to choose a recipient, in this case, The Inadequate at the Spanish Pavilion in Venice, and to write to it so often that a reply became impossible.

The idea of exile (Piromalli formed part of the group of artists of the Museo dell’arte contemporanea italiana in esilio, a project by Cesare Pietroiusti) or uprootedness expressed in letters that were often illegible, intercepted, lost, or never opened, persuaded the artist to repeat the exercise, this time involving Piromalli and the curators Giulia Girardello and Mattia Pellegrini, as well as others she met during the journey. The guidelines were the theme of exile in every sense, and that the letters, which could contain just about anything, were accepted by the post office (the letters ultimately included documents, texts, books, magazines, postcards, small objects, photographs, collages, cuttings, drawings, maps, etc.). The project at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art began with a series of empty tables that were filled as the collaborators started to send missives addressed to the museum’s director, who was free to open them, read them, and arrange them on the tables as she pleased. This collective project, which was joined by further collaborators, has continued with subsequent appearances in Vilnius, Lithuania; Buenos Aires; Madrid; Moss, Norway; Toronto; Toulouse; and Boston.

Love with Obstacles, 2020
Digital film. 57 min. Courtesy the artist and Auguste Orts, Brussels

Love with Obstacles Archive, 2020
Documents, books, and drawings from the artist’s archive and Brandeis University Archive
Courtesy the artist and Robert D. Farber University Archives and Special Collections, Brandeis University

Internationales Komitee zur Verteidigung politischer
Gefangener, eds., Text: der RAF (Malmö, Sweden: Bo Cavefors, 1977)

Bo Cavefors was a Swedish cultural agitator that founded his publishing firm in 1959 in Lund, Swed. The Bo Cavefors Bokförlag introduced to Swedish readers the work of Ernst Jünger, Karl Marx, Lautréamont, Roland Barthes, Louis Althusser, Pier Paolo Pasolini and, paradoxically, the Swedish fascist Per Engdahl.

In 1977, Bo Cavefors published the communiqués and texts of the Rote Armee Fraktion in a highly controversial book, only two years after some of the group’s members attacked the West German embassy in Stockholm. Cavefors, who for over twenty years had published more than 700 titles in his publishing company, seemed to have exceeded there and then the limit for the said freedom of expression, giving voice to terrorists. He distributed the book titled raf: texte (RAF writers did not use capital letters)in France, Italy, and both the Germanys of that time, GDR and the Federal Republic.

Realizing how difficult it would be to carry boxes with RAF’s political propaganda into the German states, Cavefors followed a simple strategy: hiding the content inside a false cover. The cover of the romantic novel - light yellow with red cursive letters - featured a schematic drawing inspired by Édouard Manet.

Alexandra Kollontai, La Bolchevique Enamorada
(Madrid: Ediciones Oriente, 1928)

Manuel Chaves Nogales, La Bolchevique Enamorada
(El amor en la Rusia Roja) Editorial Asther (1930)

In 1928, Ediciones Oriente Madrid, an important publisher devoted to disseminating social and socialist literature and essays to a wide audience, published this novel by A. Kollontai, creating quite a stir among the nascent clearly Left-oriented feminism. The panic it created among the conservative and a large part of the progressives, because of the book’s advocacy for the sexual and economical emancipation of women and the possibility of new forms of families, seems to have pushed one of the most celebrated journalists of that time, Manuel Chavez Nogales, to write a counternarrative. La Bolchevique Enamorada (El Amor en la Rusia Roja) was published in 1930, with the clear intention of warning women of the dangers of abandoning the traditional heteropatriarchal structures.

Wilfredo Lam

Seated Woman Reading a Book, 1930

Gouache on paper

Rose Art Museum Collection

Attributed To Eva Gonzales

Reading in the Forest, 1879

Oil on canvas

Rose Art Museum Collection

Mary Heilman

Diamonds, 1983

Acrylic on canvas

Rose Art Museum Collection

Man Ray

Catherine Deneuve, 1966

Gelatin silver print

Rose Art Museum Collection

Isle Bing

Venus at the Temple of Love, Ile de la Jatte, Neuilly, 1935

Gelatin silver print on Agfa Brovira paper

Rose Art Museum Collection

Zoe Leonard

I Want a President, 1992

Ink on onion skin paper, glass, L pins

Rose Art Museum Collection

Terry Winters

Marginalia, 1988

Lithograph

Rose Art Museum Collection

Two Planets Have Been Colliding for Thousands of Years, 2017
Performance and drawing on foorCourtesy the artist and ProjecteSD

The title of the performance Two Planets Have Been Colliding for Thousands of Years comes from a conversation between Dora García, Andrea Valdés, and Manuel Asín on the occasion of an exhibition curated by Guillaume Désanges at La Verrière in Brussels. For García, the image suggested by Valdés of two planets colliding for thousands of years until they become one was a perfect description of the relationship between poetry and the visual arts.

The artist then drew this slow collision: two circles, one inside the other. The frst is black, and the one that invades it is white. With the colors inverted from the black of graphite to chalk white, the drawing is reproduced on the foor with whitewash paint, where it becomes the arena for a simple and contemplative performance. Two people stand in each of the circles and agree to maintain a previously established distance from each other. When one changes position, it provokes a response in the other, who also changes position to maintain the distance agreed at the start; and they do so while permanently locking gazes. The two performers regulate themselves in terms of position, posture, rhythm, and gaze, and do so in complete indifference to the audience, who in this case look in from the outside of the white arena of these two circle-planets.

The Labyrinth of Female Freedom, 2020
Performance, drawing on floor, text on floor made with stencil and book

The floor drawings of the Mad Marginal Charts (Floor) series began with the theatre performance Interrogation of a Woman, presented in 2016 at the Teatro Ofcina in São Paulo. In it, the leading actress remains at a halt while the other two characters— guards, torturers, or interrogators—improvise a dialogue as they walk ceaselessly along the long passageway that makes up the stage designed by Lina Bo Bardi. Dora García drew a chalk circle on the floor to emphasize the immobility of the central figure, but with her mind García also draws upon: (1) the famous episode cited by Jacques Lacan in Seminar XXIII: “It is in the measure that beings are inert, namely, supported by a body, that one can, as has been done, under the initiative of Popilius, say to someone: ‘You will not get out of there because I made a ring around you, you will not get out of there before promising me something or other’”; (2) Alberto Greco’s Vivo-Dito; (3) Ian Wilson’s chalk circles drawn on the ground; and (4) Bertolt Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle.

This new performance—The Labyrinth of Female Freedom—originates in García’s 2016 Interrogation of a Woman. In the center of the circle, now made completely white, a performer recites a book of poetry written by a woman. It is up to the performer to determine the level of the voice in the recitation, and thus whether to share the poetry with the audience, or to keep it private. A few meters away from this center of the poetry-reading performer, a text is handwritten on the floor: “Position, Voice, Mundo,” a text coming from a drawing by Gloria Anzaldúa, a Chicana feminist writer and activist that evokes for Dora García all the complexities, the obstacles, and the glory of female freedom.

Charlotte Brontë (born 1816 in Thornton, England; died 1855 in Haworth, England)

Jane Eyre: An Autobiography, 1st ed., ed. Currer Bell, 3 vols. (Cornhill, London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1847).

Rare Books Collection

Robert D. Farber University Archives and Special Collections

Mary Wollstonecraft (born 1759 in London; died 1797 in London)

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (Boston, MA: Peter Edes for Thomas and Andrews, 1792).

Rare Books Collection

Robert D. Farber University Archives and Special Collections

Mary Wollstonecraft was an English writer and passionate advocate of educational and social equality for women. Her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, written during the eighteenth century, is one of the earliest works of feminist philosophy. The book is a forceful argument for women’s education, which Wollstonecraft believed was essential to the good of society. Other early feminists had made similar pleas for improved education for women, but Wollstonecraft’s work was unique in suggesting that the betterment of women’s status be effected through such political change as the radical reform of national educational systems.

Hannah Mather Crocker (born 1752 in Boston, MA; died 1829 in Dorchester, MA)

Observations on the Real Rights of Woman (Boston, MA: printed for the author, 1818).

Rare Books Collection

Robert D. Farber University Archives and Special Collections

Hannah Mather Crocker was one of the leading American political theorists between 1800 and 1820 to engage the controversial question of equality between the sexes. In the wake of the postrevolutionary backlash against political radicalism, she became a subtle rhetorician of women’s rights. She accepted how her cultural context placed limits on the realization of women’s rights, yet she did not analytically conflate these temporal limits with women’s capacities to contribute to their polity. She sought to normatively defend and gently extend American women’s ongoing, informal political participation in the postrevolutionary era and challenged the separate spheres discourse that aimed to restrict it.

On Reconciliation / Über Versöhnung, 2018

Bilingual edition

Published by K. Verlag in collaboration with the Gallery for Contemporary Art – E-WERK Freiburg and the Academy of Fine Art Oslo.

Internationales Komitee zur Verteidigung politischer Gefangener, eds., Text: der RAF (Malmö, Sweden: Bo Cavefors, 1977)

Alexandra Kollontai, La Bolchevique Enamorada (Madrid: Ediciones Oriente, 1928)

Manuel Chaves Nogales,

La Bolchevique Enamorada (El amor en la Rusia Roja)

Editorial Asther, Barcelona (1930)

In 1928, Ediciones Oriente Madrid, an important publisher devoted to disseminate social and socialist literature and essays to a wide audience, published this novel by A. Kollontai, creating quite a stir among the nascent clearly Left-oriented feminism. The panic it created among the conservative and a large part of the progressives, because of the book’s advocacy for the sexual and economical emancipation of women and the possibility of new forms of families, seems to have pushed one of the most celebrated journalists of that time, Manuel Chavez Nogales, to write a counternarrative. La Bolchevique Enamorada (El amor en la Rusia Roja) was published in 1930, with the clear intention of warning women of the dangers of abandoning the traditional heteropatriarchal structures.

Alexandra Kollontai(born 1872 in Saint Petersburg; died 1952 in Moscow)

Of My Life and Work, 1921

Facsimile of the 1921 edition PDF kindly provided by the State Historical Public Library of Russia

One of the first versions of the Memoires in which Kollontai began working on after her displacement from the center of political decision in the Bolshevik government, following her criticism of the party.

Alexandra Kollontai (born 1872 in Saint Petersburg; died 1952 in Moscow)

Sexual Relations and the Class Struggle, and Love and the New Morality 1st., trans.

Alix Holt (originally published in 1919; Bristol, England: Falling Wall Press in collaboration with the members of the Women’s Liberation Movement, 1973).

Lewis S. Feuer papers

Robert D. Farber University Archives and Special Collections

Alexandra Kollontai (born 1872 in Saint Petersburg; died 1952 in Moscow)

Women Workers Struggle for Their Rights, 3rd., trans.

Celia Britton (originally published in 1919; Bristol, England: Falling Wall Press in collaboration with the members of the Women’s Liberation Movement, 1973).

Lewis S. Feuer papers

Robert D. Farber University Archives and Special Collections

Jack London (born 1876 in San Francisco; died 1916 in Glen Ellen, California)

“Dear Comrade,” September 14, 1905

Autographed letter Autograph Collection

Robert D. Farber University Archives and Special Collections

Jack London (born 1876 in San Francisco; died 1916 in Glen Ellen, California)

“Revolution,” in Revolution and Other Essays (New York: Macmillan, 1912).

Brandeis Library

Born on the cusp of American industrialization, by the 1890s Jack London had become an active socialist— his article, “What Socialism Is,” was published in December 1895 in the San Francisco Examiner. In 1896 he joined the Socialist Labor Party and later that year published an open letter in the Oakland Times urging readers to study Marx’s Capital. In 1905, London founded the Intercollegiate Socialist Society to propagate socialism among students, and he gave presentations at Harvard, Yale, and other Ivy League universities, spreading the message of class struggle.

Inspired by events in Russia, he wrote his 1908 article “Revolution.” He argued that there had never, in the history of the world, been anything like the workers’ revolution, and that it was not analogous to the bourgeois American and French revolutions. He summed up the essential solidarity of socialism as follows:

“They call themselves ‘comrades,’ these men, comrades in the socialist revolution. Nor is the word empty and meaningless, coined of mere lip service. It knits men together as brothers, as men should be knit together who stand shoulder to shoulder under the red banner of revolt.”

Excerpt from Jack London’s “Revolution”:

“I received a letter the other day. It was from a man in Arizona. It began, “Dear Comrade.” It ended, “Yours for the Revolution.” I replied to the letter, and my letter began, “Dear Comrade.” It ended, “Yours for the Revolution.” In the United States there are 400,000 men, of men and women nearly 1,000,000, who begin their letters “Dear Comrade,” and end them “Yours for the Revolution.”

Audre Lorde (born 1934 in Harlem, New York; died 1992 in Christiansted, Saint Croix, US Virgin Islands)

“An Evening in Memory of Audre Lorde,” April 21, 1992

Flyer

Shulamit Reinharz files

Robert D. Farber University Archives and Special Collections

Audre Lorde (born 1934 in Harlem, New York; died 1992 in Christiansted, Saint Croix, US Virgin Islands)

I Am Your Sister: Black Women Organizing across Sexualities

(New York: Kitchen Table, Women of Color Press, 1985).

Audre Lorde was a writer and activist whose feminism pushed back against society’s tendency for categorization. A self-described “Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet,” Lorde dedicated both her life and her creative talent to confronting and addressing the injustices of racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia. In 1981 Lorde and fellow writer Barbara Smith founded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, which was dedicated to furthering the writings of Black feminists.

This booklet is based on a speech Lorde gave at the Women’s Center of Medgar Evers College in New York City in 1985. It addresses divisiveness in the feminist movement, specifically in relation to heterosexism and homophobia, which Lorde names as “two grave barriers to organizing among Black women.”

Audre Lorde (born 1934 in Harlem, New York; died 1992 in Christiansted, Saint Croix, US Virgin Islands)

“An Open Letter to Mary Daly,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

(Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1984).

On May 6, 1979, Audre Lorde wrote to Mary Daly, author of the 1978 book, Gyn/Ecology. Four months later, having received no reply, Lorde opened it up to the scrutiny of others. In the letter Lorde took the feminist philosopher to task for her selective, racist appropriation of Black women’s words to introduce a chapter on genital mutilation—furthering the separation between white and nonwhite women within the feminist movement. Lorde’s letter gets to the heart of the type of grievance (e.g., “that nonwhite women and [their] herstories are noteworthy only as decorations, or examples of female victimization”), afflicting many of Daly’s critics: that Daly had not been paying full attention to the reality of nonwhite women’s situation. Or, in Lorde’s own words addressed to Daly, “Within the community of women, racism is a reality force in my life as it is not in yours. The white women with hoods on in Ohio handing out KKK literature on the street may not like what you have to say, but they will shoot me on sight. (If you and I were to walk into a classroom of women in Dismal Gulch, Alabama, where the only thing they knew about each of us was that we were both Lesbian/Radical/Feminist, you would see exactly what I mean.)”

Elektrolux: Der Beste Staubsauger

Communist anti-Nazi pamphlet disguised as an Electrolux advertisement, 1933

Jewish Resistance Collection

Robert D. Farber University Archives and Special Collections

Translation of the cover from German to English:
Elektrolux: the best vacuum cleaner
With comfortable monthly rates

Vacuum Cleaner: good for your health
Vacuum Cleaner: is hygienic
Vacuum Cleaner: saves time
Vacuum Cleaner: saves strength
Vacuum Cleaner: saves money
Vacuum Cleaner: the best is Electrolux

Paris Commune Posters, 1871–1873

Original posters

Robert D. Farber University Archives and Special Collections

These posters were displayed publicly during the events of the 1871 Paris Commune on behalf of both the government at Versailles and the Communards. The posters contain orders and communiqués as well as information and propaganda relating to the military and political events of the uprising.

In September of 1870, Emperor Louis Napoleon Bonaparte and Marshal Patrice MacMahon led the French army into battle at Sedan. In a day of desperate and bloody fighting, the French forces were badly beaten by a German army led by Prussian Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke and Prussian King Wilhelm I. The Germans took many prisoners, most notably the emperor himself, and French Republicans seized the opportunity to depose Napoleon and to bring an end to the Second French Empire. A new republic was declared at Versailles, committed (at least at first) to carrying on the war. German forces occupied a significant proportion of French territory, including the contested border region of Alsace- Lorraine, and laid siege to Paris. The Government of National Defense at Versailles soon realized the hopelessness of its situation and renewed armistice talks with the newly declared German Empire.

As rumors of the negotiations trickled into Paris, left-wing groups, including socialist followers of Louis Auguste Blanqui and radical Republicans (or Jacobins), began to organize resistance to the planned armistice with the support of the citizen’s militia of Paris, the National Guard. Their movements were also influenced by distrust of the Versailles government, which was dominated by monarchists and was suspected of planning to restore the monarchy. In response to efforts by the Versailles government to disarm the National Guard and pacify Paris, a council calling itself the Central Committee of the National Guard prepared to defend the city. From early April to late May of 1871, the Communards battled troops loyal to the government at Versailles. The bloody repression of the insurrection by government troops and the execution of its leaders followed. The Commune has since occupied a place of special importance for political theorists of the Left, perhaps most notably Karl Marx, who viewed it as the first historical example of rule by the working class.

Both the Communards and the Versailles government made use of the official heading and motto of the French Republic: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. The Communard posters simply added specification as to which arm of the revolutionary leadership produced a given poster, and noted the date according to the French revolutionary calendar.

Description by Drew Flanagan, former Archives and Special Collections assistant.

Women’s International Democratic Federation

1. Fourth Congress, Vienna, 1958; conference: “The defence of life,” Berlin, 1958

2. Fourth Congress, Vienna, 1958; conference “The creation of conditions which will enable woman to fulfill her role in society as mother, worker and citizen,” Berlin, 1958

3. Women’s International Democratic Federation: “For their rights as mothers, workers citizens,” Berlin: Women’s International Democratic Federation, 1952

4. World Congress of Women, Copenhagen, Denmark, June 3–12, 1953: “To every woman everywhere,” Berlin, 1953

5. Women’s International Democratic Federation: “Women for peaceful coexistence,” Berlin: [19--?]

6. Women’s International Democratic Federation: “The rights of women defence of children, peace,” Berlin: Women’s International Democratic Federation, [195- ?]

7.Women’s International Democratic Federation: “We Accuse!”; report, Berlin, 1951

Radical Pamphlet Collection

Robert D. Farber University Archives and Special Collections

Founded in Paris in late November 1945, the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) was the largest international women’s organization of the post-1945 era. The WIDF was a progressive, “left- feminist” international umbrella organization, with an emphasis on peace, women’s rights, anti-colonialism, and anti-racism. WIDF had a strong association with the communist world, and many of its leading women were communists. Some WIDF national member organizations were affiliated with a Communist Party, others were independent women’s organizations, and there were other formats, sometimes changing over time. As the Cold War unfolded, WIDF generally supported the Soviet Union. This support, however, does not mean that WIDF was founded by the international Communist movement or that WIDF was a “Soviet front” organization with other goals than professed. All these things were stated by the US House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in a 1949 report about WIDF and its American affiliate, the Congress of American Women. However, HUAC’s accusations became very influential, leading to suspicion and rejection of WIDF as a “Soviet tool,” an argument which has been pervasive in the West ever since.

In addition to this specific history, there are other reasons why the mainstream, Western feminist historiography has largely overlooked or ignored WIDF, its contributions, or both. One is that this historiography generally focuses on liberal and gender-only feminism and excludes or treats as less central women’s movements and organizations with a broader political agenda, including those with a socialist, socialist-feminist, or pro-communist orientation, as well as Global South and Third World women’s organizations all together.

Clara Zetkin (born 1857 in Wiederau, Germany; died 1933 in Arkhangelskoye, Russia)

Lenin on the Woman Question (New York: International, 1934).

Lewis Feuer Papers

Robert D. Farber University Archives and Special Collections

Clara Zetkin was a prominent figure in the German and international workers’ movement, most notably in the struggles of women in the workers’ movement. From 1895, she was National Executive member of the Social Democratic Party of German. As secretary of the International Bureau of Socialist Women, Zetkin organized the Socialist Women’s Conference in March 1915. Along with Alexandra Kollontai, Zetkin fought for unrestricted suffrage, and against the “bourgeois feminist” position supporting the restriction of the vote by property or income. During the war, she joined the Spartacists along with Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. She was secretary of the International Women’s Secretariat and member of the Executive Committee of the Communist International from 1921, and lived in Russia from 1924 until her death in 1933.

Clara Zetkin was a prominent figure in the German and international workers’ movement, most notably in the struggles of women in the workers’ movement. From 1895, she was National Executive member of the Social Democratic Party of German. As secretary of the International Bureau of Socialist Women, Zetkin organized the Socialist Women’s Conference in March 1915. Along with Alexandra Kollontai, Zetkin fought for unrestricted suffrage, and against the “bourgeois feminist” position supporting the restriction of the vote by property or income. During the war, she joined the Spartacists along with Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. She was secretary of the International Women’s Secretariat and member of the Executive Committee of the Communist International from 1921, and lived in Russia from 1924 until her death in 1933.

Clara Zetkin (born 1857 in Wiederau, Germany; died 1933 in Arkhangelskoye, Russia)

Reminiscences of Lenin (New York: International, 1934).

Lewis Feuer Papers Robert D. Farber University Archives and Special Collection

Clara Zetkin (born 1857 in Wiederau, Germany; died 1933 in Arkhangelskoye, Russia)

We Have Met Lenin (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1939).

Lewis Feuer Papers Robert D. Farber University Archives and Special Collections

Rosa Luxemburg (born 1871 in Zamośś, Poland; died 1919 in Berlin)

1. Reform or Revolution (originally published in 1900; New York: Three Arrows Press, ca. 1937).

2. The Russian Revolution (originally published in 1918; New York: Workers Age, 1940). Radical Pamphlet Collection Robert D. Farber University Archives and Special Collections

Rosa Luxemburg (born 1871 in Zamośś, Poland; died 1919 in Berlin)

The Crisis in German Social-Democracy: The Junius Pamphlet (New York: Socialist Publication Society, 1919).

Radical Pamphlet Collection Robert D. Farber University Archives and Special Collections

Rosa Luxemburg was a Polish-born, German revolutionary founder of the Polish Social Democratic Party. Just before World War I, the socialist parties of the Second International were against growing nationalism and the possibility of an international conflict between Rosa Luxemburg and the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). In August the war was declared, and although the Bolsheviks and some organizations managed to stand firm, the SPD finally supported the War.

Rosa Luxemburg organized a meeting in Berlin with a handful of revolutionaries, including Franz Mehring and Julian Marchlewski (a.k.a., Julius Karski), and with support from Clara Zetkin in Stuttgart. They agreed to take up the struggle against war and against their own party. This was the beginning of the group that was to become the Spartacus League. Luxemburg was imprisoned for her anti-war activities in February 1915, and she remained incarcerated with only brief spells of freedom for almost the whole of the war. She wrote a pamphlet titled The Crisis of Social Democracy and smuggled it out in April 1915. Commonly referred to as the Junius pamphlet, it was published in January 1916 and distributed illegally under the pseudonym Junius (after Lucius Junius Brutus). The manifesto was a fierce attack on the SPD for its betrayal of the working class: “Nowhere has the organization of the proletariat been yoked so completely to the service of imperialism. . . . Nowhere is the press so hobbled, public opinion so stifled, the economic and political class struggle of the working class so totally surrendered as in Germany.”

Luxemburg was released in February 1916 to be met by a thousand women supporters. In January 1919, she was brutally murdered by the State.

Rosa Luxemburg (born 1871 in Zamośś, Poland; died 1919 in Berlin)

Theory and Practice, trans. David Wolff (originally published in 1910; Detroit, MI: News and Letters, 1980).

Radical Pamphlet Collection Robert D. Farber University Archives and Special Collections

Excerpt from David Wolff’s introduction to Luxemburg’s Theory and Practice: “This is the first English translation of Theory and Practice by Rosa Luxemburg. It will give the American public the opportunity to hear Rosa Luxemburg speak for herself in her confrontation with Karl Kautsky on the crucial questions of the General Mass Strike and on the relationship of spontaneity to organization, as well as on the unity of theory and practice. This crucial 1910 debate in German Social Democracy led to Luxemburg’s revolutionary break with Karl Kautsky and foreshadowed the collapse of the Second International at the outbreak of World War I. Also included here are her concluding remarks from ‘Attrition or Collision’ in that continuing debate, where she extended her critique of the opportunism which was corroding the German Social Democracy to an attack on its pusillanimity in the fight against imperialism.”

Leon Trotsky (born 1879 in Ukraine; died 1940 in Mexico City)

1. American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky, special pre-publication offer, “The Case of Leon Trotsky.”

2. American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky, News Bulletin (New York), Bulletin no. 6, May 3, 1937.

Radical Pamphlet Collection Robert D. Farber University Archives and Special Collections

The American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky was a pseudo-judicial process set up by American Trotskyists as a front organization following the first of the Moscow trials, a series of show trials held in the Soviet Union at the instigation of Joseph Stalin between 1936 and 1938, against Trotskyists and members of Right Opposition of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

It had no powers of subpoena, nor official imprimatur from any government. It was composed of historians, sociologists, journalists, intellectuals, theologians, and other notable figures, including Edmund Wilson, Suzanne La Follette, Louis Hacker, Norman Thomas, John Dos Passos, Reinhold Niebuhr, George Novack, Franz Boas, John Chamberlain, and Sidney Hook. John Dewey, then seventy-eight years old, agreed to head its Commission of Inquiry.

Leon Trotsky to American Committee Typewritten letter and autographed by “LT,” August 13, 1935 Autograph Collection Robert D. Farber University Archives and Special Collections

Leon Trotsky (born 1879 in Ukraine; died 1940 in Mexico City)

Typescript interview between B. J. Field and Leon Trotsky with handwritten corrections and additions; initialed at end by “LT.” This interview was published in the Militant 6, no. 23 (April 15, 1933).

Autograph Collection Robert D. Farber University Archives and Special Collections

Excerpt from the typescript interview by the editors:

“We are glad to print the following interview given in Prinkipo [Büyükada, Turkey] by Leon Trotsky to comrade B. J. Field in connection with an article published several months ago by a bourgeois apologist for the Stalinist regime. As the interview deals with questions of more than passing interest, it retains all its value as an exposition of the Bolshevik- Leninist standpoint on questions in dispute in the Communist movement.”

New Haven Panther Defense Committee,

Amerikkka: Lonnie McLucas, Prisoner of War

(New Haven, CT: New Haven Panther Defense Committee, 1970).

Community Meeting Flyer, October 9, 1973

People’s news service Ministry of Information bulleting no. 18, May 5, 1970

“‘Lil’ Bobby with Panthers at Oakland Court House for free Huey Rally,” Black Community News 2, no. 29, April 6, 1969.

In October of 1966, in Oakland California, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. The Panthers practiced militant self-defense of minority communities against the US government, and fought to establish revolutionary socialism through mass organizing and community based programs. The party was one of the first organizations in United States’ history to militantly struggle for ethnic minority groups and working-class emancipation, a party whose agenda was the revolutionary establishment of real economic, social, and political equality across gender and color lines.

Gordon Fellman papers Robert D. Farber University Archives and Special Collections

“Survival through Service to the People,” 1970 Flyer Gordon Fellman papers Robert D. Farber University Archives and Special Collections

The Black Panther newspaper published and advertisement on May 31, 1970 calling for a “mass rally and national press conference to announce date and place of Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention” at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC on June 19. The conference was finally organized by the Black Panther Party in Philadelphia from September 4–7, 1970. The idea behind this public convention was to review the US Constitution in order to get a new version drafted by various radical-leftist organizations in America.

Mary Wollstonecraft (born 1759 in London; died 1797 in London)

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (Boston, MA: Peter Edes for Thomas and Andrews, 1792).

Rare Books Collection Robert D. Farber University Archives and Special Collections

Mary Wollstonecraft was an English writer and passionate advocate of educational and social equality for women. Her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, written during the eighteenth century, is one of the earliest works of feminist philosophy. The book is a forceful argument for women’s education, which Wollstonecraft believed was essential to the good of society. Other early feminists had made similar pleas for improved education for women, but Wollstonecraft’s work was unique in suggesting that the betterment of women’s status be effected through such political change as the radical reform of national educational systems.

Hannah Mather Crocker (born 1752 in Boston, MA; died 1829 in Dorchester, MA)

Observations on the Real Rights of Woman (Boston, MA: printed for the author, 1818).

Rare Books Collection Robert D. Farber University Archives and Special Collections

Hannah Mather Crocker was one of the leading American political theorists between 1800 and 1820 to engage the controversial question of equality between the sexes. In the wake of the postrevolutionary backlash against political radicalism, she became a subtle rhetorician of women’s rights. She accepted how her cultural context placed limits on the realization of women’s rights, yet she did not analytically conflate these temporal limits with women’s capacities to contribute to their polity. She sought to normatively defend and gently extend American women’s ongoing, informal political participation in the postrevolutionary era and challenged the separate spheres discourse that aimed to restrict it.

“Population Control: Human Losses for US Profits,” Reproductive Rights Newsletter (Newsletter of the Reproductive Rights National Network, Spring, 1985).

Hall-Hoag Collection of extremist literature in the United States Robert D. Farber University Archives and Special Collections

The Reproductive Rights National Network formed in 1978 including fifty feminist organizations. They supported the women’s ability to access safe and legal abortions, the right of gay couples to adopt and raise children, and fought against the sterilization of women with inadequate resources. The organization disbanded in 1984.

Third World Women’s Alliance, Women in the Struggle (Seattle, WA: Radical Women Publications, ca. 1971). Radical Pamphlet Collection Robert D. Farber University Archives and Special Collections

The Black Women’s Liberation Committee was formed in 1968. Led by Frances Beal, it renamed itself the Third World Women’s Alliance (TWWA) in 1969. The TWWA insisted that for women of color and poor women, there would be no liberation without confronting issues of race and class. It also questioned the feminist orthodoxy that a natural sisterhood united all women, pointing out that some forms of women’s liberation would merely give white women the opportunity to participate in racial privilege along with white men.

Excerpt from Women in the Struggle:

“We decided to form a Black women’s organization for many reasons. One was and still is, the widespread myth and concept in the Black community of the matriarchy. We stated that the concept of the matriarchy was a myth and that it has never existed. Our position would be to expose this myth. There was also the widespread concept that by some miracle the oppression of slavery for the Black woman was not as degrading, not as horrifying, not as barbaric. However, we state that in any society where men are not yet free, women are less free because we are further enslaved by our sex.”

“Project Statement: Sexual Harassment on the Job” “National Sexual Harassment Legal Buck-Up Center” Flyer Published by Working/Women’s Institute, 593 Park Avenue, New York, 10021

Marilyn Hoffman, “A Women’s Center Targets Harassment on the Job,” Christian Science Monitor (September 4, 1979).

Radical Pamphlet Collection Robert D. Farber University Archives and Special Collections

The Working Women’s Institute was a national resource research service center that dealt exclusively with sexual harassment on the job. In 1975 they coined the term “sexual harassment” and gave a name to a formerly taboo dilemma faced by millions of working women. Its resources were regularly utilized by policy planners, social service providers, employers, academic researchers, legal practitioners, and everyday working women.

Sojourner 8, no. 7 (March 1983).

Sojourner 8, no. 8 (May 1983).

Sojourner 9, no. 7 (March 1984).

Robert D. Farber University Archives and Special Collections

Sojourner was a feminist periodical founded in 1975 that evolved from a small, Massachusetts Institute of Technology women’s newspaper, into a national forum for feminist analysis of news, opinion, and the arts, as well as women’s creative writing and poetry. By the 1990s, Sojourner prided itself as a vital hub for the feminist community, including those marginalized women who were on welfare or incarcerated.

Don Hamerquist, Fascism in the U.S.?: A Discussion Paper by Don Hamerquist (Sojourner Truth Organization, September 15, 1976).

Hall-Hoag Collection of extremist literature in the United States

Robert D. Farber University Archives and Special Collections

The Sojourner Truth Organization (STO) was an American revolutionary group based largely in Chicago during the 1970s and 80s. It was named after the nineteenth century African American woman activist, Sojourner Truth. It distinguished itself from other New Left groups in its critical approach to the role of race in the formation of the American working class.

STO created a small but vibrant political tendency around the concepts of challenging dual consciousness, opposing white supremacy, supporting extra-union organizing in factory settings, defending anti-imperialist and national liberation struggles, and building an internal culture of intellectual rigor.

Louise Imogen Guiney (born 1861 in Roxbury, MA; died 1920 Chipping Campden, England)

1. Autographed manuscript of poem “Immunity,” n.d.

2. Autographed manuscript of poem “The Lilac,” n.d.

3. Autographed manuscript of two poems, “On First Entering Westminster Abbey” and “London Fog,” n.d.

4. Autographed manuscript of poem “The Slitt of the Year,” n.d.

5. Autographed manuscript of poem “A Song,” n.d.

6. Autographed manuscript of poem “The Temple,” n.d.

7. Autographed manuscript of poem “Vergniaud in Turnbril,” n.d.

8. Autographed manuscript of poem “A Foot-Note to a Famous Lyric,” n.d.

9. Autographed manuscript of three poems, “I. For a Soldier,” “II. For Blaisilla,” and “III. For the Cenotaph of the Prince Imperial,” n.d.

10. Autographed manuscript of poem “A Vision at York Stairs,” n.d.

11. Autographed manuscript of poem “Virgil to his Lovely Lucidas,” n.d.

12. Autographed manuscript of poem “At a Symphony,” n.d.

13. Autographed manuscript of poem “Falkirk Field,” n.d.

14. Autographed manuscript of poem “Schubert,” April 1887

15. Autographed manuscript of poem “To the Children, on the Dedication at a School,” November 1888

16. Autographed manuscript of poem “To a Dog’s Memory,” March 1889

17. Autographed manuscript of poem “The Indian Pipe,” March 1886

18. Autographed manuscript of poem “Chaluz Castle,” August 29, 1889

19. Autographed manuscript of poem “Once, to the Pomp of the Joy-Bells’ Peel,” October 1885

20. “Dearest Eq,” n.d.

21. Photographs and autographed note, n.d.

Autograph Collection

Robert D. Farber University Archives and Special Collections

Louise Imogen Guiney was an American poet, essayist, and editor born in Roxbury, Massachusetts. The daughter of General Patrick R. Guiney—an Irish-born American Civil War officer and lawyer—she was educated at a convent school in Providence, Rhode Island. In addition to her own works, she edited editions of James Clarence Mangan and Matthew Arnold, and was a coauthor (along with Harriet Prescott Spofford and Alice Brown) to the 1894 Three Heroines of New England Romance.

Sigmund Freud to anonymous, August 13, 1927 Photograph of autographed letter

Autograph Collection

Robert D. Farber University Archives and Special Collections

The Moscow women’s anti-Nazi meeting and American women’s response, New York: American Council on Soviet Relations, 194-?

Radical Pamphlet Collection

Robert D. Farber University Archives and Special Collections

Angela Davis prints

University Photography Collection

Robert D. Farber University Archives and Special Collections

“The Real Issue of the 1980s: People Before Profits”

Gus Hall and Angela Davis pamphlet from US presidential race, 1984

Robert D. Farber University Archives and Special Collections

Angela Davis graduated in 1964 from Brandeis University before becoming a doctoral candidate at the University of California, San Diego, under the Marxist professor Herbert Marcuse. She gained an international reputation as a Black activist during her imprisonment and trial on conspiracy charges in 1970–1972. Because of her political opinions, and despite an excellent record as an instructor at the university’s Los Angeles campus, the California Board of Regents in 1970 refused to renew her appointment as lecturer in philosophy. However, in 1991 Davis became a professor in the field of the history of consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In 1995, amid much controversy, she was appointed a presidential chair, and she became professor emerita in 2008.

In 1980 and 1984 she ran for US Vice President on the Communist Party ticket.

Lemberg Center for the Study of Violence

Ralph Conant Papers

Robert D. Farber University Archives and Special Collections

1. Black Power Publications, 1967–1968

2. Black Panther News Clippings 1968–1971

3.Black Power Manifesto and Resolutions

4. Black Panther News Clippings 1968–1971

5. Black Identity Clippings

6. Black Power/Houston Black Politics

7. Bombings, Terrorism

8. “Anywhere We Are US” Sticker>

9. “US Works Harder for Black” Sticker

10. The Quotable Horengo

11. Chicago Eight Trial and Dissent

Alexandra Kollontai (born 1872 in Saint Petersburg; died 1952 in Moscow)

Society and Motherhood, 1921

Facsimile of the 1921 edition

PDF kindly provided by the State Historical Public Library of Russia

Alexandra Kollontai began work on her book Society and Motherhood long before the outbreak of the First World War, after the Social-Democratic fraction in the Third State Duma requested her to write a section on maternity insurance to be included in draft legislation on labor insurance. By the beginning of 1914 the work was completed and given to the Saint Petersburg publishing house Zhizn i Znaniye [Life and knowledge], run by the Bolshevik historian and writer, Vladimir Dmitriyevich Bonch-Bruyevich. It was published in 1916. The book is almost 650 pages long and is divided into two sections. The first section deals with the main issues involved: the reasons for state maternity insurance, the causes of the falling birth rate, the effects of the living conditions of the working class and of female labor on infant mortality, and the types and forms of maternity insurance. In a voluminous appendix, the author quotes the maternity insurance laws of fourteen countries, the resolutions adopted on this subject at conferences of women socialists, a wide range of statistical material, and a large bibliography, which includes reference sources in six European languages.

The above text has been adapted from the editor’s introduction to “Preface to the Book Society and Motherhood,” Marxist Internet Archive, https://www. marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1915/mother.htm.

Alexandra Kollontai (born 1872 in Saint Petersburg; died 1952 in Moscow)

Letters to the Working Youth—Third Letter: About the “Dragon” and “The White Bird,” Molodaya Gvardiya, no. 2 (February–March 1923), 162–174

Facsimile

PDF kindly provided by the State Historical Public Library of Russia

The Third Letter: About the “Dragon” and “The White Bird,” was written at a time when Kollontai’s ideas were being attacked both by the male members of the Communist Party (as irrelevant) and even more so by the female members (as dangerous and pernicious for the morals of the new soviet citizens). Kollontai addresses directly the young members of the new communist society: the working youth. In this open letter, written the same year as the famous (and polemical) “Make Way for Winged Eros,” Kollontai broke another taboo by writing about the poetry of Anna Akhmatova, a fundamentally important woman poet who was being politically prosecuted at that time and would continue to be until the end of her life. From a new, Marxist perspective, Akhmatova’s poetry was deemed to represent an introspective “bourgeois aesthetic,” reflecting only trivial “female” preoccupations, not in keeping with the revolutionary politics of the time. She was roundly attacked by the state, by former supporters and friends, and seen to be an anachronism. During what she termed “the vegetarian years,” Akhmatova’s work was unofficially banned by a party resolution of 1925, and though it was extremely difficult for her to publish her work, Akhmatova continued writing poetry.

In the performance The Labyrinth of Female Freedom, the performer is reading a book of poetry by Anna Akhmatova.