The Fury Archives Female Citizenship, Human Rights, and the International Avant-Gardes by Jill Richards

 The Fury Archives

Female Citizenship, Human Rights, and the International Avant-Gardes by Jill Richards is an amazing book reporting what women wanted in the past centuries and decades and how they influenced in many different ways their requests to a society too blind for answering.

Maybe not everyone know it, but avant-gardes and women's rights sang the same song together.

Why this? Thanks to an international socialist in grade of printing wagons of radical newspapers, journals, across the Atlantic.

These ideas, these whispers didn't remain confined in the USA, but reached the various Continents stimulating a fertile debat, opening new doors and visions.

Why Richards called this book The Fury Arcihives, using Fury for defining women? In part because it is an adjective fury that can define women as a creature irrational, with uncheck emotions. 

A woman at that time could have a role as a politician, a suffragette for  women's rights but she didn't have any kind of consideration  in the rest of her human sphere. 

Divided in three parts, in the first chapter the trial against five women accused of arson in Paris. There was a lot of excitement on this trial; just the idea that five women did it was absolutely something weird, but when the trial started and everyone discovered the heroines of the case, everyone focused the attention on the ugly faces of the various five women involved in the trial. 

Richards writes: "They were political actors but not citizen. They were human, but not subject to the rights of man."

In a society dominated by men women were seen as irrealistic creatures, unnatural. 

Le Figaro wrote that women wanted something else: a different existence, it was 1871, because not anymore happy of their existence at home, a behavior, wrote Magnard the reporter, leading to the ruin. 

Human rights, the ones focused in Magnard's piece, after all, typical in a society.

Maybe the most known girls and ladies passed to history have been absolutely the suffragettes. These girls and ladies fought for the possibility of voting, a right, that one, just for men.

Women thought that they had a lot to saying and didn't want to stay anymore at the window, looking at what was going on in this world without saying anything.

It became a literary world the one of suffragettes. A first example is Henry James and his The Bostonians where Olive asks to Verena of giving up her passion for men, dedicating the existence to their cause. As you will see Verena will win her battles and will marry a conservative man, while Olive will remain unsatisfied of her existence, alone.

Virginia Wollf was skeptical regarding the role of feminists and suffragists in the society portraying them as solitary people who remained alone forever because of their choices.

Ann Veronica by Wells tries as sort of escapism, starting a menage with a married man who can't divorce.

In The Sentinel by Rebecca West there is a girl who fall sexually in love for a guy with too much simplicity so, for this reason she won't marry him.

Another important fight for women was birth control. Women were prolific at that time, the end of 1800s, the beginning of 1900s so that in Switzerland, in Italy, a bit everywhere appeared pamphlet explaining how to avoid unwanted children and first of all, pregnancies. Children were a pillar and an important element in particular in  families of peasants, because they meant, if they survived, hands for domestic works, pretty heavy at that time. Sure, because of pregnancies and hard work girls close to the end of the 20s could be considered old in certain European countries. Life expectations wasn't long like the one that there is today, plus of course bad existence didn't help at all.

In the USA and in particular in the planter class there was a great domination of infanticides. A census from 1790 to 1860, examines the death of sixty thousand slave infants. Abolitionists remarked how the poor, horrible conditions in which people lived brought at these desperate and insane gestures.

The possibility of choosing when having a child is a great right because avoid terrible gestures, helping the mother; where this one wants to leave the baby in the hospital abandoning him because can't cure him for financial reasons, in Italy for example, she can does it.

A chapter involves Marchesa Casati; free and disinibited spirit, she was at long the lover of Gabriele D'Annunzio. 

Casati left Italy in 1922, when the regime of Mussolini was installed, but previously she spent some time in Capri a place adored by homosexuals of high society.

Why starting with Marchesa Casati? Because her ambivalence can clarify the situation of other women less privileged than her and so submitted to men. Promiscuity or loving people of the same sex was still a big taboo.

Why homosexuality was not seen well in Italy? Because it didn't bring new children and it was sterile under many ways.

Again in Weineger's account women were irrationals, people without too much consideration while men were rational, secure of themselves, having the best characteristics of this world.

Women needed to stay home, without thinking too much while they could study, learning, discovering culture, politics, arts.

Racism. Of genre, but always racism.

There were countries pretty opened and for this reason, also, many people afforded there. France and Paris were places where everyone could live with freedom his/her sexuality.

In France on 1928 was published Recherches sur la Sexualite a book that wanted to clarify all the possible doubts regarding sex, positions, orgasm, menage a trois, light on or off during sexual intercourses, men preferring older or younger women, and much more.

Although homosexuality could start to be tolerated somewhere, in other parts of Europe was highly condemned and lesbians seen as transgender.

Of course, as said before what scared to death the most conservative part of the society was the sterility, and also the idea that this fragmentation would have brought confusion and the end of a fertile society with a family well defined.

Claude Cahun is an example of a creative woman that as you can see  through her photographs, tried, with humor to express herself. Cahun was a big activist and her biography is remarkable.

A book that you must buy if you think that women fought for rights and still are fighting for new rights! every day of their existence.

Highly recommended.

I thank Columbia University Press for the physical copy of this book.

Anna Maria Polidori