Books: Free Women and The Red Virgin
AnarchoFeminism
Today, July 19, 2026, is the 90th anniversary of the Spanish Revolution and Civil War. Here are two reviews I’ve written on books about anarcho feminism, a political and philosophical lens that was central to that revolution and which in turn is central to my feminism.
First published as reviews on my Patreon in April 2020
Free Women of Spain: Anarchism and the Struggle for the Emancipation of Women, Martha A. Ackelsberg
Who is the revolution for? So often, too often, we are all called to join the revolution, to risk all for the revolution, and the revolution turns out to be a cisgender dick swinging contest. I am not interested in dick swinging contests and neither were Mujeres Libres (Free Women), an anarchist organization founded officially in Spain in 1937, The women who founded it were for the most part members of anarchist-affiliated organizations active in Spain at the time. Those organizations might have expressed commitment to gender equality but many male members of those organizations did not take women seriously and failed to be as committed to that revolutionary goal of gender equality. Sexism does not live just among the right wing and the conservatives. The "comrades" must be held to task too.
Men of the left are not sterling feminists. The idea that just because a man is an activist or a leftist makes him ipso facto a feminist is delusional and absurd. Over and over, too many forget. I am fed up of the dick swinging. A revolution that does not target patriarchy is a dick swinging contest.
And so anarchist women across Spain founded Mujeres Libres - which published a magazine by the same name - to work alongside those other anarchist organizations but to devote themselves explicitly to ending what they called "the triple enslavement of women" as workers, as women, and to ignorance.
If ever there was a moment in history to which I could press go and return there it would be to anarchist Barcelona during the Spanish Revolution. This book is a vital reminder that there is no liberation without women's liberation. And also sexual liberation. Ackelsberg notes that "Spanish anarchists had devoted considerable attention to sexual liberation, for both women and men. They advocated increased information about sex and sexuality, greater sexual freedom, and the abolition of legal and religious marriage in favor of "free love," by which they mean voluntarily contracted relationships that could be terminated at the will of either partner...The revolution allowed for the implementation of new public policies in the arena of sexuality, particularly in Catalonia."
Nonetheless, Ackelsberg also points out the double standard between what the compañeros and the compañeras could do, and notes the prudishness in the magazine that kept even anarchist women from being "explicit" or "radical" with regards to sexual liberation in 1930s Spain, even as all were fighting for the social revolution that would create the society they wanted.
The revolution anywhere, be it in Spain in the 1930s or Egypt in 2011, will fail unless women's emancipation is at its heart. Women are always told to wait. That is a mistake. I am an anarchist because I want to end all forms of hierarchies; to end the oppression that is a result of those hierarchies. I do not believe that ending capitalism and class structures will liberate us all. Capitalism and class structures are not the only forms of oppression we must end. I want to end the oppression also of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, ageism, and other forms of bigotry. I am an anarchist feminist who fights for freedom for all. And there is no freedom without women's freedom and without sexual freedom. My revolution declares "I own my body."
I have risked my life. I'll be fucking damned if I risk it again for a group of swinging dicks whose aim is to get more slices of a cake that am offered only crumbs from. How's that for mixing my metaphors?! Fuck your crumbs. Fuck your cake. Fuck your penis contests. I want to be free. I will be free.
The Red Virgin and the Vision of Utopia, Mary M Talbot and Bryan Talbot.
What fucking world is this? Ask that question, during a pandemic or at any other time, and the immediate response is a question: "Well, what's your alternative?" We are tasked with both surviving the oppressions we are subjected to and coming up with ways to end them.
At least 365,000 people around the world have died so far from COVD19. In the United States, most of the 100,000 people who have died are elders, Black and Indigenous people, people of colour, the disabled, and those most marginalized by and left vulnerable to that fucking world we are tasked to both survive and fix.
And so I'm reading and rereading, taking notes and setting fire to my mind. What is my alternative to this fucking world?
This wonderful graphic biography is a reminder of 70 days in 19th century Paris that continue to set fire to our imaginations as we try to create that better world. More than 50 years before the Spanish Civil War and revolution - see my review of Free Women of Spain: Anarchism and the Emancipation of Women - during which Catalonia implemented anarchist visionary social policies, La Commune - the short-lived takeover of Paris by radical workers - created civil partnerships, the separation of church and state, pay equality, freedom of the press, trade union representation within private firms and a minimum wage. In 1871. La Commune started on March 18, 1871 and ended in a bloodbath on May 28 but its resonance and inspiration continues.
The Red Virgin and the Vision of Utopia, a graphic biography of Louise Michel, anarchist feminist and a leader of the Paris Commune, is one of several recent titles that give the graphic treatment to leftist activists and thinkers - e.g. Rosa Luxemberg and Hannah Arendt.
And again and again and again - always ask "Who is the revolution for?" and always find the anarchist feminists telling the cis men to fuck off with their dick swinging contests. A couple of decades after La Commune was crushed, the world's first explicitly anarchist-feminist group was created as part of the thriving 19th century anarchist movement in Argentina. It produced the first anarcha-feminist newspaper La Voz de la Mujer which in 1896 in its first issue warned misogynist anarchist comrades:
“You had better understand once and for all that our mission is not reducible to raising your children and washing your clothes and that we also have a right to emancipate ourselves and to be free from all kinds of tutelage, whether economic or marital.”
In Paris, Louise Michel was demanding "Neither God nor master! Bring on the social revolution!" And about two decades later, a supporter of La Voz de la Mujer signed herself “No God, No Boss, No Husband.”
As Maxine Molyneux points out in her study of Argentinian anarchist feminists, "It is not difficult to see why feminists were attracted to Anarchism and why they were so rightly opposed to male anarchist hypocrisy. Its key ideas stress the struggle against authority, including the power exercised over women in marriage and the family. All anarchists should be seeking freedom within relationships. The Anarchist emphasis on oppression and on power relations opened up a space within which women could be seen simultaneously as the victims of class society and as the victims of male authority."
The fourth edition of La Voz de la Mujer said it thus: “We hate authority because we aspire to be human beings and not machines directed by the will of ‘another,’ be this authority, religion, or any other name.”
In 1906 Japan, anarchist feminist Kanno Sugako exhorted "Rise up, women wake up! As in the struggle workers are engaged in against capitalists to break down the class system, our demands for freedom and equality with men will not be won easily just because we will it. They will not be won if we do not raise our voices, if no blood is shed,”
And here are Mujeres Libres in Spain, some 60 years after Louise Michel and about 40 years after Argentinian anarchist feminists and their La Voz de la Mujer, and some 30 years after Kanno Sugako:
"All these compañeros, however radical they may be in cafes, unions, even (Anarchist) groups, seem to drop their costumes as lovers of female liberation at the doors of their homes," Lola Iturbe, Mujeres Libres in 1935.
There have been moments - a few weeks, months, years - when revolutionaries disentangled a better world from the fuckery of injustice, inequality, and dehumanization that are the tik tok of the world as we usually know it. And just as steady is the misogyny that systematically erases women from those flashes of light that continue to serve as flares for our imagination.
My obsession with those flashes of possibility and the women who set them off sustain me. And they are especially urgent now.
To ask “what fucking world is this?” is to refuse to go back to (ab)normal. We are tasked with ensuring that the parenthetical prefix (ab) is our tenacious rejection of that regression. Some 150 years later, the barricades that Louise Michel defended and the challenge that she posed to both her comrades and the regime are worthy goals of that better world we must demand.
The art in this book is phenomenal and the politics are vital. And if you’re wondering who is Louise Michel? It’s a reminder of how over and over and over again women are erased from the “history” we are taught. Fuck this world and fuck the patriarchy.
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Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author, commentator and disruptor of patriarchy. Her books have been translated into 13 languages so far. Her new book Feminism vs Fascism: Ten Tactics to Topple Tyrants is forthcoming February 23, 2027 via Mariner Books. Her latest book is an anthology on menopause she edited called Bloody Hell!: Adventures in Menopause from Around the World. Her first book Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution (2015) targeted patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa and her second The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls (2019) took her disruption worldwide. It is now available in Ireland and the UK. Her commentary has appeared in media around the world and she makes video essays and writes a newsletter as FEMINIST GIANT.
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