The Radical Muse: Women and Anarchism in Early-Twentieth-Century Cuba

Abstract

Following independence from Spain in 1898, Cuba's anarchists focused attention on what they regarded as elite hypocrisy regarding the larger social problems besetting Cuba. In the hope of drawing Cuba's popular classes into the global anarchist movement, their critique addressed the manner in which industrial, bourgeois society victimized women, especially those of the working class. Cuban radicals used the image of women and women's issues as foils to analyze and criticize health, workplace, and family issues. They also used women as symbols of obstruction to anarchist-defined notions of progress. finally, they showed how women could aspire to be female heroines, by promoting an ideal type of "noble woman" and the concept of "revolutionary motherhood" to which women should strive. Anarchists directed their messages to women and men through the movement's popular cultural forms. Newspapers, novels, short stories, plays, and social gatherings in which plays were performed or revolutionary songs were sung all played a part in anarchist appeals to female followers and functioned as a form of education.