Red Valkyries Feminist Lessons From Five Revolutionary Women

The lives of five socialist women and their legacy for modern-day feminists

Red Valkyries explores the history of socialist feminism in Eastern Europe. Through the revolutionary careers of five prominent socialist women active in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—the aristocratic Bolshevik Alexandra Kollontai; the radical pedagogue Nadezhda Krupskaya; the polyamorous firebrand Inessa Armand; the deadly sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko; and the partisan, scientist, and global women’s activist Elena Lagadinova—Kristen Ghodsee tells the story of the personal challenges faced by earlier generations of radicals.

None of these women was a perfect leftist. Their lives were filled with inner conflicts, contradictions, and sometimes outrageous privilege. But they managed to fight for their own political projects with perseverance and dedication. Always walking a fine line between the need for class solidarity and the desire to force their sometimes callous male colleagues to take women’s issues seriously, these women pursued novel solutions with many lessons for those who might follow in their footsteps.

Kristen R. Ghodsee is an award-winning author and professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism and the host of A.K. 47, an episodic podcast on the life and works of the Russian revolutionary Alexandra Kollontai. She writes for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Baffler, Dissent, Jacobin, Ms. Magazine, Project Syndicate, The Lancet, and Jewish Currents. Her articles and essays have been translated into over 25 languages, and her work featured on radio and television, including Public Radio International's The World, Deutschlandfunk Kultur, France 24, and the PBS NewsHour. Ghodsee has won prestigious residential fellowships or visiting professorships in the United States, Germany, France, and Finland as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship in Anthropology and Cultural Studies.