Women of the Counterrevolution: Female Reactionary Activism in Europe, 1917–1939

The counterrevolution that was launched against the 1917 Bolshevik seizure of power and related left-wing revolts and civil wars primarily in central-eastern Europe has become a much more clearly defined research subject in the past twenty years but has been framed to almost necessarily exclude women. This article, based on research on radical right groups in northwestern Europe, shows that an expanded framework that pays attention also to the critical noncombatants and even nonmilitary dimensions of counterrevolutionary activity will also include female activists who had important roles to play in this reactionary project. With case studies from Sweden, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Britain, this article analyzes the character of women's contributions to the reactionary project, their backgrounds and positions, their relationship to contemporary feminist movements, and the nature of counterrevolutionary femininity in contradistinction to the figure of the revolutionary "Red woman."