Mina Puccinelli and Elisabeth Dmitrieff: Intersecting Trajectories of Women in Circulation within the First International, 1869–1876

This article examines the transnational trajectories of two women activists of the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA), Mina Puccinelli (born Wilhelmine Müeller) and Elisabeth Dmitrieff (born Elizaveta Koucheleva), to explore how political mobility shaped women’s participation, organizational practices, and political agency within the internationalist movement. Of German and Russian origin, both moved across national and political spaces within the IWA, the Paris Commune, and wider revolutionary struggles. Dmitrieff became embedded in IWA structures: her involvement in the Russian section and the Geneva women’s section brought experience and contacts leading to official mandates to London and Paris, where she acted in connection with the General Council and helped organize the Union des Femmes during the Commune. Puccinelli moved fluidly between milieus, relying on personal contacts, public interventions, and her reputation as a revolutionary and military figure across Garibaldian, internationalist, republican, and revolutionary networks in Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, France, and Spain. The comparison shows that mobility was both a resource and a constraint: it enabled them to circulate information, contacts, and repertoires across settings, while making their authority dependent on unstable networks and exposing them to scrutiny over credibility, gender, and legitimacy. Situating them within the IWA, a decentralized plurality of sections and correspondence networks, the article presents two modalities of intervention: organizational mediation and personalized mobilization. Drawing on IWA archives, newspapers, police records, and correspondence, it addresses the uneven evidence, particularly for Puccinelli, and highlights the possibilities and limits of women’s engagement and the gendered construction of their authority and memory.