Caroline Wigginton: “Women and Revolution: A Horror Story”

Women’s writing about war:  “The Age of Revolutions, in which women like Abigail Adams and Mary Wollstonecraft were famously writing to demand a revolution in their experiences of oppression, was not an age that could yet imagine a world without violence against women. At best, or more accurately at worst, women could be co-participants, using military revolution to seize an opportunity to be equal to men as perpetrators of violence—even as women’s writing also made visible the intensification of women’s victimization at the hands of male soldiers, lovers, and rebels. And at the hands of women, too.”