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The Palgrave Handbook
of Communist Women
Activists around the World
Edited by
Francisca de Haan
The Palgrave Handbook of Communist Women
Activists around the World
 Francisca de Haan
Editor

The Palgrave
Handbook
of Communist Women
Activists around
the World
Editor
Francisca de Haan
Departments of Gender Studies
and History
Central European University
Vienna, Austria

ISBN 978-3-031-13126-4 ISBN 978-3-031-13127-1 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13127-1

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature
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whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation,
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 Acknowledgments

The idea for his book emerged during my stay at the Polish Institute of
Advanced Studies (PIASt) in Warsaw, from March to July 2019, and I would
like to thank the PIASt for that fellowship. Based on my ongoing work about
the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) and the work of
colleagues and friends on WIDF branches and related topics, I realized that
there were no recent biographical studies on many of the women we were
writing about, let alone a work that would bring together recent biographical
work on communist women and would thus help to create a broader picture
of their contributions. At the same time, I was and am deeply convinced of
the importance of biographical studies that place their subjects in their histor-
ical context. International women’s organizations, so stay with my own field,
are not just empty shells but are created and kept functioning by women with
specific histories and motivations, which shape these women’s political activism
and hence these organizations. And more generally, biographies remain an
important genre for feminist scholars and readers due to their inspirational
value.
Secondly, I realized how much we lack a global perspective on the history
of communist women, and that I was in the position to bring together scholars
from different locations and backgrounds to create a book that would include
women from all continents, as we have done here. I asked the Italian historian
of communist women Eloisa Betti to co-edit the book with me, which she
kindly accepted. Unfortunately, she had to withdraw from the project because
of the overwhelming demands on her time, in part due to the fact that she
still has no permanent position at the University of Bologna. I sincerely thank
Eloisa Betti for embarking with me on this project and for her initial work and
support.

v
vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

More generally, knowledge production is a collective process, and I am

delighted to have this opportunity to mention a few occasions that were espe-
cially important for me in that process. The first was an Exploratory Confer-
ence on “Two Socialist Feminisms in Conversation: Soviet Bloc Women’s
Organizations and US Socialist Feminism,” organized by Linda Gordon and
Krassimira Daskalova at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard
University (September 20–21, 2018). Others that were involved in orga-
nizing that Conference or as participants include Kristen Ghodsee, Maxine
Molyneux, Sara Evans, Magdalena Grabowska, Luciana Jinga, Agnieszka
Mrozik, Denisa Nečasová, Raluca Popa, and Sandra Prlenda. Another key
event was the conference on “Global Socialist Feminism: Exploring the Past,
Present, and Future of Left Feminisms,” organized by Elisabeth Armstrong,
Kristen Ghodsee, and Wang Zheng, and held at Michigan University (May
31–June 3, 2019) (and see https://www.globalsocialistfeminism.com/). The
third occasion was a small-scale seminar on “International Mobilizations on
Women’s Rights Issues during the Cold War” organized by Ioana Cîrstocea
(CNRS, CESSP), and held in Paris (June 28, 2019), with participants Kristen
Ghodsee, Ireen Dubel, Jocelyn Olcott, Sara Panata, and Chiara Bonfiglioli.
I also received invitations to give lectures in Warsaw (2019) and Aarhus
(2021) which allowed me to share my work on socialist or left-feminist women
building the global women’s rights infrastructure and get feedback, occasions
for which I thank Dobrochna Kałwa and Birgitte Possing.
In August 2019, I became Head of the Department of Gender Studies
at the Central European University (CEU) (then still in Budapest), which is
such an inspiring environment. But this was the period of the CEU’s forced
relocation to Vienna, the covid-19 pandemic, the increasing repression by
authoritarian regimes around the world of political and other opponents, often
LGBTQI+ activists (in many cases our students, or people connected to them),
and from February 24, 2022, the war in Ukraine. Under these circumstances,
I am all the more grateful to the thirty-two contributors to this book for their
wonderful work and their patience in answering all my queries and for staying
with the project for longer than originally foreseen.
At the CEU, I have taught two M.A. courses that were especially relevant
for what became this book: “Women and/in the UN” (which I taught for
three years) and “Communism and Gender: Global and Historical Perspec-
tives” (between 2013 and 2020). I would like to thank the then Head of
the Department of History, Nadia Al-Bagdadi, for the suggestion to teach a
course on communism and gender. I am grateful to the many students who
have made both these courses such enriching experiences.
As Head of Department, I was in the privileged position to have a Research
Assistant, and I am very conscious of the fact that the book simply could
not have been finished without them: for a short time, Yara Abdelhady;
Natalya Antonova, and Maliha Mohsin for their work on the book’s Index;
and for most of the time that I worked on this book, Mariia (Masha)
Semashyna, whose dedication, hard work, precision, and sense of humor were
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vii

indeed invaluable. I would also like to express my thanks to Laure Guirguis

and Judy Wu for helping me find authors for a few cases where that was
more complicated, and to Elisabeth Armstrong for a chapter on the Indian
communist activist Kanak Mukherjee (1921–2005). This text couldn’t be
included in this volume, but fortunately there is a separate publication avail-
able: Kanak Mukherjee (1921–2005). Women of Struggle, Women in Struggle.
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research (2021).
Also my sincere thanks to Saskia Wieringa for the picture on the book
cover (the full picture is included in Chapter 15). It features the Indonesian
Umi Sardjono, the chair of Gerwani (the Indonesian branch of the Women’s
International Democratic Federation), at a Gerwani conference in 1955, with
a large portrait of Clara Zetkin in front of the podium. This photograph is
especially valuable for several reasons. It highlights the political agency of
women in a postcolonial country. It illustrates how Clara Zetkin long after
her passing functioned as a global foremother (Sardjono herself described
Zetkin as “a socialist female warrior” and a source of inspiration). And, impor-
tantly, it can remind readers of the atrocities in Indonesia in 1965–1966, when
approximately 500,000 Indonesians were killed in an orchestrated frenzy of
anti-communist violence, one of the largest mass murders of the twentieth
century. Also, around a million people were imprisoned, among them Umi
Sardjono, who spent fourteen years in jail. “The Act of Killing” is an impres-
sive 2012 documentary film about the 1965 events. For more information,
please see Chapter 15.
Finally, I would like to thank the peer reviewers for their helpful suggestions
(including what became the Recommended Documents at the end of each
chapter), and the people and institutions who have granted us the right to use
illustrations for kindly doing so.

April 2022 Francisca de Haan

CEU, Vienna, Austria

IISH, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
 Contents

Acknowledgments v
Notes on Contributors xiii
List of Figures xxiii
1 Introduction: Toward a Global History of Communist
Women 1
Francisca de Haan

Part I Global Foremothers

2 Clara Zetkin (1857–1933): A Rebel Building the Socialist
and Communist International Women’s Movements 33
Florence Hervé
3 Alexandra Kollontai (1872–1952): Communism
as the Only Way Toward Women’s Liberation 59
Natalia Novikova and Kristen Ghodsee
4 A Right to Be Radical: Claudia Jones (1915–1964)
and the “Super-Exploitation of the Black Woman” 97
Carole Boyce Davies

Part II Europe
5 Helen Crawfurd (1877–1954): Scottish Suffragette
and International Communist 119
Kiera Wilkins
6 Ana Pauker (1893–1960): The Infamous Romanian
Woman Communist Leader 141
Ştefan Bosomitu and Luciana Jinga

ix
x CONTENTS

7 Dolores Ibárruri, Pasionaria (1895–1989): Communist

Woman of Steel, Global Icon 167
Mercedes Yusta Rodrigo
8 Teresa Noce (1900–1980): A Communist “Professional
Revolutionary” in Twentieth-Century Italy 193
Eloisa Betti and Debora Migliucci
9 Edwarda Orłowska (1906–1977): A Story of Communist
Activism in Poland Told in Words and Silences 217
Katarzyna Stańczak-Wiślicz
10 Nina Vasilievna Popova (1908–1994): “Woman
in the Land of Socialism” 245
Alexandra Talaver

Part III Asia

11 Deng Yingchao (1904–1992): A Feminist Leader
in the Chinese Communist Party 273
Wang Zheng
12 Pak Chŏng-ae (1907-?): From Red Labor Unions
to the Korean Democratic Women’s Union 299
Suzy Kim
13 Iijima Aiko (1932–2005): A Feminist’s Fight Against
Discrimination in Japan 327
Akiko Takenaka
14 Nguyễn Thi. Bình (b. 1927): “The Flower and Fire
of the Revolution” 347
An Thuy Nguyen
15 Umi Sardjono (1923–2011) and the Quest to Build
a New Society for Indonesian Women 377
Katharine McGregor and Ruth Indiah Rahayu
16 Behice Boran (1910–1987): A Committed Communist
Woman in Cold War Turkey 399
Sercan Çınar

Part IV Africa and the Middle East

17 Naziha al-Dulaimi (1923–2007) and the Anticolonial
Struggle in Iraq 435
Noga Efrati
 CONTENTS xi

18 “Not Only the Country’s Independence, Mine Too!”

Arlette Bourgel, an Algerian Jewish Communist (b. 1928) 453
Pierre-Jean Le Foll-Luciani
19 Aoua Keita (1912–1980): Anti-Colonial Activist,
Nationalist Politician, and Feminist in Mali (West Africa) 475
Pascale Barthélémy and Ophélie Rillon

Part V Oceania
20 “A Key Person Internationally”: Freda Brown
(1919–2009), Australian Activist 499
Lisa Milner
21 Dancing for the Revolution: Rona Bailey, New Zealand
Artist Activist (1914–2005) 521
Cybèle Locke

Part VI The Americas

22 Jeanne Corbin (1906–1944): A Canadian Communist
Militant in a Man’s World 547
Andrée Lévesque
23 Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (1890–1964): Mortal Enemy
of Capitalism 565
Lara Vapnek
24 Gachita Amador (1891–1961), Between Two Loves:
Communist Action and Guignol Theater 587
Verónica Oikión Solano
25 Vilma Espín (1930–2007): Forging a New Woman Within
the Cuban Revolution 613
Ailynn Torres Santana and Michelle Chase
26 “When My Life Goes Out …” Biography
of the Argentinian Communist Activist Fanny
Edelman (1911–2011) 643
Adriana Valobra and Natalia Casola

Index 669
 Notes on Contributors

Pascale Barthélémy is a historian and Assistant Professor in contemporary

history at the École normale supérieure (ENS) in Lyon (France), and a member
of the Laboratoire de recherches historiques Rhône-Alpes (UMR 5190). She
is a specialist in the history of women and gender in Africa in the French
colonial context. She has published, among others, Africaines et diplômées
à l’époque coloniale (1918–1957) (Rennes: PUR, 2010) and Sororité et colo-
nialisme. Françaises et Africaines au temps de la guerre froide (1944–1962)
(Paris: Editions de la Sorbonne, 2022), and co-edited the issues “Colonisa-
tions” (2011) and “Citoyennetés” (2016) of the journal Clio. Women, gender,
history. After working on the education of girls, she is currently interested in
the political commitments of women in West Africa, in the relations between
French and African women after the Second World War, and in the articulation
between feminism and colonialism in the fifties and sixties.
Eloisa Betti holds a Ph.D. in European History from the University of
Bologna, Italy, where she is currently Adjunct Professor of Labor History.
She has been a Fellow at the School of Advanced Study of the University of
London and EURIAS Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.
In 2020, she obtained the Italian National Scientific Habilitation as Asso-
ciate Professor of Modern History. She has served as external expert for the
Italian Office of the ILO, is a member of the Directing Committee of the
Italian Society of Labor History (SISLAV), and a scientific advisor for the
Emilia-Romagna Network of Archives of the Union of Italian Women (UDI).
She has published extensively on labor, gender, and women’s history. She has
published two monographs: Le ombre del fordismo (Bologna: Bononia Univer-
sity Press, 2020), and Precarious Workers. History of Debates, Mobilizations
and Labor Reforms in Italy (Budapest: CEU Press, 2022), and is co-editor
of Women, Work, and Activism: Chapters of an Inclusive History of Labor in
the Long Twentieth Century (Work and Labor—Transdisciplinary Studies for
the 21st Century) (Budapest: CEU Press, 2022).

xiii
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

S, tefan Bosomitu is a senior researcher (since 2007) of the Institute for the
Investigation of Communist Crimes and the Memory of the Romanian Exile
(Bucharest). In 2011, he defended his Ph.D. thesis at the University of Ias, i
(Romania). He is the author of Miron Constantinescu. O biografie [Miron
Constantinescu. A Biography] (Bucarest: Humanitas, 2014), and editor of
Spectrele lui Dej. Incursiuni în biografia s, i regimul unui dictator [The Spec-
tres of Gheorghiu-Dej. Insights into the Biography and the Regime of a
Dictator] (Ias, i: Polirom, 2014). His main academic interests are related to
the interwar history of European communisms, the biographies of communist
nomenclature, and the history of social sciences under communist regimes.
Carole Boyce Davies is a Professor of African Diaspora Studies who teaches
at Cornell University in New York State. She is the author of the prize-
wining Left of Karl Marx. The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia
Jones ( 2008) and the classic Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of
the Subject (1994). Her Caribbean Spaces. Escape Routes from Twilight Zones
(2013) was longlisted for the OCM-BOCAS prize, 2014. In addition to over a
hundred journal essays, articles, and encyclopedia entries, Dr. Boyce Davies has
also published over thirteen critical editions on African, African Diaspora and
Caribbean literature and culture including the 3-volume The Encyclopedia of
the African Diaspora (Oxford: ABC-CLIO, 2008). A member of UNESCO’s
Scientific Committee on the African Diaspora, she is the recipient of the Franz
Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Asso-
ciation and the New York State African Studies Association Distinguished
Africanist Award. Her latest book is Black Women’s Rights: Leadership and
the Circularities of Power (Lexington Books, 2022).
Natalia Casola is Professor of History at the University of Buenos
Aires (UBA), Argentina, and CONICET (National Scientific and Technical
Research Council) Associate Researcher. Her research topics are related to the
history of the left and the Argentine Communist Party in the recent past.
She published El PC argentino y la dictadura militar. Militancia, estrategia
política y represión estatal (Buenos Aires: Imago Mundi, 2015) and numerous
articles related to communism, repression, exile, and the women’s movement
in Argentina in the 1970s and 1980s.
Michelle Chase is Associate Professor of History at Pace University, USA.
Her research interests include gender and feminist movements in Cold War
Latin America. She is author of Revolution within the Revolution: Women
and Gender Politics in Cuba, 1952–1962 (University of North Carolina Press,
2015). Her articles have been published in Journal of Latin American Studies,
Journal of Women’s History, and Bulletin of Latin American Research. She has
also written about contemporary Cuba for The Nation, Jacobin, and Boston
Review. She is guest co-editor of Radical History Review issue #136 (January
2020), “Revolutionary Positions: Gender and Sexuality in Cuba and Beyond.”
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xv

Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Human-
ities, the American Association of University Women, the Lyndon Johnson
Foundation, and the Hoover Institution. She is a member of the editorial
committee of NACLA: Report on the Americas.
Sercan Çınar is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Gender Studies
at Central European University, Vienna, Austria, with a dissertation prelim-
inary titled “‘Feminism Abroad’: A Transnational History of Turkish Migrant
Left-Feminist Women’s Organizations in Western Europe, 1970–1990.” He
has published articles on the history of the Turkish radical left (in Turkish),
as well as the chapter “The Making of Turkish Migrant Left Feminism and
Political Generations in the Ruhr, West Germany (1975–1990)” in Gender,
Generations, and Communism in Central and Eastern Europe and Beyond,
edited by Anna Artwińska and Agnieszka Mrozik (Routledge, 2020). He
writes in various zines, journals, and blogs, mostly on radical left-wing politics
in Turkey and in the Middle East. His research interests include gender and
women’s history and the Cold War, transnational history of left-wing women’s
movements, communism, and anarchism.
Francisca de Haan is Emerita Professor of Gender Studies and History,
Central European University, Vienna, Austria, and Fellow at the Interna-
tional Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Her research
interests center on transnational women’s and gender history, histories of
inter/transnational women’s movements, socialist and communist women’s
political activism, women’s work, and women’s archives. Publications include
Gender and the Politics of Office Work, the Netherlands 1860–1940 (1998);
The Rise of Caring Power. Elizabeth Fry and Josephine Butler in Britain and
the Netherlands (1999, co-authored with Annemieke van Drenth); and the co-
edited Biographical Dictionary of Women’s Movements and Feminisms (2006);
Women’s Activism: Global Perspectives from the 1890s to the Present (2013);
and Rosa Manus (1881–1942): The International Life and Legacy of a Jewish
Dutch Feminist (2017). De Haan is founding editor of Aspasia: The Interna-
tional Yearbook of Central, Eastern and Southeastern European Women’s and
Gender History.
Noga Efrati is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of History, Philosophy,
and Judaic Studies at the Open University of Israel. A historian of the Middle
East, her research focuses on women and gender in the MENA region and
on the social, legal, and political history of Iraq. Between 2006 and 2011
she headed the Post-Saddam Iraq Research Group at the Harry S. Truman
Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace at The Hebrew University
of Jerusalem. She is author of Women in Iraq: Past Meets Present (Columbia
University Press, 2012), and of many articles concerning women’s rights
activism in Iraq. She is also the co-editor, with Amnon Cohen, of Post-Saddam
Iraq: New Realities, Old Identities, Changing Patterns and, with Ruth Roded,
xvi NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

of Women and Gender in the Middle East in the Twentieth Century Middle East
(Magnes Press, 2009).
Kristen Ghodsee is Professor of Russian and East European Studies and a
member in the Graduate Group in Anthropology at the University of Penn-
sylvania, USA. She is the author of eleven books including Muslim Lives in
Eastern Europe: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Transformation of Islam in Postso-
cialist Bulgaria (Princeton University Press, 2010); The Left Side of History;
World War Two and the Unfulfilled Promise of Communism in Eastern Europe
(Duke University Press, 2015); Red Hangover: Legacies of 20th Century
Communism (Duke University Press, 2017), Second World, Second Sex (Duke
University Press, 2019), and Taking Stock of Shock: Social Consequences of the
1989 Revolutions with Mitchell A. Orenstein (Oxford University Press, 2021).
Her latest book is Red Valkyries. Feminist Lessons from Five Revolutionary
Women (London: Verso, 2022). Her essays and articles have appeared in publi-
cations such as Dissent, Foreign Affairs, Jacobin Magazine, Ms. Magazine, The
New Republic, The Lancet, The Baffler, Die Tageszeitung, The Washington
Post, Le Monde Diplomatique, and The New York Times.
Florence Hervé works as an author, journalist, and lecturer. She has been an
activist of the German women’s movement since 1968, and of the Women’s
International Democratic Federation from the 1970s until 2004. She received
her doctorate in German Studies in Paris. She is the co-editor of the Agenda
Wir Frauen (since 1979) and of the review Wir Frauen (since 1982, www.wir
frauen.de). She has published many books in German and French, including
biographies, dictionaries, women’s histories, and illustrated works.
She has published widely on Clara Zetkin, including Florence Hervé, ed.,
Clara Zetkin oder: Dort kämpfen, wo das Leben ist (2020, 4th ed.); French
edition: Clara Zetkin, Je veux me battre partout où il y a de la vie (2021); “Put
Down in the West, Idealised in the East? On the Reception of Clara Zetkin in
Germany after 1945,” in Marilyn J. Boxer and John S. Partington, eds., Clara
Zetkin, National and International Contexts (London: Social History Society,
2013). Co-translator of: Gilbert Badia, Clara Zetkin, Féministe sans frontières
(Paris, 1993). In 2011 Florence Hervé was awarded the Clara Zetkin Women’s
Prize of the party Die Linke, in 2021 the Luise-Büchner-Preis für Publizistik.
In 2014 she refused the Bundesverdienstkreuz.
Luciana Jinga, Ph.D. in Contemporary History, is a researcher at the Institute
for the Investigation of Communist Crimes and the Memory of the Roma-
nian Exile in Bucharest and Research Associate at the University of Angers
(France). From 2017 to 2019 she was a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellow
at the University of Angers (France). Dr. Jinga has a strong interest in the
evolution and characteristics of communist regimes in Central and Eastern
Europe, with a clear focus on gender-related research, traumatic childhood,
and humanitarian aid. She has conducted research on (1) women’s political
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xvii

activism since 1945, (2) pronatalist politics, (3) institutionalization of children

during the twentieth century.
Suzy Kim is a historian and author of Everyday Life in the North Korean Revo-
lution, 1945–1950 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2013) and
Among Women across Worlds: North Korea in the Global Cold War (Cornell
University Press, forthcoming). Her work has appeared in positions: asia
critique, Asia-Pacific Journal, Cross-Currents, Comparative Studies in Society
and History, Gender & History, and the Journal of Korean Studies. She holds
a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, and teaches at Rutgers, the State
University of New Jersey in New Brunswick, USA.
Pierre-Jean Le Foll-Luciani is a historian working on social history of Alge-
rian communism and of Algerian Jews; former student of the École normale
supérieure of Lyon (France), and research associate at the university of
Rennes 2 (France). He published Le Camp des oliviers. Parcours d’un commu-
niste algérien (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2012), and Les juifs
algériens dans la lutte anticoloniale. Trajectoires dissidentes (Rennes: Presses
universitaires de Rennes, 2015).
Andrée Lévesque is a historian specializing in women’s history and in
the history of the Left in Canada. She is the author of Red Traveller.
Jeanne Corbin and her Comrades (2006). She is Professor Emerita at McGill
University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
Cybèle Locke, a Pākehā historian, is a Senior Lecturer in the History Program
at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. She is a labor and oral
historian, focusing on twentieth-century, working-class communities. Her first
book, Workers in the Margins: Union Radicals in Post-war New Zealand
(2012), forefronts case studies of freezing workers’, clerical workers’, and
unemployed workers’ unions to explore how women, Māori, and Pasifika
workers transformed union cultures. Her book-length biography of New
Zealand communist and trade union leader Bill Andersen, The Man Who
Stopped Auckland, is forthcoming with Bridget Williams Books.
Katharine McGregor is a historian of Indonesia with a special interest in
memory, human rights, and women’s history and the Cold War. She teaches
Southeast Asian and Asian history at the University of Melbourne, Australia.
She has published widely. Some of her most recent works include Gendered
Violence Across Time and Space in Indonesia and East Timor, Women in Asia
Series (ASAA), ed. Katharine McGregor, Hannah Loney and Ana Drago-
jlovic (Routledge, 2020), and The Indonesian Genocide: Causes, Dynamics and
Legacies, ed. Katharine McGregor, Jess Melvin, and Annie Pohlman (Palgrave
Macmillan Genocide Studies Series, 2018).
Debora Migliucci has a Ph.D. in Women’s History and Gender Identity in the
Modern and Contemporary Age from the University of Naples “L’Orientale,”
and a Ph.D. in Constitutional law from the University of Milan, Italy. She is
xviii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

currently director of Archivio del Lavoro (Labor Archive, documentation and

research center of the Chamber of Labor) in Milan. Her main research field is
labor and political history, with particular attention to the evolution of rights
and a gender perspective.
Her publications include: D. Migliucci and F. Imprenti, Sebben che siamo
donne. Per una storia delle sindacaliste della CGIL di Milano 1891–1981
(Milan: Unicopli, 2018); “Rappresentare il lavoro. Donne e Camera del lavoro
a Milano,” Percorsi storici, no. 4 (2016); La politica come vita. Storia di Giusep-
pina Re, “deputato” al Parlamento italiano (Milan: Unicopli, 2012); Storia e
costituzione (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2011).
Lisa Milner is an Australian researcher and activist. Her research interests
circulate in the intersections of cultural activism and politics, and include
the political and cultural productions of Australian communists and socialists,
radical and workers’ theater in Anglophone nations, representations of workers
and unions on screen, and labor history. Her work has been published widely
in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, including in Labour
History, Contemporary British History, Australasian Drama Studies, and New
Theatre Quarterly. Her monograph on Freda Brown, Swimming Against the
Tide, was published in 2017. She is the Vice President of Interventions,
Australia’s leading independent, not-for-profit publisher.
An Thuy Nguyen (Nguyễn Thùy An) is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at
the University of Maine, USA. Her specializations are the history of U.S.
foreign relations, Vietnamese history, twentieth-century U.S. history, women’s
history, and gender studies. Her dissertation probes the historical significance
and implications of the Nixon Doctrine in Asia from the perspectives of non-
communist progressives in urban South Vietnam during the Cold War. Her
research has culminated in a peer-reviewed article in the journal Critical Asian
Studies, a book review, and numerous national and regional conference papers.
An Thuy Nguyen simultaneously serves as the translator and editor on a
funded book project and as the translator for a documentary film on the
Vietnam War. She is a recipient of the Society for Historians of American
Foreign Relations’ Marilyn Blatt Young Dissertation Fellowship and Samuel
Flagg Bermis Research Grant, the Association of Asian Studies’ and the Henry
Luce Foundation’s Translation Award, and the University of Maine’s Chase
Distinguished Research Assistantship, Susan Hunter Fellowship, and other
awards.
Natalia Novikova received her doctorate from the Yaroslavl State Pedagog-
ical University, Yaroslavl, Russia. She has published articles on the Russian
women’s movements, including “Clara Zetkin and Russia: 1900s–1930s,”
in Marilyn J. Boxer and John S. Partington, eds., Clara Zetkin. National
and International Contexts (London: Socialist History Society, 2013); “Early
Historical Accounts of the Russian Women’s Movement: A Political Dialogue
or a Dispute?’ in Women’s History Review 20, no. 4 (2011); “Linking
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xix

Party Policy and Women’s Suffrage: The Case of Ariadna Tyrkova,” in

Irma Sulkunen, Seija-Leena Nevala-Nurmi and Pirjo Markkola, eds., Suffrage,
Gender and Citizenship: International Perspective on Parliamentary Reforms
(Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009).
Verónica Oikión Solano earned her Ph.D. in History from the Universidad
Nacional Autónoma de México. She is Research Professor at the Center for
Historical Studies at El Colegio de Michoacán (Council National of Sciences
and Technology, México). Her publications include: “Estado, Mujeres y
Revolución. Refugio García, un espíritu rebelde en el Consejo Feminista Mexi-
cano,” Alcores, no. 13 (2012), Fundación 27 de Marzo, 123–141; “Lucha
militante contra la guerra y el fascismo: Mujeres de Frente Único en la encru-
cijada mundial de los años treinta,” in María Dolores Ramos Palomo, Milagros
León Vegas, Víctor J. Ortega Muñoz and Sergio Blanco Fajardo, eds., Mujeres
iberoamericanas y derechos humanos. Experiencias feministas, acción política y
exilios (Sevilla: Athenaica Ediciones Universitarias, 2016), 250–271; “Mujeres
comunistas en México. Desigualdad social y lucha política, 1935–1955,” in
Adriana M. Valobra and Mercedes Yusta Rodrigo, eds., Queridas Cama-
radas. Historias iberoamericanas de mujeres comunistas (Buenos Aires: Miño y
Dávila Editores, 2017), 153–172. Her most recent monograph is Cuca García
(1889–1973), about the causes of women and the revolution, with a prologue
by Mary Kay Vaughan (Zamora: El Colegio de Michoacán and El Colegio de
San Luis, 2018).
Ruth Indiah Rahayu is a researcher who works on the history of Indone-
sian women, with a focus on the twentieth-century women’s movement
in Indonesia and leftist women’s activists who disappeared during violent
episodes of Indonesian history. She is currently preparing for a doctoral
promotion in philosophy at the Driyarkara College of Philosophy, Jakarta,
Indonesia.
Ophélie Rillon is a historian, researcher at the Centre national de la recherche
scientifique (CNRS), and member of the Institut des mondes africains (IMAf)
in France. Her work focuses on politics and social movements in West Africa
(Mali, Burkina-Faso), through the history of intimacy, biographical trajecto-
ries, and gender relations. She co-edited the book Socialismes en Afrique =
Socialisms in Africa, Collection histoire, sociologie, anthropologie 54 (Paris:
Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 2021) and the special issue
“African Women’s Struggles in a Gender Perspective” of Review of African
Political Economy (or ROAPE) 43, no. 149 (2016).
Katarzyna Stańczak-Wiślicz is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of
Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Her research inter-
ests are gender and women’s history in post-1945 Poland, and history of
popular culture. With Małgorzata Fidelis, Barbara Klich-Kluczewska, and
Piotr Perkowski, she published Kobiety w Polsce 1945–1989. Nowoczesność,
równouprawnienie, komunizm [Women in Poland 1945–1989. Modernity,
xx NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Equality, Communism] (Kraków: Universitas, 2020). Earlier she published

Opowieści o trudach życia. Narracje zwierzeniowe w popularnej prasie kobiecej
XX wieku [Real-life Stories. Confession Narratives in Polish Popular Women’s
Magazines in the 20th Century](Warsaw: IBL, 2010).
Akiko Takenaka is an Associate Professor of Japanese history at the Univer-
sity of Kentucky, USA. She is the author of Yasukuni Shrine: History, Memory,
and Japan’s Unending Postwar (University of Hawaii Press, 2015) and a
number of academic articles on memory and historiography of the Asia-Pacific
War, war responsibility, gender and peace activism, visual culture, and history
museums. She is currently completing her second book manuscript, tenta-
tively titled Mothers Against War: Motherhood, Gender, and Peace Activism in
Postwar Japan.
Alexandra Talaver is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Gender Studies,
Central European University, Vienna, Austria. Her research interests are
women’s and gender history of Russia and the Soviet Union. Sasha Talaver’s
Ph.D. project focuses on the history of the main state-supported women’s
organization in the Soviet Union: the Soviet Women’s Anti-Fascist Committee
(from 1956, the Soviet Women’s Committee), established in 1941. She is co-
editor of Feministskiı̆ samizdat. 40 let spusti ◠
a (Feminist Samizdat: 40 Years
after) (Moscow: Commonplace, 2020).
Ailynn Torres Santana is a postdoctoral researcher with the International
Research Group on Authoritarianism and Counter-Strategies (IRGAC) of the
Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, a visiting researcher at the Freie Universität
Berlin, and an associate researcher at Facultad Latinoamericana de Cien-
cias Sociales (FLACSO) Ecuador. She has been associate professor at the
University of Havana (2006–2012) and visiting professor at the Freie Univer-
sität Berlin (2021), FLACSO Ecuador (2016–2018, 2020), University of
Barcelona (2015, 2018), and the University of Massachusetts Amherst (2018).
In 2019 she was a visiting researcher at Harvard University. Her research
interests include feminist movements, inequality, and citizenship in Latin
America. She is editor of the book Derechos en riesgo en América Latina:
11 estudios sobre grupos neoconservadores (Quito/ Bogotá: Fundación Rosa
Luxemburgo/Desde Abajo, 2020). She is a member of the editorial boards
of Cuban Studies (Harvard University) and Sin Permiso (Barcelona).
Adriana Valobra is a Teacher of Primary Education, and Professor of
Research Methodology and Problems of Argentine History at La Plata
National University (UNLP), and Principal Investigator IDIHCS-CONICET.
She is also Director of the Interdisciplinary Center for Gender Research and
former main editor of Descentrada: Revista interdisciplinaria de feminismos
y género (Decentered: Interdisciplinary Journal of Feminisms and Gender).
Her most recent books are Queridas Camaradas, co-edited with Mercedes
Yusta Rodrigo (Buenos Aires: Miño y Dávila, 2017), Ciudadanía política de
las mujeres en Argentina (Grupo Editor Universitario-UNMDP, 2018) and
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xxi

Historias de mujeres en la acción política. De la Revolución Rusa a nuestros

días (Imago Mundi, 2020), co-edited with Débora D’Antonio and Karin
Grammático.
Lara Vapnek earned her Ph.D. in History at Columbia University, USA. She
is a Professor at St. John’s University, where she specializes in the history
of gender and labor in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States.
She is the author of Breadwinners: Working Women and Economic Inde-
pendence, 1865–1920 (2009) and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn: Modern American
Revolutionary (2015). Her articles have appeared in Feminist Studies and
the Journal of Women’s History. Her current research examines the history
of infant feeding in the United States.
Wang Zheng is Professor Emerita of Women’s and Gender Studies and
History at the University of Michigan, USA. She is the author of Finding
Women in the State: A Socialist Feminist Revolution in the People’s Republic
of China, 1949–1964 (University of California Press, 2017) and Women in
the Chinese Enlightenment: Oral and Textual Histories (University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1999); and co-editor of From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese
Society, Translating Feminisms in China (University of California Press, 1992),
and Some of Us: Chinese Women Growing Up in the Mao Era (Rutgers
University Press, 2001). A long-term academic activist promoting feminist
scholarship and gender studies in China, she is the founder and co-director
of the UM-Fudan Joint Institute for Gender Studies at Fudan University,
Shanghai, which has served as a feminist academic center for training univer-
sity faculty and graduate students in China. She has also authored two books
and co-edited nine volumes on feminism and gender studies in Chinese.
Kiera Wilkins holds a master’s degree in Women’s and Gender History from
Central European University, Budapest (now Vienna). Her interest in the
history of communism was sparked during her Honors degree in Politics and
Central and East European Studies at the University of Glasgow. Based in
Scotland, she is currently working in the field of social enterprise and maintains
a keen interest in women’s history.
Mercedes Yusta Rodrigo is Full Professor of the Contemporary History of
Spain in the Spanish Studies Department of the Université Paris 8 (France).
She published many books and papers about resistance against Franco’s dicta-
torship and the anti-fascist women’s movement, including Madres Coraje
contra Franco: la Union de Mujeres Españolas en Francia, del antifascismo a
la Guerra fría (Madrid: Catedra, 2009). She co-edited, with Hugo Garcia
et al, Rethinking Antifascism: History, Memory and Politics, 1922 to the
Present (London and New York: Berghahn Books, 2016) and with Laurent
Douzou, La Résistance à lépreuve du genre: hommes et femmes dans la resis-
tance antifasciste en Europe du Sud (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes,
2018).
 List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Clara Zetkin, ca. 1890 36

Fig. 3.1 Alexandra Kollontai, 1927 78
Fig. 4.1 Claudia Jones memorial stone with rose 100
Fig. 4.2 Claudia Jones at her desk 109
Fig. 5.1 Helen Crawfurd, likely early 1920s 129
Fig. 6.1 Ana Pauker, 1926 148
Fig. 6.2 Ana Pauker, picture from the cover of her first Sigurant, ă File,
date unknown 150
Fig. 7.1 Dolores Ibárruri with a group of women, likely at the WIDF
World Congress of Women, Moscow, June 1963 180
Fig. 8.1 Teresa Noce and her husband Luigi Longo, 1948 205
Fig. 9.1 Edwarda Orłowska, probably in Białystok, 1922 223
Fig. 10.1 Nina Popova after the ceremony of awarding of the Order
of the Badge of Honor, 1941 249
Fig. 10.2 Nina Popova with other leading figures at the WIDF World
Congress of Women, Moscow, June 1963 255
Fig. 11.1 Cai Chang, Deng Yingchao, and Soong Ching-ling, Beijing,
December 1949 283
Fig. 12.1 Pak Chŏng-ae at the Second World Peace Congress, Warsaw,
November 1950 312
Fig. 13.1 Iijima Aiko, date unknown 334
Fig. 14.1 A meeting between Nguyễn Thi. Bình, Nguyễn Thi. Ði.nh,
and other Long-Haired Warriors in South Vietnam,
before 1960 353
Fig. 14.2 Madame Nguyễn Thi. Bình at an Anti-Vietnam War
Demonstration, London, 4 July 1969 358
Fig. 15.1 Gerwani Conference, Madiun, East Java, October 1955 382
Fig. 15.2 Mrs. Umi Sarjono, Member of the People’s Representative
Council of the Republic of Indonesia, Jakarta, 11 April 1956 384
Fig. 16.1 Behice Boran, 9 October 1978 401
Fig. 16.2 Behice Boran leading a May Day rally in Istanbul’s Merter
district, 1979 417

xxiii
Another random document with
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 Quite by chance, Cyprian glanced at the clock and remarked in startled
tones that it was past eleven.

"Is it?" she asked indifferently.

Her arms were clasped round her knees and her chin resting on them.
Sometimes she rocked herself gently backwards and forwards. He smiled to
himself, remembering the pose since she was seven.

"I am thinking it is about time I saw you home," he said. "Mrs.

Carmichael will be wondering what on earth we are doing."

"No she will not. There is no one at home, Cyprian, and I am not
expected back till to-morrow."

"But where have you arranged to spend the night?"

She gave that little shrug of the shoulders, once characteristic of

fourteen-year-old Ferlie shrugging the Inessential off her horizon.

"Here, I think," she said with wide eyes on the ruby coals.

Cyprian laughed. Then he protested, in his amusement, at the simplicity

of Ferlie grown-up. Presently, he sobered and began to attempt
explanations; to all of which she turned a dispassionately deaf ear.

"Come on, dear," said Cyprian at last.

"Where to?"

Driving it home that this unexpected arrival on his doorstep had, in very
sooth, been a Ferlie-esque escapade from which he must extricate her; if she
would lend herself to extrication. He was honestly puzzled.

Of course, he realized that, since they were Themselves, and not another
couple, her outlook was perfectly reasonable. Ferlie and he. A law unto
themselves long ago, when she awoke at night to scream because her
surroundings were dark and lonely. A law unto themselves when he
received her at the hands of Martha and Mary, mistrusters of men in
general, but willing to admit him into the fold on account of that farcical
avuncular status. A law unto themselves in their unnaturally unusual
correspondence with its sprawled confidences on one side and its restrained
admissions on the other of his need of her in the background of his life.

That need was within him still, but it must be his part to limit it now that
she was grown up: to take over the reins of friendship and—and normalize
it.

"Well, Cyprian," said Ferlie, quietly watching him, "are you, even now,
an occupant of a cage in the greater Zoological Garden, outside the walls of
which I promised you, a long while ago, that I always intended to remain?"

This was utter nonsense. Ferlie, with her talk of cages at fourteen, was
not to be encouraged, but Ferlie, holding similar views at eighteen, was,
most distinctly, to be brought up short.

He shifted the chair impatiently and she forestalled his reply.

"I suppose," she said, "that some buy their freedom in the course of
years with the big price of experience, but others are born free. If you have
not bought yours yet you will some day. But I was born free. Peter, too, I
think. He has the courage of his beliefs; he is no captive to past customs,
nor is the fear of the neighbour the beginning of his wisdom. If we walk
into cages it will be of our own free will, and not because any stale bait can
tempt us from within, nor any pursuing hounds scare us from without."

"Ferlie," said the bewildered man beside her, "will you please tell me
exactly what you mean?"

She shook a tangled lock out of her eyes and, at that moment, in the
gilding firelight, he had an odd fancy that a man might fill his hands with
sovereigns who had the courage to plunge them into her hair. Involuntarily,
he touched the ruffled rebellious head.

"You and I have always understood one another," he reminded her.

She imprisoned his fingers between her two soft palms.

 "It is a good many years now, Cyprian, since you and I became friends.
Whenever I have had need of you and you could possibly reach me, you
have always come. We have had to face separation for what has seemed a
vitally long time to me since your last leave. To you, already mentally
settled and developed, it may not have seemed so long. But I have been half
afraid that your return would separate us more surely than, so far, has the
sea. To test that fear, I came to-night, because I have need of you, Cyprian.
To-night, not to-morrow. When I was little, what help could you have given
me by waiting for the daylight? I used to think you could save me from the
tomb which was all ready to close on me. Now it is a cage of which I am
afraid. I want to stay with you until that fear is past. I want to assure myself
of you; to re-learn you in the light of my increased knowledge of life. To-
night, not to-morrow. For to-morrow I have to make a decision concerning
that cage, and the decision depends upon what I may learn of you in the
little time we have together to-night. I knew how you would shrink from
offending Convention; therefore I have frustrated Convention. We have
only a few more free hours in which to pick up the threads which may have
got dropped and twisted. Upon the untangling of them rests my decision of
to-morrow. I have gone to sleep in your arms so often that it is a very
natural thing for me to remain beside you now until we can both sleep—at
rest, in one another's presence again. I need you, Cyprian, just now. And I
want you to realize just how much, or how little, you need me."

All but mesmerized, he listened. That which was hide-bound in him,

and entirely reticent British, put up a dull fight against the naked simplicity
of her words. He said weakly: "Dear, you are so young. You do not
understand."

"I understand 'What a Young Girl Ought to Know,'" and she bubbled
over with quick mockery. "Curiously enough, the knowledge neither
distresses nor shames me. This isn't the Victorian era. But all that I
understand, or misunderstand, about the threadbare 'Facts of Life,' affects
neither of us with regard to this situation. We have cherished our hours in
the past, scattered here and there, each like a desert oasis. We have come to
another now. Later, very much later, I think I shall probably fall asleep in
this chair and then you may cover me up and depart in peace, yourself, to
bed. And to-morrow we can breakfast somewhere together as if I had just
come upon the morning train and you had met me, and no one need hear
that we spent a happy night, or thereabouts, re-discovering one another."

Stirred to the depths and vexed with himself for his susceptibility to her
moods, Cyprian withdrew his hand into safety.

"You always had a way of making the unnatural seem perfectly natural
and ordinary."

"What forms your opinion on what is 'natural'?" asked Ferlle, abruptly.

His brain groped around in the dark awhile before he found an answer.

"There is a daimon in every man," he insisted in low tones, speaking

more to himself than to her, "which forces upon him the knowledge when a
thing is not Right, even though it may be Natural."

And then, that very daimon, thus invoked, spoke to him in the ensuing
silence.

The same child who had fallen asleep on his shoulder in the past was
beside him now, expectant of the same "crystallized apricot" of comfort. Let
him take heed that it was such comfort as healed and did not merely drug.
What, for all her dreams, could she have grasped of the Powers which spin
the dice for good or evil? Eighteen to thirty-nine! Supposing he yielded to
this childish defiance of the Unwritten Law and anyone came to know? He
got up and crossing to the window, flung it wide. The roar of London traffic
rushed upwards on the rising wind. He stood, his profile directed at the
struggling smoke-befogged stars; his shoulders, so moulded to desk-work, a
little bowed. Far below him, the haunches of a large black draught-horse
lumbered towards a mews. Its heavy deliberation touched a chord of
memory: a fragment of verse—Yeats, wasn't it?—assailed him in warning.

"The years like great black oxen plough the land, While God the
Ploughman gathers in" ... Gathers in ... Gathers in ... The grain?

There had been a clever fantastical novel he believed written round the
theme, and he had seen it filmed.
 Someone in it had found the long-desired elixir of Youth.

At the time this had not seemed impossible, but now ... "While God, the
Ploughman..." Anyway, He did not hold back the great black oxen. The
inexorable ploughing, sowing and garnering must go on. Eighteen to thirty-
nine. How possible to take advantage of Ferlie's crystal faith and
unanalysed affection? If her words veiled the faint suggestion that her need
of him was as great as his need of her—wonderingly, reverently, he
repeated it to himself, "his need of her"—he must pretend, for the present at
any rate, that he did not hear it. He must be just to her Youth, that glorious
jewel of Life which she wore with such careless indifference.

"The years like great black oxen tread the world, And God the
Herdsman goads them on behind."

That was it....

"Cyprian." Her voice brought him down from the clouds and he closed
the window with a slight sense of chill. "Cyprian, look at me."

He raised his eyes to hers, to drop them again immediately.

"Can you tell me, honestly," she asked him, "that you consider it would
be what is called a 'sin' for me to lean upon our friendship in the way I
choose, to-night?"

He shook his head at that but he would not answer.

"Cyprian, look at me." Nor would he do that again. His eyelids blinked
—their old short-sighted trick—over her head, at the sapphire resting
against her white throat, at the dying embers, at the hearth-rug where lay,
kicked free by its owner, a glass-buckled Cinderella shoe.

And she knew that she would be proved helpless against his refusal so
much as to look at his conception of the Forbidden Thing: for every flutter
of his eyelids was the drawing of a shutter which blocked from her another
window of his soul.
 * * * * * *

"And now," said Cyprian at last, his voice dry with exhaustion, "Would
you mind going?"

Instantaneously, Ferlie turned her back and thrust her foot into the errant
shoe. In the doorway she faced him, her cloak over her arm.

"You have never asked that of me before," she said, "and you will never
be required to say it again."

Half paralysed he heard the front door bang. In another moment the
wave of reaction set in. What in thunder was he thinking of to allow her to
go out into Jermyn Street at this hour of the night, alone?

He snatched his hat and followed, gaining on her by the fact that he
could take the lift. She was passing under the stone arch leading to the
pavement as he crashed back the gates.

"Ferlie!" he called after her, "Wait." But she did not stop nor turn her
head at the sound of his footsteps hurrying along behind her. A taxi crawled
near with its flag up. He was just too late to prevent her getting into it. With
feverish presence of mind he noted the number. Fortune favoured him, for it
was caught in a block of cars returning from the theatres, as another car
ejected its passenger on the other side of the road.

Cyprian, too fiercely anxious at the moment to see the humour of the
situation, gave his penny-novelette directions. The driver awarded him an
indifferent glance and held out his hand for earnest money. He was used to
minding his own business in his profession.

Once in full pursuit of Ferlie's taxi Cyprian found himself on the verge
of unnatural mirth. His third night in England; and he and Ferlie playing
hide-and-seek, in and out of the London traffic, like any hardened human
satyr and some nymph of the by-streets. And why? What was this
intangible, invisible Thing which had suddenly interposed itself between
them? A silly whim on her part, an instinct-driven refusal on his and the
shadow had assumed these gigantic proportions.
 Outside the Carmichaels' town residence, with its Sale-advertising
boards and closed blinds, Ferlie alighted.

From the prompt departure of her driver one might divulge that she paid
him without examining the fare. On her own front door-step, wrestling with
her latch-key, Cyprian reached her.

"Ferlie, don't be a little goose!"

Her eyes meeting his in the reflection of the street lamp were as hard as
pebbles.

"Only Beckett is here," she said, referring to the old butler, "and he has
put up the chain. Since you must let me in for a silly betrayal of my
unexpected return you had better come down into the basement and see if
you can hoist me through his bedroom window, if he sleeps with it open.
His room is next to the pantry and silver-chest. If I set an alarm going
accidentally, he will only think it is a burglar at last and plunge his head
further under the clothes."

"But, Ferlie——" She was half-way down the area steps and he, less
familiar with the house, followed stumblingly.

Beckett's window was open and quite near it stood a rain-barrel. She
tossed the cloak she had not troubled to put on into Cyprian's arms.

"I can't take that with me," she said, and, before he could recover his
breath to protest, she had reached the summit of the barrel. An instant she
swayed on the edge of it, balancing herself by means of a pipe running
down from the bathroom window. She was now only a shadowy shape
poised above him in the darkness.

"Somewhere," the coldly-spoken sentence stole down to him after she

drew herself up on to Beckett's window-ledge, "I have heard it said that 'to
the pure all things are impure.'"

The blank black square of her egress stared unfathomably back at

Cyprian, standing below it with the loose unfolded cloak, emptied of its
owner, in his arms.

CHAPTER VII

Her father said, "Well, if he is a decent chap, and Ferlie likes him, she is
lucky." Adding, a little later, from his pillows, his brow considerably
smoother than it had been for some time past, "At any rate, he will never
leave his wife a pauper."

Her mother said, "Oh, my darling! I always knew you'd come to see." ...
And aye had let the tears down fall in thanksgiving that there existed no
Jock o' Hazeldean to abstract the bride at the last moment.

Peter said, "There will be lots of girls ready to scratch your eyes out
with envy, Old Thing."

Lady Cardew said, "My dear, I thought from the very first that it was
Meant."

While, to Ferlie, Clifford said, "I was perfectly sure you would come
round in the end. I know women!"

And Beckett lost his bet with the cook; perhaps because he was less
inclined to put his head under the clothes at night than one might think.

Cyprian said nothing at all. He was, apparently, most tremendously

busy; though, as Mrs. Carmichael justly remarked, "One would have
imagined he would make an effort to come in, considering how interested
he had always been in dear Ferlie as a child."

Dear Ferlie as a woman was beginning to show herself a little

disconcerting. A dignified demeanour was all very well for one so soon to
wear the title of Lady Clifford Greville-Mainwaring, but this complete
aloofness to the arrival of satin-lined boxes and sealed wooden cases was
almost irritating. People were constantly coming up to the scratch, too, and
relations who, in the event of the prospective bridegroom's comparative
penury, would have considered pepper-pots quite suitable for the state of
life unto which it had pleased God to call Ferlie, were, in present
circumstances, producing eight-day clocks and jewellery.

Dear Clifford, also, was singularly blessed in a dearth of relatives who

would, otherwise, have been entitled to run appraising eyes over the girl
destined to assist him bear the burden of an ancient name.

"Not but that," as Ferlie's mother more than once pointed out to
congratulating friends, "the Carmichaels could hold their heads as high as
the Greville-Mainwarings in that respect." She trusted Lady Cardew had
rubbed it into the Duchess. The Duchess herself, a first cousin of Clifford's
father, emerged presently, from the mist of introductions, as an untidy,
acidly cheerful old lady, much more interested in horse-racing than in
Clifford; though she had been overheard to express a hope that his fiancée
had not bitten off more than she could chew. Which vulgarity reconvinced
Ferlie's mother that everybody in the Peerage had not got in, so to speak, by
the front door.

The Carmichaels were unmistakably "front door" people, even though

Ferlie's particular branch might remain collateral for some years to come in
default of railway accidents and infantile epidemics.

There was no earthly reason to delay the wedding. The doctors had not
made up their minds as to the date of Mr. Carmichael's operation and the
sooner his wife was free to devote all her energies to this decision the better.

Lady Cardew advised haste on account of her own private recollection

that Clifford had, more than once, been guilty of changing a matrimonially-
inclined mind. Had she imparted this news to Ferlie the latter might have
insisted on delay; at least until Cyprian should be completely out of her
range, in Burma. As it was, he received a silver-edged invitation to the
wedding with everybody else; though Mrs. Carmichael hoped to give him
to understand quite clearly that he had fallen from grace, when they met
face to face on the Day.
 He had decided—nearly—to refuse it.

He had decided—nearly—that Ferlie could never have meant anything

at all by that most particularly Ferlie-esque mood.

He had decided—nearly—that he had done Right.

But the Daimon produced nothing to demonstrate that virtue brings its
own reward.

He had made two attempts to see Ferlie and arrive at some sort of an
explanation, but on each occasion she had deliberately frustrated him.

He had found it impossible to make his letter of congratulation anything

but stereotyped. Cyprian was not good at expressing himself except in
reports where exhaustive information was required in condensed form. It
would be more than necessary for him to send Ferlie a wedding present.

Nothing impersonal could prove of interest in the ancestral halls of

Mainwaring. Yet, there did not seem to be any personal message that Ferlie
would be likely to welcome from him at the moment. A younger man had
felt more cause for resentment, that Ferlie, during the short intimate
moments when she hailed their recovered friendship, had not confided in
him her intention of marrying this man. Cyprian was, himself, incapable of
resentment against her, however well-deserved.

By chance, he caught sight of something in a jeweller's window which

attracted him for unanalysable reasons: it was a small golden apple attached
to a slender gold chain. By means of a catch, cunningly concealed under the
leaf, it split in half, revealing a tiny magnifying mirror and a minute
powder-puff. Round the mirror was engraved the legend, "To the Fairest."

Cyprian bought the apple, caused it to be packed and sealed, and wrote
the address in the shop; whence he despatched it to Ferlie, omitting even to
enclose his card.

She did not acknowledge it but, at least, she did not send it back.
 * * * * * *

With the dawning of her wedding day a fatalistic calm descended upon
his tortured mentality, preparing him to see the thing decently through.

On account of Mr. Carmichael's illness the ceremony and reception

were to be comparatively "quiet." But when Cyprian arrived, in response to
exultant bells, at the fashionable church's door, whence a strip of red carpet
protruded like a derisive tongue, his muffled senses perceived quite a
formidable array of guests in wedding-garments who ostensibly came to
pray and remained to stare.

An immaculate gentleman, blandly manipulating yards of scarlet cords

suggestive of a royal lynching, inquired of him, "whether he were on the
side of the bride or the bridegroom," and, receiving an inarticulate reply,
pushed him into the end of the last pew and left him to his own devices with
a hymn-book.

The organ blared joyously, as if the organist aimed at drowning the

torrent of whispering and the squeaks of enraptured greeting uniting the
pews.

Here and there, was a face known to Cyprian through the medium of the
illustrated papers.

Fragments of conversation were wafted backwards through the lily-

scented air.

"The mother really landed him, I believe."

"Yes, the Glennies are furious, and Mona Glennie says..."

"But he was never actually engaged to her, was he?"

"Wild oats. What young man doesn't... No. The Vane girl was older than
he was. The attraction at that establishment was the Samaritan Actress."

"Well, it's the first time I have heard a member of the tribe of Abraham
described as a Samaritan."
 "You don't understand. Why, she took in the Vane when all doors..."

Cyprian sat back and opened the hymn-book at random. Did he feel
things more intensely than these folk and was it a disgrace to be thin-
skinned?

Muriel, and now ... Ferlie. "The One before the Last." But Muriel had
figured in the life of a different man from the Cyprian who sat here
watching for Ferlie. If intense desire could be construed by the high gods
and accepted as prayer, he did most intensely desire Ferlie to be happy.

The buzz of conversation thickened into low murmurings and died. The
bridegroom had entered by a side door and was speaking to someone in a
front pew.

Almost immediately the Voluntary changed to Lohengrin's "Wedding

March," and a clump of rose-coloured dresses, presumably belonging to
bridesmaids in the porch, took individual form and clustered round
someone in white.

From his post at the back Cyprian had not been able to gather more than
that Ferlie's future husband was tall and rather thin but, on turning his head
now, his eyes encountered hers fully. He was startled by the impression that
he was staring into the face of a perfect stranger. How ghastly white she
looked! The fraction of a moment and the eyes dropped, even as his own
had dropped before hers the night she had wished to keep him at her side.

She was passing by on Peter's arm. The pair of them looked as if they
ought still to be going to school.

Peter's face wore precisely the same expression as must have adorned it
when he first took his place at roll-call among the sixth-form "Bloods."

The bridesmaids twittered behind large bouquets of sweet-peas.

Everybody was standing. Everybody was howling a hymn, what time all
craned their necks and stealthily mounted hassocks to stare at Ferlie ...
Ferlie, who hated people to see her at emotional moments.... He would
wake in a little while to find her beside him, seeking shelter from the Thing
which had whitened her face with terror....

"Dearly Beloved, we are gathered together in the sight of God..." Ah,

well, if the man thought so.

Cyprian felt certain that, whatever God had seen fit to do in Cana of
Galilee, He was not presiding amongst these wedding-guests.

Every now and then a gap in the swaying pews would give him a
glimpse of Ferlie's mother dabbing at her face with a handkerchief, in token
that she must be regarded as bereft of a daughter against her will. At
intervals, she was, doubtless, thanking God that she had done her duty.

Cyprian again sought refuge in the hymn-book.

The mutterings up at the altar were stilled and various people had
escaped from confinement to wander through the vestry-door in the wake of
the chief actors in this religious farce. Or was it tragedy?

While bitter thought was crowding thus against bitter thought in his
mind, his gaze became involuntarily fixed upon the lines of the hymn the
choir was singing to fill in time:

"O Perfect Love, all human thought transcending!

Lowly we kneel in prayer before Thy Throne,
That theirs may be the love that knows no ending
Whom Thou for evermore doth join in one."

But—Good Gracious!—thought Cyprian, in the light of blinding revelation,

he and Ferlie did not need all this to make them one. They had always
known that they were one, united by some mystic Force which had its roots
in a Far Beginning and its branches in the Eternities.

Then why were they building these barriers deliberately between them
and their united freedom?

"With childlike trust which fears not pain nor death."

He had missed the rest of the second verse, but that last line was a perfect
description of Ferlie's approach to Love in the abstract. (The woman in
front of him would not stop sniffing.)

"Grant them the joy which brightens earthly sorrow,

Grant them the peace which calms all earthly strife;
And to Life's day the glorious unknown morrow
That dawns upon eternal love and life...."

It was over. In a dream he had seen her flit by him, glancing neither to
the left nor to the right, but this time she was not clinging to Peter.

With her departure the church became a happy tumult of rising sound.
The organist had pulled out everything in the diapason line that his fingers
could reach, and Cyprian escaped along the flower-strewn carpet, and so to
his taxi, with a great longing upon him for the silence of catacombs.

The philosophic sensations which had followed his sleepless night were
no proof now against his throbbing nerves. Ferlie, also, he remembered,
experienced physical suffering in mental sorrow. The knowledge formed
another of the cobweb-threads binding them to one another.

In Mrs. Carmichael's drawing-room people were now shaking hands

with her. There was more noise and a great deal of affected laughter.
Cyprian, avoiding the Family, including the uplifted Peter, slipped into an
ante-room in search of whisky and soda.

He could not face Ferlie before all that crowd. He could not.

From the ante-room he made his way to an apartment containing a bowl

of goldfish. He remembered it commanded a view of the stairs. If she
passed up or down the staircase, unattended, he might reasonably expect to
have her for a moment to himself. He waited for a long while, watching the
goldfish go round and round in circles. They roused misty recollections of
Ferlie's nonsensical talk of the general imprisonment of human spirits.
 When she did come, although she passed right through the room in her
white veil and flowing draperies, he nearly failed to step forward from that
sheltered corner by the bookcase.

"Ferlie!"

She started violently and swung round.

"Oh! It's you, is it?"

She spoke on a high-pitched delirious note. Naturally, people were

agreeing any girl would be over-excited who had achieved this marriage.

Her whole appearance shocked Cyprian, who knew the real Ferlie.

"I never acknowledged your gift, Cyprian. The Apple of Discord.

Clever of you to think of that. Not that I needed a material reminder of the
fact that you and I had at last experienced ... shall we call it a
misunderstanding?"

The words raced one another to a close, and she ended on the edge of
shrill laughter. He flinched as if she had struck him in the face.

The tale of their years for that instant reversed, he looked back at her
with the eyes of a hurt and bewildered child. Shaded them with his hand
against the pain as he replied:

"You know that is neither fair nor true."

"I no longer know what is true," said Ferlie.

Half beside himself with the sight of her thus altered, he caught her
wrists and held them.

"Because you have formed a new and all-absorbing tie for the future, is
it necessary to mock at that older discarded friendship which stretches out a
hand to you from the past?"
 A slow flush crept up her face and the grey eyes widened on a look of
anger and intense pain.

"Mock? No, Cyprian, I am not Muriel Vane—kind to men in order to be

cruel. If I seem to indulge in that particular vein of cruelty, it is because I
know of no other way to be kind ... now."

He saw the thin gleam of a gold chain which lost itself in the folds of
transparent softness near her throat, and was superseded by a visible string
of pearls—"the gift of the Bridegroom."

Then she wrenched herself away and left him there, staring
uncomprehendingly at the goldfish going round and round.

CHAPTER VIII

Cyprian did not return to the flat. He went out into the restless London
streets. Block after block he passed, from the more fashionable quarters to
the outskirts of the park, walking swiftly to escape pursuing Memory, until
at last the damp darkness of the river divided the myriad scintillating eyes
of the city.

Further along the Embankment dead forms lay huddled where the
shadows lay deepest, every now and again to start erect, galvanized into life
by the angry flash of a police-lantern.

As he paused to strike a match against a stone bench, shaped like an

incompleted coffin, one of these corpses twitched itself upright.

"Fit ter drop!" it muttered, still in the throes of uneasy slumber; "Gawd!
fer one bloody night to fergit meself in."

Cyprian replaced his pipe in his pocket and fumbled.

 "Here," he said, "I don't know who you are, and you don't know who I
am, but if you, too, are in need of sleep and a little forgetting, go and buy it
with this, which will not buy it for me."

With the astonished gratitude of a "Gawd bless yer bleedin' eyes,

Gov'ner" (even here it was God, God, God, thought Cyprian, who refused to
be shut out of Man's tortured intellect even while it anathematized His
works) this invisible wreck of Humanity, made in His image, slouched
away to drink itself blind to sorrow for a short time in some starless rat-hole
known only to its kind.

And Cyprian sat and smoked on the deserted seat, still redolent with the
effluvia of rotting rags, until a suspicious arc of light searched him out in
his sins and a voice, hoarse with hectorings, commanded him to move on.

Morning found him so far from home that a sleepy taxi-driver whom he
hailed rolled a jaundiced eye on receiving the directions of this individual
whose damp, crumpled clothes and unclean collar showed unmistakable
evidence of an unusual brand of night-on-the-tiles, and Cyprian was obliged
to disburse half the fare in advance.

His physical exhaustion stood him now in good stead and he slept
deeply on the shabby leather cushions the whole way back to the flat. Slept
again on his undisturbed bed, afterwards, till the scandalized valet roused
him for tea; his first meal in twenty-four hours.

Before he set sail for the East, he made one attempt, and only one, to
renew correspondence with Ferlie.

The letter conveyed nothing to her of the true state of his mind. In
despair he had closed it on a pathetic admission, "I fear I have no gift of
expression." She answered him, but her own methods of expression were,
as usual, fantastic. In the letter she enclosed a small gold key. "A gift for a
gift, Cyprian. I suppose it was inevitable that you should shut the gates
upon me. I send the sign that only you can unlock them."

He placed the key upon his watch-chain, and, with Herculean efforts of
self-control, refrained from any attempts to discover her meaning.
 She had always been such a rebel; she had always been so sure of the
light within her and, alas, she had always been so sure of the light within
him.

A few weeks later, when, the honeymoon accomplished, Ferlie and her
husband had returned to town, Mr. Carmichael died.

The operation proved successful enough but, somehow, he never really

rallied. Perhaps the predominant feeling that his day's work was now ended
lessened the incentive to live.

He smiled with grim satisfaction the afternoon Peter came to see him; a
Peter who had already begun to regard the Human Form Divine in the same
light as the Butcher regards the liver and kidneys which he slaps down upon
the marble slab to dissect for purchasing housewives; a Peter who would be
decidedly happier using the knife than saving the unwary limb that might
stray his way.

Peter's hair was untidy, his eyes bloodshot, his collar unhygienic, and
his finger-nails in half-mourning. His appearance was altogether
unsterilized and self-assured. He cried, with a loud voice. His opinions on
certain experimental operations, his criticisms on those neighbouring
embryo surgeons at work on the same yellow preserved leg as himself, his
versions, punctuated with spasms of hearty merriment, of the latest hospital
yarn, portraying his fellow-students as a set of inquisitive young ghouls
more triumphant over an eminent physician's sponge forgotten in a victim's
intestines than troubled with sympathy for the latter's bereaved relatives.

"And I'll tell you exactly what they did to you, Father; it's old Gumboil's
favourite amusement. First he cuts open the..."

"Peter, I am surprised at you!" broke in his horrified mother.

Thus had the path of Peter been made smooth and his way plain by
Ferlie's brilliant marriage.

"I staked little enough on her," said Mr. Carmichael, relishing the jest of
Martha and Mary's antiquated establishment. "Your mother was mistrustful
of education for her own sex; she did quite well for herself without it, didn't
she? Ferlie seems to have justified the conviction that the old-fashioned girl
gets the matrimonial plums. At any rate, you will owe your sister a good
deal. See that she stays happy."

Of his son-in-law, whom he only saw once, he said very little.

"Impossible to judge them by the young men of my day. This type did
well enough in the War crisis."

He did not leave his wife badly off. With Peter on the way to being
floated, and Ferlie secure, she had her widow's pension to herself, besides a
little private means and the sum the big town-house eventually fetched
when Ferlie bought it, pandering to a dream of her mother's that Peter might
one day practise there and retain the Carmichael traditions in the old setting.
Till that satisfactory day it could nearly always be sub-let.

Somewhat doubtful of the Christian aspect of her husband's expressed

desire for cremation Mrs. Carmichael, while respecting his wishes,
determined that the rest of the funeral obsequies should be sufficiently
orthodox to disarm his Creator.

"No proper tombstone, you see," she complained damply to Ferlie. "The
design should, so obviously, have been a severe cross, quite plain, with
perhaps a weeping angel praying. Then a dove of peace hovering, and
maybe a few lilies. The simpler the better, you know. And a scroll at the
foot, or an open book with one of those grand old texts—Isaiah, is it, or
Ecclesiasticus?—anyway, one of the Prophets—'Fear not for I have
redeemed thee.' So comforting. Or else the one about panting for living
waters that always makes me feel thirsty myself. Your dear father was so
fond of rhetoric."

Ferlie, not quite sure whether the weeping angel was destined to wear a
delicate semblance to the bereaved wife, nor convinced that the cross could
be considered suitably symbolic of the faith of one who had ever regarded it
as the undeserved gibbet, brought upon him by himself, of a well-meaning
Eastern agitator nearly two thousand years ago, was inclined to demur.
 "Father never evinced either the slightest fear of his condemnation
hereafter, nor any faith in an ultimate redemption," she protested, "and I
think it would have been rather hypocritical to parade a thirst for living
waters after death in anyone who can hardly be described as having gasped
for them during life."

Then, responding to her mother's grievously shocked demeanour, she

relented into explanation.

"I think I never admired Father so much in his life as I did at his death.
He closed his eyes, restfully and unfearingly, upon the consciousness of
work well done and principles truly upheld. What business is it of ours if
they were mistaken principles? So many people, who profess to cling to the
creeds supported by the Churches, live as if they had none, and then drift
out on a tide of terrified remorse and shame. But, personally, I would not
feel fit to intercede for Father's 'forgiveness,' if he really requires to be
forgiven for being true to his lights."

Ferlie's mother was too religious to see it, and, since it seems to follow
that the brighter the hope of Eternal Life, the blacker the garb in which it
must be approached, there was much melodious moaning at the bar when
her husband's ashes were interred upon the shores of that Eternal Sea which
brought us hither and upon which, in imagination, she had safely launched
his sceptical soul.

A week later she was still sewing bands of crepe on to Peter's various
coats and seeking consolation in those little details of mournful respect she
was able to accord her Dead.

* * * * * *

In due course, Aunt Brillianna, returning from the uttermost ends of

Italy, was overwhelmed by the volume of water which had poured under the
Family Bridge during her inexcusable retirement.

As the younger relatives, who had expectations at her hands, remarked:

"Anything might have happened to her at her time of life." Why, Death had
happened to her nephew!