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Book Reviews
After WWII, Corine landed in San Francisco and with her husband, the muralist Neal Hoskins, and became a member of the Communist Party. That didn’t last long. She was kicked out for “questioning authority,” a quality that endeared her to many of us and irritated some of us. She was once described as a “contrarian,” but also as someone who “didn’t suffer fools.” An old friend from Women for Peace recalled that “Corine endured longwinded opinions but delivered her own crusty blurbs resetting the condition of the world . . . often with a twinkle in her eyes.”
Corine worked as a union waitress for many years and was fiercely involved in the struggle against the class system. “My mother was proud of her union pension,” her daughter Shirley Hayes said, “because it was rare for a waitress and represented what she believed.” (Shirley provided loving care for her mother during the waning years of her life.)
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Corine’s activism was wide ranging: the School of the Americas Watch, Grandmothers for Peace, VALB, the Fort Point Gang, the ILWU’s “Bloody Thursday” commemorations, the Hayward Democratic Club, Women for Peace, and the Marin Inter-faith Task Force, to name just a few. She often wore her “Thank God I’m an Atheist” button, but strangely enough, was a good friend and loyal supporter of radical Catholic priests Roy Bourgeois, Charlie Liteky, Bill O’Donnell, and Louis Vitale.
Corine was the kind of organizer whose work sometimes goes unnoticed. She made the calls, sent the notices, delivered the goods, did the follow-ups. She ferried carloads of activists to picket lines and protests in a car plastered with leftwing bumper stickers. Martha Jarocki, whose father Leonard Olson was a Lincoln vet, regarded her as a mentor. “She was the last of that generation,” Martha noted, “and she wanted to show the way to the next generations.”
In the immortal words of Tom Joad that so stirred the young Corine Hodges: “Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there . . . and when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in houses they built—why, I’ll be there.”
She was there. ¡Salud!
Don Santina is a political writer and novelist. He can be reached at lindey89@aol.com.
Enrico Acciai, Garibaldi’s Radical Legacy: Traditions of War Volunteering in Southern Europe (1861–1945). Translated by Victoria Weavil. Abingdon, Oxon./New York, Routledge, 2021. 195pp.
Reviewed by Karen Rosenberg
In 1936, the Italian unit of the International Brigades named itself the Garibaldi Battalion. Arguably, this was a signal to its fighters, who held differing political opinions, not to oppose each other any longer, since the famous General Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807-1882) symbolized the need for unity to defeat a foe. A charismatic figure in his time, Garibaldi had attracted and led volunteers to battle for an independent and unified Italy. But national unity was only one part of his legacy. Garibaldi was also a proponent—and a practitioner—of transnational warfare. As Enrico Acciai shows in Garibaldi’s Radical Legacy, even after his death, his name was invoked when men from various countries volunteered to fight outside the Italian peninsula for values like freedom and social justice. The list of places where his influence was felt includes Poland, Crete, Greece, France, and the Balkans as well as Spain. Although Acciai doesn’t discuss all these insurrections in detail, his short book sheds a new light on left-wing internationalism in the 1930s. In many ways, the Garibaldi’s 19th-century followers anticipated the ethos of the International Brigades. They were motivated not by material rewards, but ideals opposed to the established order. Some left their own countries to join conflicts in other lands. Mostly non-professional soldiers, they often arrived with scant training and discipline; however, once they had built their military skills and strong bonds of comradeship, governments feared them. That’s why, after they had left the scenes of battle and had returned to their homes or sought refuge in exile, they were often kept under surveillance. (Acciai and other scholars have scoured archives for the reports of police informants about the lasting ties and new activities of so-called subversives.) With time, many Garibaldians changed their political stripes, adopting new ideologies. Nonetheless, their pride in their revolutionary
past was often conveyed orally, especially to their own families—a custom that, as Acciai shows, shaped later generations of radical thinkers, activists and volunteers. Personal contact was not the only mode of transmission of radical values, histories, and traditions. Books and periodicals, too, were central to the maintenance and growth of such national and transnational networks. Propagandists joined the effort to recruit volunteer soldiers and to raise funds for their arms. The women who joined in this work made important contributions to transnational warfare, and it is regrettable that their role is understudied and, therefore, undertheorized. Historian Lucy Riall, whom Acciai praises, has done groundbreaking research on this topic. Her book Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero (2007) demonstrates that female writers and readers were crucial to the construction and spread of the mythic Garibaldi. In part, Riall argues, Garibaldi’s was a cult of self-sacrifice: some of his followers were drawn into fights with small chances of success. As in a civic religion, strategic calculations were often trumped by belief and enthusiasm. Acciai, in turn, traces the way the famous surname Garibaldi, carried by his sons and grandsons, led people into various and sometimes opposing political directions. Indeed, I wish that Acciai had written more about the fascist affiliations of Ezio, Ricciotti Jr. and Peppino Garibaldi, whose cases point to significant strains at the very center of the Garibaldian tradition.
Because Acciai’s book raises important issues about how left-wing internationalism grew and survived, despite repression, it would be a pity if it were read only by university students and scholars. That said, the text places considerable demands on a general audience. Anyone not well versed in European history should be prepared to look up terms like the Risorgimento, the Paris Commune and syndicalism. In Italy, where Acciai teaches, it may be common knowledge that “the Hero of the Two Worlds” is an honorific expression to refer to Garibaldi, who served as a military leader in both South America and Europe. But when it’s used without explanation, as it is here, not everyone will understand. The problem of intelligibility is compounded by typos that occasionally transform the text into an erudite guessing game. (Can you recognize “Porudhon” as a garbled version of Proudhon?) Perhaps one function of a reviewer nowadays is to remind publishers that when we buy or borrow a book, we expect that it has been well proofread. Karen Karin Rosenberg is a working on a book about the writings of Russian revolutionaries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Isabella Lorusso, Fighting Women: Interviews with Veterans of the Spanish Civil War. London: Freedom Press, 2020. 185pp.
Reviewed by Jessica Davidson
Isabella Lorusso’s Fighting Women: Interviews with Veterans of the Spanish Civil War, a translation of her 2019 book Mujeres en lucha, chronicles the experiences of eleven left-wing women involved in the body politic of 1930s Spain. An independent scholar of the Spanish Civil War, Lorusso interviewed anarchists, members of the POUM, a communist, and a Catalan feminist living in Barcelona, Madrid, Paris, and other locations in France in 1996, 1997, and 2010. Many of the women were Catalan by birth while others hailed from central Spain. They all participated in left-wing activities in Catalonia during the Second Republic in Spain and the subsequent civil war. In the brief introduction and prologue, Lorusso identifies the “direct gendered vision” of the conversations she had with her subjects, which focus on “emotions enriched with historical memory.” She also recognizes the difficulty of doing interviews with individuals who are asked to remember their personal involvement in an extraordinary era six decades prior. The book, she writes, should encourage the reader to “try to honor these women who gave their lives for a dream of love and freedom.” The foreword by Beatriz Gimeno, a deputy for Podemos in the Spanish parliament, and the afterword by Elisabeth Donatello position the publication as a testament to the feminism and activism of the women interviewed.
In their interviews, the women paint a picture of a society during the Second Republic and the civil war that was both expectedly chaotic and surprisingly normal. In some cases, life proceeded as usual. There were public dances, love-matches, and marital vows. Some of the women were studying when the war began, while others were in the workplace. When female suffrage was granted during the Second Republic in 1933, some of the subjects rushed into politics and the traditional world adapted. Several of the women were introduced to politics by their fathers, complicating traditional patriarchal rules and gender relations. Manola Rodriguez, a communist from Madrid, for example, remembers that although she sat alongside her father at se-
cret political meetings, “as a man he had his own contradictions: at home he was the master and we had to obey him.” Pepita Carpena recounts her early political involvement in the Anarchist movement and her eventual move away from the CNT and towards feminism. At age 14, already employed as a tailor and influenced by the local presence of the CNT, Carpena joined the textile trade union. Her politicization began at a young age, but she argues that her militancy took time to take shape, first as a member of the Libertarian Youth and then as a member of the Anarchist Free Women (Mujeres Libres). From the beginning of her involvement, Carpena faced sexism and the “strong machismo” polluted her early experience with anarchism. Although she credits the CNT with encouraging women to follow their intellectual and political interests, she claims that “all men are the same” when it comes to the limits of their tolerance of women militants. Disappointed, she decided to “work only with women.” Carpena remained committed to anarchist beliefs through her participation in the Mujeres Libres, where she felt empowered and experienced a feminist awakening that was not possible among the male ranks of anarchists. Her radicalization in Mujeres Libres included support for gay rights. Because Lorusso provides limited assessment of the interviews, it is not clear how her publication fits into existing historiography within Gender Studies or within the history of modern Spain. Despite gearing the conversations toward feminism, sexism, and patriarchy, Lorusso does not draw any conclusions, nor does she identify common themes across her interviews. “The words of the protagonists alone,” she writes, “provide a historical, human, and personal view of what was their—and hopefully even our—revolution.” Yet she leaves it up to the reader connect the dots. Still, Lorusso’s book prompts important questions. Do the women’s memories reflect the latent sexism of radical leftwing political groups? For example, does Pepita’s description of the boys’ club that was the Libertarian Youth point to a false narrative of women’s emancipation promised by anarchism? Fighting Women is useful to explore the limitations of communism and anarchism and the shortcomings of the Second Republic, as her interviewees provide a trenchant critique of the left-wing’s unwillingness to dismantle patriarchy. Significant gender-based discrimination was clearly detrimental to their political mobilization. The women express disappointment in the left’s inability to include gender in its social revolution. Their stories, in other words, challenge the popular narrative of women’s political integration under the Spanish Republic. Lorusso’s book also contributes to the history of feminism. Do these stories indicate a growing wave of feminism in the 1930s, and if so, what kind of feminism? Likewise, where might left-wing feminism in 1930s Spain fit in the larger history of the movement? Spain is often discounted as a participant in early twentieth-century European feminism in part due to the influence of the Catholic Church and the Franco dictatorship. The testimonies in Lorusso’s book challenge this interpretation, pointing instead to the presence of a strong feminist movement shaped by women’s direct political experience. Pepita Carpena, for example, attests to a radicalism born from feminism more than from anarchism.
Lorusso’s book should be read alongside important scholarly studies like those of Victoria Enders and Mary Nash, both of whom have effectively used oral history in their analyses of women and gender in Spain during the 1930s. While Fighting Women has merit, it would have been even more valuable if it had included a critical assessment of the memories of the women Lorusso interviewed.
Jessica Davidson is an Associate Professor of History at James Madison University whose work focuses on twentieth-century Spanish political, social, and women’s history, women in rightwing politics and in dictatorships.
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