Volume 22, Number 12 · July 17, 1975
Revolutionary Women
By Aileen Kelly
Marx's Daughters: Eleanor Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Angelica Balabanoff
by Ronald Florence
Dial, 258 pp., $10.00
Five Sisters: Women Against the Tsar
edited and translated by Barbara Alpern Engel, by Clifford N. Rosenthal
Knopf, 254 pp., $8.95
The titles of both books under review have the ring of contributions to a fashionable cult: an impression confirmed in the case of the first by the anxious propitiation of the cult's priestesses on page 10: 'I have referred to the heroines of this book throughout by their first names or nicknames, not through any measure of condescension or disrespect….' The author's sincerity is not to be doubted; he treats his subjects in the characteristic style of those eager to be counted in the ranks of the unprejudiced: self-conscious respect verging on sentimentality (page 190: 'Angelica was determined to remain loyal—but to whom, to what?').
Review, 3724 words
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