Description
The Amazons : A Marxian Study by Emanuel Kanter. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company. 1926.
Written in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution and amid the United States’ First Red Scare, the study of the ancient Amazons– the legendary race of female warriors– suggests that their mythical status is an error of “bourgeois” scholarship.
Arguing that female warrior groups emerged as result of “the disruption of primitive communist tribes” in antiquity, Kanter posits that the Amazons were real, but not a single group of women in one place. Tracing a global phenomenon with examples seen from South America to Scythia, Kanter’s study casts the Marxian Amazons as an emergent, recurring pattern where women overthrow their patriarchal societies to determine and fight for their own destinies. Kanter, a noted communist and feminist historian, makes special efforts to connect his “historical” Amazons with the status of women in the Soviet Union, arguing that “the defeat of the bourgeoisie” must be “not only on the economic, political, and military fields, but also on the cultural.”
pp121, small 8vo. Brown cloth boards with Amazon figure stamped in black on front. Wear to board corners and edges as well as spine ends. Bookblock and pages darkened. Pastedowns and endpapers toned. Penciled note “monologues” across verso of first free endpaper. Good condition.
If you liked this book, you might also enjoy this first edition Anna Freud owned and annotated by one of her personal students.
