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Women have never been passive bystanders to the history being made around them and they have always found ways to contribute to shaping their world. Munich in 1918/1919 provides a useful site to examine women's experiences and roles due to the long-standing involvement of women in the peace movement and welfare work, as well as the foundation of the Bavarian Soviet Republic after the First World War. However, Munich in the early years of the Weimar Republic is most commonly associated with Adolf Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch in 1923, an attempt by right-wing men to seize political power. Moreover, the 1918 revolution is also often told through the lens of male political figures. As a result, politics in the early twentieth century is easy to view as a male-dominated affair with women merely experiencing the effects of male political power. This era, particularly from the perspective of Munich, also becomes viewed through the lens of the rise of fascism, which obscures and distorts the alternative political visions many women held and worked towards. This article centres on women's experiences and roles in politics and the public sphere in revolutionary Munich to ask what opportunities the revolution and its immediate aftermath presented for women and how they were able to influence political decision-making despite huge barriers. Through an understanding of how their world was gendered, their role as political agents comes to the fore.

In November 1918, revolution swept across Germany: it led to the end of the war, the abdication of the Kaiser and a new parliamentary democracy. While leading figures of the revolution, such as Ernst Toller, Rosa Luxemburg and Kurt Eisner, have been the subject of much scholarly interest, less research has been conducted into the motivations and aims of the rank and file, a group which included many women. Women played key roles as revolutionaries: by spreading the revolutionary message, working in its administration or participating in direct action on the streets. By choosing to become a revolutionary, individuals risked imprisonment or even death. For German Jewish women, who faced anti-Semitism in their daily lives, the risk was even greater. This article focuses on these forgotten female revolutionaries to uncover their roles, aims and motivations, and to contribute to a heterogeneous understanding of the revolution.

Many intellectuals, various social movements, as well as all manner of individuals from around the globe who are critical of the ills of global, expansionist capitalism have written, spoken out about, and called for everything from minor changes to radical changes to the existing social, political and economic order. Moreover, many of these groups and individuals have used the tools of Marx's critique of capitalism in order to advance their positions and calls for change. While most critics of the existing social, political and economic order advance their critical examination of capitalist-spawned injustices with the hope of providing a foundation for us to explore ways to resist, disrupt and replace them, with few exceptions, usually this exploration is confined to (or at least focused on) human communities. However, in this essay, using some key concepts in Marx's oeuvre, I examine how the global expansion of capitalism, together with its requisite increase in structures of power and domination, are responsible for the intensification of similar injustices for non-human animals, which, according to Marx's own theoretical commitments, I argue, should also be resisted and, indeed, eradicated. On the flip side, in addition to arguing that a proper understanding of some of Marx's most fundamental commitments requires us to fight not only for human but for non-human animal liberation, I also argue that genuine animal liberation requires the radical disruption of capitalism and that the more common, less radical animal liberation movements are insufficient for bringing about this end.

Socialist Women and the Great War: Protest, Revolution and Commemoration, an open access book, is the first transnational study of left-wing women and socialist revolution during the First World War and its aftermath. Through a discussion of the key themes related to women and revolution, such as anti-militarism and violence, democracy and citizenship, and experience and life-writing, this book sheds new and necessary light on the everyday lives of socialist women in the early 20th century. The participants of the 1918-1919 revolutions in Europe, and the accompanying outbreaks of social unrest elsewhere in the world, have typically been portrayed as war-weary soldiers and suited committee delegates—in other words, as men. Exceptions like Rosa Luxemburg exist, but ordinary women are often cast as passive recipients of the vote. This is not true; rather, women were pivotal actors in the making, imagining, and remembering of the social and political upheavals of this time. From wartime strikes, to revolutionary violence, to issues of suffrage, this book reveals how women constructed their own revolutionary selves in order to bring about lasting social change and provides a fresh comparative approach to women's socialist activism. As such, this is a vitally important resource for all postgraduates and advanced undergraduates interested in gender studies, international relations, and the history and legacy of World War I. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollection.com. Open access was funded by Knowledge Unlatched.