Becoming Radicals: Polish Jewish Women's Paths to the Spanish Civil War

This lecture is part of the Socialist Studies Seminar.

Why did ordinary young women from interwar Poland leave everything behind to fight for Republican Spain? Through interconnected biographies, this paper examines how calss, gender, education, and ethnicity shaped women's paths toward political radicalization, socialism, and communism. Some encountered radical politics through universities, travel, and intellectual circles; others through hospitals, factories, poverty, and prison. Despite varied trajectories, their paths converged in Spain, where commitments to socialism, communism, and above all anti-fascism, gave political meaning to experiences shaped by inequality, care, and social change.

Co-sponsored by the World History Center at Pitt and the Carnegie Mellon University Department of History