Jill Richards’ ‘The Fury Archives’ Charts Women’s Resistance Across Modernist Movements

Jill Richards’s 2020 study ‘The Fury Archives: Female Citizenship, Human Rights, and the International Avant-Gardes’ examines women’s resistance through unconventional archives, including bildungsroman literature, birth-control pamphlets, little magazines, and arrest records. The book avoids focusing on specific demands, instead exploring acts of resistance as daily practice. Part one analyzes the afterlives of women incendiaries via Ina Césaire’s 1992 play ‘Fire’s Daughters,’ which recites names of participants in Martinique’s Southern Insurrection. Part two traces reproductive rights history through publications like ‘The Women Rebel’ (1914) and ‘The Birth Control Review’ (1917–40), linking Dadaism to queer feminism via Hannah Höch and Mathilda Brugman. Part three examines Surrealism’s female form and queer resistance through Man Ray’s 1922 portrait of Marquise Casati, Claude Cahun, and Marcel Moore, and analyzes committee meetings as foundational to human rights via Paulette Nardal’s journal ‘Woman in the City’ (1945–51). Richards notes the book was motivated by present politics, observing that strategies like public occupation and naming names remain contemporary. Published by Columbia University Press.