Women as Agents of Change. Towards a Normative History of Protest

The contributions of this book are unique in that they analyse different cases of “gendered” protest in the Western world, from ancient to modern times, in an interdisciplinary manner. They build on the question of what constitutes women’s protest and offer theories from various standpoints of the historical relationship between gender and protest as mutually constitutive. In this review, I analyse some of the limits to these theoretical observations and the conclusions that are drawn from them. I argue that the significance of the book lies in the evidence that it presents of the normative nature of protests – not only in the contributions that discuss protests that uphold gender norms, but also in those that discuss apparently subversive protests – which calls on us to rethink the role of women in driving change.