They decline to reveal the smallest details, aiming to maintain total secrecy. They will say only that most of the band members met at the small protests held by Russia’s once-feeble opposition, from monthly illegal demonstrations calling for the right to assembly to banned gay pride marches. Their average age is 25. They are hardcore feminists. Most studied the humanities in university. They won’t detail their day jobs.
– Guardian, 2nd February 2012

Pussy Riot, like the Sex Pistols, have a name designed to make headlines, and a bit more political substance to back up the sensationalism. Formed in Moscow last September, this offshoot of Russia’s complex and fractured political scene has come to prominence in the UK media in the context of protests against political corruption which have been gaining in volume and intensity after parliamentary elections last December. In mid-January, one of the collective’s impromptu guerrilla gigs, taking place on Red Square opposite the Kremlin, ended with its members detained by police.

Laura Barton in the Guardian, picking up on the band’s citing of Bikini Kill as an inspiration, offers a slightly short-sighted view of 90s Riot Grrrl as an antecedent for the expression of ‘an alternative female voice’. While the group clearly do reference Riot Grrrl’s ‘tone of wild irreverence’, it also makes sense to consider Pussy Riot in the context of the former Soviet Union’s long and fascinating history of political protest coalescing around avant garde art and music, especially punk. Adam Curtis’ recent blog is an interesting attempt to make sense of this sort of determinedly oppositional culture which has been notable by its relative absence from the UK’s current wave of socio-political protest. Similarly, the clash of sartorial signifiers which Pussy Riot provide by combining miniskirts and stockings with ski-masks and balaclavas could be a legacy of Riot Grrl too, but as a practical measure it has as much in common with other Anonymous-style contemporary protest movements, not to mention the general history of masking and disguise in protest.

Russia does have a long tradition of women in protest, notably the 1917 revolution in which women played a prominent part, encouraged by the intersection of socialism with many of the goals of women’s liberation. Pussy Riot cite this ‘deep tradition… of gender and revolution – we’ve had amazing women revolutionaries.’ They add that ‘the revolution should be done by women… For now, they don’t beat or jail us as much’. This assertion ties in with historical debates on the ability of women to take part in protest or civil disobedience with a greater degree of impunity than men – an ideal which isn’t always borne out by the treatment of female protesters.

Contemporary Russian politics – like any – are not a straightforward matter, and the extent of Pussy Riot’s relevance and representativeness remains to be seen. But in a context where growing and disparate opposition groups are encountering heavy and often violent repression across the world, the ways in which women participate in protest, and the styles of self-expression they employ, are always worth noting.

Comemmorative dollar for the Little Rock Nine, six of whom were women

Often women’s involvement in protest has drawn on their gendered role within families and communities. Women played a significant part, for instance, in the riots over food supply, quality and price which swept Europe during its transition to a capitalist market economy from the 16th century to the 19th. Historians like Temma Kaplan, E P Thompson and Natalie Zemon Davis (and, er, me) have seen female participation in these protests as an extension of their role in the sexual division of labour, including food procurement and preparation, which lent legitimacy and authority to their involvement. The prominence of women in local networks of communication, and their presence in social centres like market squares as part of their daily routine, also allowed them to collectively mobilise and organise – the equivalent, under agrarian capitalism, of creating a Facebook Events page.

There is, however, a myriad of other movements and moments in which women have taken part as workers, students, trade union organisers, family members, and consumers, as well as on grounds of class, race, sexuality, and political principle. There’s even a Wikipedia list of female rebel leaders dating from the 9th century BC to this year’s uprising in Ivory Coast, which, even though this series is concerned less with individuals and more with women’s mass participation in protest, is still pretty cool.

Just as their presence is still being obscured in reports of current events in the Middle East, so women have historically been absent from many popular and academic accounts of protest. The advent of feminist-influenced social history from the mid-20th century sought to correct masculine bias within traditional narratives of labour history or liberal teleologies, both of which had marginalised or misrepresented the involvement of women. Conversely, strictly purist or doctrinaire feminist narratives of history have also tended to ignore popular movements which did not advance a specifically feminist programme, regardless of how heavily women may have been involved. Both of these approaches resulted in the omission, until recently, of women from the histories of protest movements like Chartism in which they played a significant part.

The place and properness of women in protest has long been a bone of contention, with discourse surrounding their involvement portraying them as hysterical, unwomanly, deviant, or deranged. Sheila Rowbotham, in her historical study of women and protest, notes that:

It is at the point where the revolution starts to move women out of their passivity into the conscious and active role of militants that the mockery, the caricatures, the laughter with strong sexual undertones begin.

The vicious alarmism and mockery drawn by female involvement in politics, with which suffragists and civil rights agitators found themselves contending, is already evident in several cartoons on female Jacobins and campaigners for constitutional reform. Political cartoons of the 18th and 19th century were rarely noted for their subtlety, and caricaturists tended to focus upon the disorderly nature of political females, as well as imputing to them an ‘unwomanly’ loose or aggressive sexuality. Cruikshanks depicted ‘The Female Reformers of Blackburn’ as vulgarly outspoken and blowsily dressed, distastefully dominating their political platform, and J L Marks’ ‘Much Wanted: A Reform Among Females!!!’ gives its female protagonists suggestively brandished rolled-up papers, poles clutched between their knees, and – oh yes – hands clasped in their laps to form a gaping dark hole, setting out their desire to usurp male power as well as their own wantonness. As, perhaps, does the presence of all those upthrust pikes, swords and cannons in depictions of the women’s march to Versailles. And of course Cath Elliot’s recent piece on online harassment, by which politically uppity women are impugned as frigid, or sluts, or lesbians, provides a piquant reminder of this glorious tradition.

Women in protest don’t merely have attacks from the right to worry about. Their involvement does not take place in a vacuum – women protest not only as women but for multiple reasons of sectional interest, and the gender identification of protestors has historically generated conflict and tension with identities based on race, class, sexuality, and ideology. To take just one example, the involvement of women in 20th century industrial conflict, acting in support of or solidarity with male industrial workers, has been criticised by some feminists who view such conflict as manifestations of an unhelpfully macho patriarchal culture from which women should separate themselves.

Nor can it be assumed that female involvement in social protest will naturally result in an outcome which is cognisant of, sympathetic to, or even comfortable for women. After the Women’s March to Versailles, women as revolutionaries became a potent symbol of the power of the French Revolution, and the young Republic was eventually personified in the figure of Marianne. But, as Joan Landes has argued, Marianne’s visual prominence did not mean that women obtained significant political, social, or economic advantages during the French Revolution; the new Republic’s politics was one of laws and texts in which Marianne’s image bore no concrete significance. Similar tensions are apparent in the complex relationship of Iranian women with the after-effects of the 1979 revolution, and the contention that the presence of women in the current ‘Arab spring’ uprisings, when acknowledged at all, is being appropriated and used symbolically.

In addition to the examples given in links above, this series will look in greater detail at case-studies of women’s involvement in social, political, and economic protest, their motivations and methods, their successes and setbacks. It’s been a long, hot summer of discontent and it shouldn’t be any surprise to see women as well as men taking their place in the sun.

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• Rhian Jones also blogs at Velvet Coalmine.