The Worldwide Family of Militant Women
Red Menace
Red Menace
4.9 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 12 May 2026
⏱️ 94 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this episode, Breht and Alyson sit down with Arlene Eisen to discuss her new memoir, In the Worldwide Family of Militant Women. Eisen reflects on her political formation across the upheavals of the 1960s through the early 1980s, her encounters with Black liberation and anti-imperialist struggle, and the forgotten history of militant women who built relationships of solidarity across borders. Together they explore internationalism, revolutionary commitment, movement fragmentation, and what younger generations can still learn from an era when women fought empire not from the margins, but from the heart of the struggle. The result is a rich conversation about memory, political development, and the urgent need to build durable anti-imperialist movements in our own time.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Red Minus. This is Allison. As always, I'm here with my co-host, Brett, and we have, I think, a really exciting episode today that I'm very, yeah, I'm very eager to get into it. We are joined by Arlene Eisen, author of the worldwide family of militant women, which is a text |
| 0:39.3 | that was just published by Iskra Books, and which I will not, cannot endorse strongly enough, |
| 0:45.8 | honestly. I think this was a really fantastic read. It is both a memoir, but also a political |
| 0:51.1 | reflection on movements that span from the 1960s to the 1980s, that has |
| 0:56.6 | some really important lessons, I think, for radicals today and for those of us in our generation |
| 1:01.1 | and the generation, even younger than Bretonized generation, who are now involved in struggles |
| 1:06.3 | against imperialism, against patriarchy, and against capitalism. There's a lot in here to chew on. |
| 1:11.9 | I think just up front, I want to say that I'm really excited for this conversation. |
| 1:15.8 | You know, I was telling Brett before this, it's kind of a dark time in the world right now. |
| 1:20.5 | The rise of reaction and of imperialism taking on more aggressive forms internationally |
| 1:26.1 | can be very demoralizing. And I think looking at a text that spans such a large scope of time and looks at the struggles of other generations who came before us and fought is remarkably grounding just for kind of providing perspective and for remembering that the situation that we're in isn't the first time things have looked bad. |
| 1:45.1 | It is certainly not even the most intense that imperialism has manifested as perhaps. |
| 1:50.1 | And so that perspective is really useful. |
| 1:52.2 | And I'm really looking forward to diving into this. |
| 1:54.5 | So I'm going to go ahead and pass it over to Arlene if you want to introduce yourself a little bit before we get into some questions about the text itself. |
| 2:02.5 | Oh, thanks, Alice, and that's a great. |
| 2:06.1 | Actually, one of my biggest motivations for doing this book was precisely what you took from |
| 2:13.1 | it, which was some sense of history and that this horrible period is not unprecedented and there is a way out maybe. |
| 2:25.1 | So that's wonderful to hear you say that. |
| 2:29.4 | About myself, this is whole book. |
| 2:53.4 | Yeah. about myself. This is his whole book. Well, apart from the book, I'm old old. I'm actually going on 84, which becomes evident if you read the book is very much dated. |
| 2:58.4 | I mean, every episode in the book is dated, so I don't try to hide that. |
... |
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