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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2008
A focus on politically uncommitted working-class women alters the traditional historiographical emphasis on collective militancy in the Spanish Revolution. A large number of females acted ambivalently towards the cause, and revolutionaries were forced to confront women's individualism. In the search for the collective identities of class and gender, this individualism has been ignored. Instead of neglecting or condemning the personal, historians should try to understand how an exploration of the varieties of subversive individualism – resistance to workplace discipline, opportunism, and petty fraud – can expand the boundaries of social history and help to contribute to a theory of the state.
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