ABSTRACT
Over the past 50 years social scientists, most prominently, Charles Tilly, have buttressed this model of the ‘pre-modern’ riot with new emphases on ritual and performance, concepts, such as the ‘repertoires of revolts’. In addition, the date of the transition from ‘pre-modern’ to ‘modern’ social movements and protest has moved steadily forward, from the French Revolution to as late as the mid-nineteenth century.2 Some historians have gone further in generalising about women’s revolutionary nature and their roles.3 Yves-Marie Bercé saw grain scarcity as the usual precondition of pre-modern uprisings, and therefore women were the ‘traditional’ participants; protecting the hearth was in their ‘biological’ nature.4 For Jean Delumeau, women’s emotional and instinctive need to protect their offspring meant that their insurrectionary activities were even less sensitive to historical change. From the Middle Ages, he jumps to the 1970s (then, his present) to conclude that the same needs as in the past have led to the revolutionary initiative and the inspiration guiding contemporary women to join and lead movements such as Baader Meinhoff.5
