Flora Tristan: Feminism in the Age of George Sand
Verso, 2019
Agent: Sandra Dijkstra
Flora Tristan was one of the first women radicals to draw clear connections between the plight of disaffected workers and powerless women. Active in the 1830s and 1840s, and regarded as something of a pariah, she is best known for her book Workers’ Union, an account of the conditions of women in Peru, London, Paris and the provinces of France.
Reviews:
“One of the great merits of Sandra Dijkstra's Flora Tristan is the skillful interweave of Tristan's life with the ideas she championed. Thanks to Dijkstra, we come to know Tristan as a pioneer feminist before the word was invented; as an indefatigable socialist whose ideas influenced Marx and Engels; and as an unforgettable personality."
—Marilyn Yalom
"The world simply doesn’t know enough about Flora Tristan, renowned socialist thinker and activist, firebrand grandmother of Paul Gauguin, world traveler as comfortable in Paris as in Arequipa, Peru. But here is Sandra Djikstra to recount this pilgrim’s story—this riotously liberal yet intensely focused life—filled with its 19th century spirit of possibility. Nowhere is that story told with the care and detail Dijkstra brings to this eye-opening book."
—Marie Arana
"Flora Tristan was the pioneer social explorer of the early Victorian world, chronicling the condition of women and labor from the sugar plantations of Peru to the salons of the July Monarchy and the satantic mills of industrial England. In this brilliant study, Dijkstra restores Tristan to her rightful but complex place in the histories of socialism and feminism."
—Mike Davis